Have you heard about the eight types of personalities proposed by Carl Gustav Jung ?

It is no secret that one of the main concerns of psychologists, historically, has been to describe personality traits. In some cases this has been due to the need to create more or less objective parameters with which to create personality profiles useful for personnel selection, the description of client typologies or research into mental disorders and risk factors.

In other cases, it could be explained by motivations less related to the pragmatic. In the end, simply putting some order into the chaos of human behavior can be, in itself, satisfying. That is why for decades several psychometric tests have been developed (such as Raymond Cattell’s 16 FP) that have offered the possibility of measuring aspects of personality and intelligence in a systematic way.

Carl Jung, however, was not interested in this type of classification because he considered it too rigid. This follower of the psychodynamic paradigm initiated by Sigmund Freud preferred to wage war on his own.

The eight personality profiles, according to Jung

At the beginning of the 20th century, when psychology was beginning to enter its adolescence, one of the most important representatives of the psychodynamic current set himself the task of describing the personality types that define us from a mystical, fundamentally esoteric perspective, and probably without taking into account the possible practical applications of his proposals.

His name was Carl Gustav Jung, and although you may not have heard of him, it is quite possible that you once used two of the terms that were popularized by him: introversion and extraversion.

Carl Jung and his approach to personality types

The relationship between Carl Jung, philosophy and psychology (understood as the exploration of the spiritual and the non-material) dates back to his early years and lasted until his death in 1961. During this time he tried to describe the logics that make the human psyche work and the way in which it relates to the spiritual world, using concepts such as the collective unconscious or archetypes. It is not in vain that Carl Jung is remembered as the founder of depth psychology (or analytical psychology), a new “school” distanced from the Freudian psychoanalysis in which Jung came to participate during his youth.

Carl Jung did not want to describe physical mechanisms that would allow us to predict to a lesser or greater extent how we would behave. He wanted to develop tools that would allow us to interpret the way in which, according to his beliefs, the spiritual is expressed through our actions.

That is why, when the time came in his career when he set out to investigate personality types, Carl Jung did so without giving up his particular vision of the immaterial nature of the mind. This led him to use the concepts of introversion and extraversion, which despite being very abstract have generated a lot of interest.

The introverted and the extraverted personality

Introversion has usually been associated with shyness and extraversion with openness to meeting people. Thus, introverted people would be reluctant to engage in conversation with someone they do not know, would prefer not to draw too much attention to themselves and would be easy prey to nerves in situations where they must improvise in front of many people, while extraverted people would tend to prefer socially stimulating situations.

However, Carl Jung did not define the introverted and extraverted personality by focusing on the social . For him, what defined the introversion-extraversion dimension of personality were attitudes towards subjective phenomena (fruits of imagination and one’s own thought) and objects external to oneself (what happens around us).

Introverted people, according to Carl Jung, are those who prefer to “retreat into themselves” and focus their attention and efforts rather than explore their own mental life, whether it be by fantasizing, creating fictions, reflecting on abstract issues, etc. The extraverted personality, on the other hand, is characterized by showing greater interest in what is happening at every moment outside, the real world not imagined.

Thus, introverted people would have a tendency to prefer to be alone than in the company of unknown people, but exactly because of their shyness (understood as a certain insecurity and a high concern for what others think of one’s self), but as a consequence of what makes them introverted people: the need to be interested in these people , to keep a certain degree of alert for what they might do, to look for subjects of conversation, etc. Extraverted people, on the other hand, would feel more stimulated by what is happening around them, regardless of whether it has to do with complex social situations or not.

The four basic psychological functions

In Carl Jung’s personality types, the introversion-extraversion dimension is mixed with what he considered the four psychological functions that define us: thinking, feeling, perceiving and intuiting . The first two, thinking and feeling, were for Jung rational functions, while perceiving and intuiting were the irrational ones.

From the combination of each of these four functions with the two elements of the introversion-extraversion dimension, Carl Jung’s eight personality types emerge.

