Forever Jung

In one of my earlier blog posts (Jan 2009) I talked about my sudden fascination with Myers Briggs Personality Tests (MBTI) and how this would probably be a characteristically short lived fad for me. Well in this case, my interest in Jungian Type Theory has not been short lived and over the past year I have grown to be a fully fledged MBTI bore, expanding my collection of books which now include Jung for Beginners, The Essential Jung, The Undiscovered Self by Carl Gustav Jung, Gifts Differing by Isabel Briggs Myers, Please Understand Me II by David Kiersey (who developed the Kiersey Temperament Sorter), Type Talk: The 16 Personality Types and the latest addition to my library, Personality Type: An Owner’s Manual by Lenore Thomson, a former editor of the Jungian journal Quadrant and in my opinion the best book on personality type that I have read. Some of my fellow Humanists will be sceptical about Jungian psychology. Richard Dawkins has been scathing about Jung’s questionable pseudoscientific ideas, claiming in the God Delusion that Jung believed that books would spontaneously fly off his bookshelf. I gave an impromptu talk about the New Atheists on Monday in York when a planned presentation of YouTube comedy clips was scuppered by a dodgy internet connection. I put up a slide showing Dawkins’ 7 point scale of belief, with 7 being someone who is certain that there is no God and 1 being someone who knows that there is. Dawkins gave Carl Jung as an example of this type 1 certainty about God, quoting an interview given shortly before Jung’s death in with he said “I don’t need to believe in God, I know”. I am sceptical that Jung was claiming to believe in the God of traditional theism but that is a moot point. I think Jung was a more insightful thinker than Dawkins gives credit for. He may have had questionable beliefs in astrology and synchronicity but his ideas about personality type seem to ring true to me. Or maybe I am still a sucker for psychobabble.

At the time of my last blog post on MBTI I consistently tested as INTJ – the Mastermind, to use Kiersey’s terminology. I have since become convinced that I correspond much more readily with the INTP personality type – the Architect.

Are you a Rational Personality Type?

I just received the weekly Melvyn Bragg In Our Time newsletter (email) which directed me to the podcast of the BBC Radio 4 edition of In our Time that was broadcast on 1st January. This turned out to be quite a coincidence because the programme was titled The Consolation of Philosophy and consisted of philosophers discussing Boethius’ book in connection with our current economic fortunes, the subject of my last blog post. They also discussed Albert Camus writing about suicide which was also the subject of one of my recent posts.

The aristocratic A.C. Grayling, one of the contributors, is one of my favourite writers. I have read nine of his books and would particularly recommend The Choice of Hercules and Against All Gods, though the latter is very short. He wrote a series of books, starting with The Meaning of Things and progressing through The Mystery of, The Reason of, The Heart of and The Form of Things. These books consist of short, self contained monologues on a wide variety of subjects. I have also read a book by one of the other contributors, Roger Scruton’s An Intelligent Person’s Guide to Philosophy, though his writing is too conservative for my tastes.

Grayling also wrote a book on Ludwig Wittgenstein (pictured in Swansea in 1947), the archetypal introverted genius. One of my favourite anecdotes about Wittgenstein, which Dawkins mentioned in The God Delusion, is when he asked his students why people used to think that the Sun went around the Earth. When they gave the predictable response, he then asked, “and what would it have looked like if the Earth had gone around the Sun?”. Think about it.

Those who know me are acquainted with my frequent short lived fads and one of my recent obsessions was Myers-Briggs Personality Tests. These tests were developed from the personality type ideas of Swiss psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung - the Aryan Christ as one book dubbed him. Dawkins thinks that Jung was a looney who thought that a book could spontaneously explode, but I think his ideas are quite interesting. Maybe I’m just a sucker for psychobabble.

Anyway, Jung thought that there were four main functions of consciousness, two perceiving functions: sensation and intuition and two judging functions: thinking and feeling. Further, these two functions are modified by two main attitude types: extraversion and introversion. Now, it’s not that you are either an introvert or extrovert. Rather, you have a dominant function which is either introvert or extrovert. Actually, I might be mixing this up with Keirsey temperament sorter or Socionics (which is the more controversial version of MBTI popular in Russia).

I have done lots of MBTI tests and I always come out as INTJ. NT Types are known as Rationals. So my dominant function is introverted intuition and my secondary function is extroverted thinking. No wonder people think I’m cold as ice.