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True to Type

© Bonnie McCarson

At a recent gathering I overheard a conversation in which one person was talking about the actions of another in a questioning way. The Jungian analyst in the group commented, "Perhaps she is just being true to her type." That response was, in fact, very true to her Jungian training since one of Jung's contributions to our understanding of ourselves was in his work on personality types. But exactly what did she mean with the expression "true to her type."

First, let's review a little history on how Jung came to his theories on what he called psychological types. In his writing on the subject Jung says that he had "long been struck by the fact that besides the many individual differences in human psychology there are also typical differences." (Storr, from Psychological Types, CW 6, pars. 1-7). Anthony Storr in The Essential Jung introduces the topic of psychological types with a note about how Jung came to his conclusion on different types. As we know from Jung's autobiography, he was a keen observer of life and his patients, and he studied patterns he saw in people. Storr reminds us that Jung went through a period of time when he was "concerned with defining the difference in his approach to the problems of psychology from those adopted by Freud and Adler." (Storr 129) It was during this time that Jung consciously began to work out his explanation of the "typical differences" and patterns he had seen in so many years of observations of patients.

Today many of us are familiar with the outgrowths of Jung's work. We may at some time have taken the Myers-Briggs personality inventory or be familiar with Kiersey's book Please Understand Me. The terms "introversion" and "extraversion" have become almost household words in our culture. Those terms were, in fact, Jung's starting point. He looked at the broad group differences in the way individuals prefer to deal with the world and saw two main approaches. Then he went further in defining the "conscious function of which the individual makes the principal use." (Storr 144) Those functions he identified as thinking, feeling, sensation, and intuition. The familiar 4-letter personality types we get from the Myers-Briggs or Kiersey stem from first the determination of extraversion or introversion and then the strongest functions for an individual.

So, back to the original question, what does being true to type mean? All of us, like Jung, have perhaps noticed certain differences in the personalities of siblings. In spite of their having the same parents and environmental influences, a pair of siblings may be very different personalities. For some reason inherent to an individual, the personality develops along a spectrum between the extremes of extraversion and introversion and likewise exhibits a tendency to favor certain functions over others as a way of dealing with the world. A person who is more thinking than feeling will react differently perhaps in a given situation from someone who leans more to feeling. The intuitive will see things differently from the sensing type. Kiersey's more recent book Please Understand Me II discusses the 16 possible type combinations and what we might see in them.