The psychological types

Carl Jung’s personality types, published in his 1921 work Psychological Types, are as follows.

1. Thought-introverted

People belonging to the category reflective-introverted are much more focused on their own thoughts than on what happens beyond them . They are interested, concretely, in thoughts of an abstract type, reflections and theoretical battles between different philosophies and ways of seeing life.

Thus, for Jung this type of personality is the one that in popular culture we could relate to the tendency to philosophize, the concern for the relations between ideas.

2. Sentimental-introverted

People belonging to the feeling-introverted personality type are not very talkative, but they are friendly, empathetic and have no particular difficulty in forming emotional bonds with a small circle of people. They tend not to show their attachment, among other things because of the lack of spontaneity in expressing how they feel.

3. Sensation-introduced

As in the case of the other personalities defined by introversion, the sensitive-introverted personality is characterized by being focused on subjective phenomena . In this case, however, these phenomena are more related to the stimuli received through the senses than to feelings or abstract ideas. According to Carl Jung’s definition, this type of personality usually describes people who are engaged in art or crafts.

4. Intuitive-introverted

In this intuitive-introverted personality type , what the person is interested in are fantasies about the future and what is to come … at the cost of not paying attention to the present. These people would be of a rather dreamy character, who show detachment from immediate reality and prefer to give space to the imagination.

5. Thought-extraverted

This reflective-extraverted personality type is defined by the tendency to create explanations about all things from what the individual sees around him or her . This makes these rules understood as immovable principles about how objective reality is structured, so this type of person would have a very characteristic way of seeing things that changes very little over time. Moreover, according to Carl Jung, they try to impose this world view on other people.

6. Sentimental-extraverted

This category sentimental-extraverted would be made up of highly empathetic people, who have a facility for connecting with others and who enjoy a lot of company. According to Jung, this type of personality is defined by the fact that it is related to very good social skills and a low propensity for reflection and abstract thinking.

7. Sensation-extraverted

In this sensitive-extraverted personality type the search for new sensations is mixed with experimentation with the environment and with others . People described by this personality type are very given to the search for pleasure in interacting with real people and environments. These individuals are described as being very open to experiences that they have never had before, so that they show an opposite disposition to those who oppose what is unfamiliar to them.

8. Intuition-extraversion

Carl Jung’s latest personality type, the intuitive-extraverted type , is characterized by a tendency to undertake all kinds of medium-length or long-lasting projects and adventures , so that when one phase ends you want to start another immediately. Travel, business creation, transformation plans… the future prospects related to the interaction with the environment are the centre of these people’s concerns, and they try to get the rest of the members of their community to help them in their endeavours (regardless of whether the others benefit as much as they do themselves or not).

Are Jung’s personality types useful?

The way Carl Jung created these personality types is far from what is attempted today, based on statistical analysis and research involving hundreds of people. Neither in the first half of the 20th century did the methods and tools exist to create personality models with any robustness, nor did Jung’s thinking ever fit in with the way of research that is followed in scientific psychology , which is very concerned with creating objective criteria to delimit personality traits and to test theories by contrasting expectations with reality.

The Myers-Briggs Indicator has emerged from Carl Jung’s eight personality types, and the concepts of introversion and extraversion have greatly influenced leading psychologists of individual differences, but in themselves these descriptions are too abstract to predict typical human behavior. Sticking to these kinds of definitions of personality can easily lead to the Forer effect.

However, the fact that Carl Jung’s proposal has an almost inexistent scientific value does not mean that it cannot be used as a philosophical reference , a way of seeing ourselves and others that is suggestive or poetic. However, its objective value is no greater than that of any other classification of types of personalities that a person not trained in psychology or psychometry can make.

Bibliographic references:

  • Clay, C. (2018). Labyrinths: Emma, her marriage to Carl Jung and the early years of psychoanalysis . Madrid: Tres Puntos Ediciones.
  • Frey-Rohn, L. (1991, 2006). From Freud to Jung. Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica.