"Father Jung"
Part of what I think will be compelling about the book I’d like to write is the idea of a reconciliation between the two rival “children” of Carl Jung’s theories on psychological type: the Myers Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) and Socionics.
Jung wrote a book called Psychological Types, published in German in 1921 and translated to English in 1923. He introduces a theory that there are 3 dichotomies that can be used to analyze personality differences:
“Thinking/Feeling” “Sensing/Intuition” “Introversion/Extraversion”
I’m not going to go into what these mean today; for now it’s enough to note that when you use these to create pairs, you get 8 combinations.
The people who created the Myers Briggs Type Indicator– Isabel Briggs Myers and her mother Katharine Cook Briggs– said that each “personality type” (out of 16 possible) has four of the 8 combinations in a “functional stack”, going from Dominant down to Inferior.
A. Augusta (Aušra Augustinavičiūtė’s name in shorthand), who founded the theory of Socionics, said that every type (again, out of 16 possible) has all of the 8 combinations (she called them “information elements”), arranged in a particular pattern of four “blocks”: ego, super-ego, super-id, and id.
Myers and Briggs created their system during World War II to help women find the jobs best suited to them as they entered the workforce in large numbers for the first time. Socionics apparently emerged from investigations and conversations taking place “behind the Iron Curtain” in the 1960s and 1970s. I would like to find out more about what was motivating these discussions. Aushra was an economist!
I first learned about the MBTI sometime in 2012 when I was struggling with my career direction. Somehow the web searches I did, looking for inspiration or advice or answers, led me to it. In another post I’ll share some of the story of how confidently I typed other people, while being deeply wrong about my own for about 7 years. One of the ways I described this to other people, after I became aware of my mistake, is “You can’t see your own eyes.”
It wasn’t until 2020 that I delved into Socionics. It took me a while to map what I knew about the MBTI onto Socionics– not least because Socionics people frequently declare with confidence that the types don’t map. That “ENTJ” (MBTI) does not map to “ENTj” (Socionics), because “ET” (Extraverted Thinking) does not map to “Te” (Extraverted Thinking).
I love both sides. The MBTI is where I started and it is utterly dominant in the United States, while Socionics has a different kind of logical elegance in its theory, and intellectual rigor. In both cases, a big problem is how difficult it is to come up with consistent answers as to what different individuals’ type is.
Socionics has right at its center, the understanding that it is the relations between people that are key. The big drawback of Socionics is that it was birthed behind the Iron Curtain, and there are millions of pages published in Russian. I believe that America needs its truths, translated into our culture. How can it be done?
I think I hit upon a big clue this morning, as I was looking into THIS JUNGIAN LIFE. All three of the people behind this website belong to The Philadelphia Association of Jungian Analysts, and two of them are physically located here. I could meet them in person! There is passion for the idea of the journey toward self-discovery, a journey that they don’t expect to take less than a few years. My gut tells me that they would encourage the direction I’m trying to move in. And so I plan to contact them before too long.
In my own tradition of Christianity, various of the first teachers, whose letters to their followers became “the scriptures of the New Testament”, use mystical language to talk about unity amidst diversity. In particular Paul said that different members of the faith are complementary to each other, in the same way that parts of the human body are complementary. Members dependent on each other:
“For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. For in the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body—Jews or Greeks, slaves or free—and we were all made to drink of one Spirit.” (1 Corinthians 12:12-13)
And I’m out of time! If you made it this far, thanks for reading. I’ll be back tomorrow; I need to get comfortable with the idea that if you’re going to post every day, you might have to make some short posts.
Jung wrote a book called Psychological Types, published in German in 1921 and translated to English in 1923. He introduces a theory that there are 3 dichotomies that can be used to analyze personality differences:
“Thinking/Feeling” “Sensing/Intuition” “Introversion/Extraversion”
I’m not going to go into what these mean today; for now it’s enough to note that when you use these to create pairs, you get 8 combinations.
The people who created the Myers Briggs Type Indicator– Isabel Briggs Myers and her mother Katharine Cook Briggs– said that each “personality type” (out of 16 possible) has four of the 8 combinations in a “functional stack”, going from Dominant down to Inferior.
A. Augusta (Aušra Augustinavičiūtė’s name in shorthand), who founded the theory of Socionics, said that every type (again, out of 16 possible) has all of the 8 combinations (she called them “information elements”), arranged in a particular pattern of four “blocks”: ego, super-ego, super-id, and id.
Myers and Briggs created their system during World War II to help women find the jobs best suited to them as they entered the workforce in large numbers for the first time. Socionics apparently emerged from investigations and conversations taking place “behind the Iron Curtain” in the 1960s and 1970s. I would like to find out more about what was motivating these discussions. Aushra was an economist!
I first learned about the MBTI sometime in 2012 when I was struggling with my career direction. Somehow the web searches I did, looking for inspiration or advice or answers, led me to it. In another post I’ll share some of the story of how confidently I typed other people, while being deeply wrong about my own for about 7 years. One of the ways I described this to other people, after I became aware of my mistake, is “You can’t see your own eyes.”
It wasn’t until 2020 that I delved into Socionics. It took me a while to map what I knew about the MBTI onto Socionics– not least because Socionics people frequently declare with confidence that the types don’t map. That “ENTJ” (MBTI) does not map to “ENTj” (Socionics), because “ET” (Extraverted Thinking) does not map to “Te” (Extraverted Thinking).
I love both sides. The MBTI is where I started and it is utterly dominant in the United States, while Socionics has a different kind of logical elegance in its theory, and intellectual rigor. In both cases, a big problem is how difficult it is to come up with consistent answers as to what different individuals’ type is.
Socionics has right at its center, the understanding that it is the relations between people that are key. The big drawback of Socionics is that it was birthed behind the Iron Curtain, and there are millions of pages published in Russian. I believe that America needs its truths, translated into our culture. How can it be done?
I think I hit upon a big clue this morning, as I was looking into THIS JUNGIAN LIFE. All three of the people behind this website belong to The Philadelphia Association of Jungian Analysts, and two of them are physically located here. I could meet them in person! There is passion for the idea of the journey toward self-discovery, a journey that they don’t expect to take less than a few years. My gut tells me that they would encourage the direction I’m trying to move in. And so I plan to contact them before too long.
In my own tradition of Christianity, various of the first teachers, whose letters to their followers became “the scriptures of the New Testament”, use mystical language to talk about unity amidst diversity. In particular Paul said that different members of the faith are complementary to each other, in the same way that parts of the human body are complementary. Members dependent on each other:
“For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. For in the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body—Jews or Greeks, slaves or free—and we were all made to drink of one Spirit.” (1 Corinthians 12:12-13)
And I’m out of time! If you made it this far, thanks for reading. I’ll be back tomorrow; I need to get comfortable with the idea that if you’re going to post every day, you might have to make some short posts.
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