P E R S O N A L I T Y   I I

II. BACKGROUND

What makes you different from other people? What makes you resemble other people?

Sure, there's the physical aspect... but that's only part of what makes "you" who you are. There's also the internal aspect: your personality.

Are there identifiable personality types? Students of human nature have thought so for centuries. An early attempt to try to explain similarities in personality was the notion that the body contained four fluids called "humours," and that an excess of one of these four led to observable preferences in behavior. Even today we retain something of this notion when we say that someone is "in a good humor."

As medical science advanced, theories concentrated on linking personality to external features of the body. One such theory, popular in Europe in the late seventeenth century, was called phrenology. It consisted of the belief that your personality was in large measure determined by the shape of your head. A low, jutting brow, for example, was thought to indicate tendencies toward a lack of self-control, and was considered a sign of potential criminal behavior.

Then came Sigmund Freud. His contribution to understanding human behavior was to focus on behavior as innate; that is, as being something that comes from the mind, not merely as determined by physical characteristics. Freud's focus proved to be magnetic; in time he was joined by colleagues and students in establishing what was essentially the new field of behavioral science.

But not all of those who studied with Freud accepted all aspects of his conclusions. One of these was Carl Gustav Jung.

A complete synopsis of the work of C.G. Jung is beyond the scope of this essay. (You may find parts of it worthwhile, though, so I've included some interesting references in the Resources section.) But two elements of his work in particular relate to a model of human personality.

One of these was his notion of the "archetype." Jung, as a psychological professional, used this term in a technical sense to mean idealized concepts of human nature that were common to all cultures, but it's still useful to us in a broader sense to cover functional patterns of behavior. Jung considered familial relationships (father, mother, etc.) to be examples of archetypes. This concept has since been extended to describe distinguishable personality types that appear in virtually all the world's cultures, such as "the Warrior," "the Trickster," and "the Wise Old Man." (Some of these archetypes are recognizable as Major Arcana of the Tarot... which, in its way, was another early attempt to categorize patterns of behavior.)

By aserting the concept of the archetype, Jung suggested that there were certain personality traits, recognizable in conjunction with one another, that together set apart individuals from one another but made their behavior resemble that of those who shared those traits. By this, Jung didn't mean that actual individual humans ever were archetypes, only that common internal traits consistently produced specific external patterns of behavior.

This naturally led to the question: What were these common traits?

Jung's personal psychological research suggested several possibilities to him. He observed, for example, that some people prefer their world to be settled; they prefer order to chaos, and are most comfortable when they feel they know what is expected of them. In other words, a main concern of these persons was duty. Meanwhile, questioning revealed to Jung that everyone else preferred the mirror image of duty: freedom.

Jung called the latter preference for freedom "perception." (He didn't give the first one a name; later researchers named it the "judging" preference.) He then linked this preference for either duty or freedom to other two-state preferences he had observed, namely, sensing (of the external world) versus intuition (of one's inner state), and thinking (deciding questions by the application of reason) versus feeling (deciding questions by the application of emotion). In addition, he observed one other primary preference, that of either preferring the company of other humans or else preferring solitude.

Jung moved on to other work beyond this, but he in turn had his numerous students, and they have continued research into this aspect of his work.

II. Background

Home

Heart	Body	Spirit	Mind
Art	Writing	Religion	Personality
Music	Travel	Politics	Computers
Genealogy	Work	History	Reasoning
Fiction	Games	Economics	Science