Type Consultant Jeanne Marlowe (JM) interviews Lenore Thomson Bentz (LTB) on questions about personality type.
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JM: Let's leap right into the heart of the matter. What is a psychological type?
LTB: I think I'd like to start with what a psychological type isn't. I want to be up front about how I understand type theory, because otherwise what I say about it won't make much sense.
I don't believe that type refers to a person's innate personality characteristics. It isn't the causal source of a person's needs or the behaviors designed to meet them.
Rather, type is the outcome of habituated choices -- our accustomed orientation to incoming information. Of course, some of our choices are going to favor our temperament, in so far as temperament means our basic chemistry, but knowing our type won't tell us what job we're best suited to do or what kind of marriage partner we ought to seek. Type tells us how we generally adapt, particularly when a situation is unfamiliar. It tells us what we're most likely to recognize as important about a situation, what that means to us, and what strategies we use to manage it.
The universe, after all, is a blooming, buzzing, ever-changing field of information. We can't take in everything that exists. Every situation requires that we make choices. If we recognize something as important, we're setting aside other things as less important, or screening them out altogether. This isn't a sign of dysfunction. It's the way we're made. The very purpose of having a nervous system is to narrow our receptive capacity to data that ensures our comfort and survival.
From time immemorial, various temperament theories have attempted to classify human personality in these terms, assuming that people have different kinds of nervous systems, which give rise to different kinds of emotional dispositions. For example, some people enjoy risk, others seek harmony; some people want responsibility, others enjoy change. The validity of these classification systems, however, is undermined by the corollary assumption that people's behaviors issue directly from their affective needs, reflecting the natural way such needs can be met.
C. G. Jung, the analyst who came up with the theory of psychological types, objected to this assumption. He was loathe to credit people's choices entirely to affective disposition, as though people could be pegged by a label, and consciousness were an expedient illusion. He pointed out, in fact, that when our behaviors do issue from immediate needs outside our conscious control, we don't identify these actions with preference or authenticity. Rather, we feel precisely as though we're out of control. Therefore, Jung focused on the part of the psyche that is making this judgment -- the "I" that results from making free-will decisions, the choices that make us feel like "ourselves."
A type test is trying to get at these free-will decisions -- do you see yourself as cool-headed or warm-hearted; do you like deadlines or do they get in the way? These choices can't be traced backwards into core emotional needs that demand behavioral compliance. Rather, they point ahead -- to goals that we set ourselves in a particular time and place, the ways in which we deliberately narrow our receptive field to information that we value.
posted by Roscoe @ 4:01 PM
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