Theophrastus, successor to Aristotle at the head of the Peripatetic
school, is celebrated for his pioneering portrait of characters, or moral/personality types. Better known to moderns is its lineal descendent, Les caractères, of La
Bruyère. But what shall detain us
here, in the course of our ambling review of the psychoanalytic movement, is
the characterology of G.C. Jung, as outlined in his work of 1921, Psychologische Typen. In after-days, it spawned Myers-Briggs and ‘socionics’.
The psychological biota itself -- this is well-known -- presents as a “blooming buzzing confusion”. We can scarce generalize, or
quantify, over dandelions,
let alone people.
Yet then comes Plutarch’s
Parallel Lives : a
milestone. The advance consists,
not in the matter of simply
listing a limited roster of celebrated characters, but in positing a strict paralellism
between the Greek roster, and the Roman.
This does not in itself present a structure
of personality-types; rather, it
(strongly) suggests that such a structure (as yet undiscovered) may exist: else, whence such extensive paralellism
?
[Insert rudimentary exposition of Jungian typology. Or better yet -- look it up
yourself in Wikipedia.]
So (any reader will naturally ask): Where do I come
in?
Well, for a single example, let us consider Jung’s categories : Thinking, Feeling; Sensation,
Intuition; cross-classified with Extraverted/Introverted : with, as our lab specimen, that wild&wacky but loveable Doctor Justice.
Among Jung’s eight types is the “Introverted Intuitive”; and herein I must number myself. Jung also offers a twinned pair of
“Thinking” types, which would have been my “first choice”; but a moment’s reflection reveals that intuitive is on the mark. I have repeatedly fought against that imbalance in my
nature, by striving for thinking:
majoring first in chemistry, later in math, as an ‘enantiodromic’ counterforce
to my essentially poetic cathexis.
People of this type are inclined to make
use of the mechanism of reification
-- i.e., they treat ideas,
images, or insights as if they
were real objects. For intuition,
therefore, unconscious images acquire the dignity of things.
Anthony Stevens, Jung: A Very
Short Introduction (1994), p. 96
The bulk of the ‘founding posts’ of this blog were in defense of philosophical Realism (in the mathematical context,
a.k.a. Platonism). I have never used this unpleasant term
“reification”, whose connotations are wholly negative. But as glossed above, -- yeh, I’ll cop
to that.
OK so -- I cop to the Type -- do I cop to the Shadow?
Shadow: Extraverted Sensation. … Poorly oriented in time and space,
they tend to forget appointments, are seldom punctual, and easily get lost in
strange places.
-- Stevens (id)
Poorly oriented in time -- definitely. I have little sense of when things happened to me, and can
easily be off by a matter of years.
Indeed, often the only way I can fix the thing is that I do tend to recall
precisely where I was when something happened. So, something can at least be dated to, say, the Princeton
Years. But this latter fact
connects with my being very well
oriented in space : When my wife and I wander through the
footpaths of a forest, she is instantly disoriented, and calmly relies on my
inner compass.
As for appointments, I never forget them; though some decidedly overt-extraverted (ditsy) women I work
with do that constantly -- simply
not showing up for their exams, or showing up on the wrong day … I recoil in
horror from such behavior. And as
for punctuality -- I am always
punctual, thank-you-very-much (having been raised on Mary Poppins -- who is
likewise punctual, and magical).
That last feature, “easily lost in strange places”, is much more
interesting. In actual practice, I virtually never get lost, in part simply
because the very prospect of such a disaster fills me with nameless horror, so I do conscientious advance
research before traveling.
Whereas, if the travel arrangements are left to my wife, we can easily
wind up in the wrong town entirely.
But in dreams, being lost is
the paramount terror. Even
the runner-up, the Examination Dream, tends to have this flavor: I am never actually concerned that the
exam itself will be too hard;
merely, I was not given clear directions as to the location where the
exam is to take place, and must wander about a vast impersonal campus, finding
no help from anyone at all.
Back to the I.I. Shadow.
Stevens goes on (in very poor taste, I might add):
They tend to make poor lovers …
-- Stevens (id)
Har-rumph! -- Obviously, nothing I could say, would sway; we must rely on the
testimony of others.
I call as my first witnesses:
Miss
Daisy M.
Mlle
Fifi la-C.
die
Jungfrau Gretchen W.
followed by (in chronological order)
Laurette
S.
Ms.
Anastasia Y.
Mme
la comtesse Marie-Claire l’O
and so forth.
~
Whether this sort of thing is any more than the kind of game played in
newspaper astrology columns, I leave to others to assess. Yet one factor structurally distinguishes Jung’s typology from the usual
party-game: namely, the assertion of a duality::
a Personality of type AI (so Jung) will have a shadow of their
respective opposites, ai. -- “Structurally”, as opposed to simply
empirically. -- Oh dear, the
thought is becoming cloudy already, difficult to express. -- Once again, Jung has my number: “they have difficulty in communicating
their ideas simply and in an organized way, for they pursue image after image,
idea after idea, ‘chasing after every possibility in the womb of the unconscious’.” That is exactly what is happening here
-- guilty your honor -- only (mercurially) yet a different image suddenly
presents itself: not the womb, but
the vulva of the Unconscious.
Okay so -- What do I mean by all this.
Jung offers eight basic character categories, astrology twelve. Only, Jung’s is more orderly than that,
in that it is structured as the combinatorial consequence of four cognitive types times two expressive subflavors. Already, conceptually, this is an improvement :cf. in
physics, the “eightfold way”, which is likewise combinatorial. Indeed the analogy goes farther, since
that Jungian foursome is itself structured as two dyads: compare color, flavor, charm,
independent (and combinatorially combining) dimensions in quantum particle
physics.
But let us set that aside, and simply consider the twelve bzw. eight
categories as an unstructured ‘flat file’. The question, then, is empirical,
not structural or theoretical:
Which taxonomy does a better job of “cutting Nature at the joints”?
Okay now -- here’s another layer -- and one which, so far as I know,
has no counterpart in astrology.
Jung emphasizes dualities, in the form of dialectal dichotomies -- Self
vs. Animus bzw Anima, to take an example independent of these characterological
categories. And here he maintains
that each person whose basic (overt) type is of the bi-componential category
such-plus-such, has an underside or revers de la médaille composed of their
respective opposites, or duals -- call them what you may.
Now -- Jung’s dualistic scheme
differs from the mathematical in that (apart from the fact that this
whole spiel is a metaphor) each duality is by no means symmetrical: one of the coin-sides is weaker (and
also unconscious, though that is not essential, since really both sides are). Now, mathematical duality is by
no means definitionally self-symmetrical:
in favorable cases (such as Hilbert space, or
L2
) the category in
question is called “self-dual”, and is calculationally especially nice to work
with; in consequence, it is
primarily this sort of duality that
interests mathematicians.
Anyhow: This Jungian
structural/theoretical nicety now becomes once again robustly empirical : Is it in fact the case that
people who (by general consensus -- let us simply assume this, for
nothing rides on it) fit into such-and-such an overt category, manifest the corresponding dual as a covert category?
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