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• Jung identifies Freud as both ES-P and INFP
• Myers identifies Freud as an extrovert.
• Keirsey & son identify Freud as ESTP.
• Von Franz identifies Freud as I-FP.
• Van der Hoop identifies Freud as ENTP.
• Freud identifies himself as having Compulsive traits.
• Theodore Millon (professor of psychology and creator of the MCMI personality assessment system) identifies Freud as having Narcissistic traits.
• V.W. Odajnyk (author of ‘Archetype and Character‘) identifies Freud as INFP (early life) and ISTP (later life).*
• James Graham Johnston (author of ‘Jung’s Compass of Psychological Types‘) identifies Freud as a type with Te.
• Walter Kaufmann (author of ‘Discovering the Mind’) identifies Freud as “more introverted” than Jung.
• John Beebe (Jungian analyst and editor of ‘The Question of Psychological Types‘) identifies Freud as ISFP.
• CelebrityTypes Admin team identifies Freud as ISTJ.

* Though Odajnyk seems to say in his book that Freud was an ISFP (early life) and then an ISTJ (later life), this is actually an error in the editing process surrounding the publication of the book. Odajnyk’s true assessment of Freud is as we have listed above: As an INF type with F dominance (early life) and then as an IST type with T dominance later in life. Our source is personal correspondence with Odajnyk.

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As you can see, the assessments of Freud’s type are all over the place. As we have previously said, Freud is a sort of psychological sphinx; a man who had both advanced knowledge of human psychology and purposefully tried to hide his true personality in his conduct and writings. As such, the most fitting statement on the wide deviations of opinion is the following, as made by Jung:

“Freud is a very neurotic character. … This makes it hard to determine his type.”

Or by the philosopher Karl Jaspers:

“[To the investigator] Freud himself remains an opaque personality.”

Or as the prominent Freud biographer Peter Gay would have it:

“As every biographer of Freud must ruefully acknowledge, that great unriddler of mysteries left behind some tantalizing private mysteries of his own.”

In the book ‘Jung’s Compass of Psychological Types‘, the author, James Graham Johnston, assesses the types of the people listed below.

It should be noted that Johnston does not subscribe to the law of opposites as postulated by later theoreticians in the field. As such, his types are different and cannot be compared to the standard 16 types. For example, Johnston identifies himself as an Ni-Ti type with an Fe-Se shadow, so for example, according to his conception of function orders, his function order could be (a) Ni-Ti-Fe-Se or (b) Ti-Ni-Fe-Se, or something entirely different.

Although he agrees that there are a “primary 16″ types, Johnston does not rule out that there could be more, saying, perhaps in jest, that there might as well be 2400 types in Jung’s typology when all the variations are factored in.

*(Talking on the conceptual level and not necessarily the individual)

By the CT admin team
After V.W. Odajnyk and Edward Hoffman

“Adler had only one idea. It was a good idea, but he did not get beyond [that].” – C.G. Jung

As we have detailed in another article, the contributions of extroverts to the history of ideas tends to get overlooked in favor of similar ideas produced by introverts. In the case of Alfred Adler, it is hard for us today to understand that prior to World War II Adler was actually a bigger name than Jung (and possibly as big a name as Freud) within the field of psychology.

The only idea commonly associated with Adler’s name today is that of the superiority complex, and most people, including professional psychologists, even misunderstand that. They tend to think that the superiority complex has to do with wanting to be some sort of Nietzschean or Ayn Randian Superman, and this misinterpretation in turn has led many people to regard Adler as some kind of NTJ type. Yet in Adler’s psychology, the superiority complex is actually a psychological defense against deep-seated feelings of inferiority. According to Adler, the Randian Supermen are only being uptight and haughty because they secretly fear that they are unlovable and that they do not belong in the world. According to Adler, these people need a kiss and a hug and to be empathically seen for what they really are. Only then will they be able to relax and to be what they truly are in this life. Then they can sit on the rose bush of life and bloom according to their true nature, rather than compulsively needing to be the biggest bloom on the bush. This is the true meaning behind Adler’s idea of the superiority complex and it accurately foreshadows the findings of modern psychology when it comes to the notion of the narcissistic personality.

So with regards to the common understanding of Adler, he is commonly thought to have been a one-trick pony; a cul-de-sac in the history of psychology. As we can see from the Jung quote above, Jung also helped perpetuate the myth that Adler had only one idea, and that the remainder of the ideas of early psychology were to be credited to Freud and to Jung himself. This quote of Jung’s may be especially incriminating given that many of the ideas that are now widely credited to Jung were really Adler’s. Did Jung knowingly downplay the importance of Adler’s contributions in order to hide his source of inspiration and make his own contributions look more seminal by comparison? That is a matter best left to individual interpretation. On the one hand, Jung consciously downplayed the contributions of other psychologists in other matters. Yet on the other hand, Jung repeatedly said in private that he was profoundly indebted to Adler.

We leave it to the reader to decide.

Below is a list of psychological contributions that originated with Adler, but which are rarely acknowledged as Adler’s ideas. Many of these ideas are commonly thought to have originated with Jung:

• Emphasizing the individual over ‘society,’ yet also seeing the individual as an expression of something greater that ultimately hawks back to all life
• The idea of psychological compensation (though Freud also had such ideas)
• Extending the concept of psychic energy, or libido, beyond the mechanistic limits first set by Freud (this expanded conception of libido is also used by Jung in Psychological Types)
• Patient and therapist should face each other (rather than face away from each other, as dictated by Freud)
• The ideal time frame of therapy is 1-2 times a week, rather than 4-5 times a week as suggested by Freud (Jung also supported Adler’s time frame)
• The current psychic outlook of the patient is more important than the patient’s childhood history
• The idea that the personality yearns towards integration and wholeness
• The idea that the personality strives towards individuation in balance with society (rather than at the cost of society as with the Nietzschean superman)
• The idea that personality complexes are psychic rather than physiological in nature
• The idea that popular groups and movements of the times are not random “historical fashions” or “historical extrapolations,” but that they express deep-seated psychological needs of the community (for example, in his book Civilization in Transition Jung says that the fascination with UFOs speaks to a community in need of wholeness. In a similar vein, he would probably have said that the 9/11 Truth movement speaks to a populace that yearns for government officials that they can deem accountable and benign.)

Why Did Adler Disappear From the History of Ideas?

So if Adler was as big a name as Freud and an even bigger name than Jung prior to 1939, how can it be that Adler’s contributions to the history of psychology are almost unknown today? Well, part of the reason is the same as the one that we have given in an earlier article on the contributions of introverts and extroverts:

The contributions of the extroverts often go unsung throughout the history of ideas (the extroverted Adler, versus the introverted Freud and Jung; the extroverted van der Hoop versus the introverted Myers and Keirsey, for example). But it is also in part their own fault for spreading themselves too thinly, and for generally not putting the same amount of tenacity into the promotion of a single project. In an ideal world, a person’s contributions should be judged on the basis of their ideas alone, but in the real world, all kinds of other considerations are unfortunately also at play.

Yet more specifically in the case of Adler, the difference was also one of organization: Both Jung and Freud had their difficulties giving presentations in front of large audiences of people and instead preferred to surround themselves with small, tightly-knit circles of admirers. Adler, on the other hand, positively loved giving presentations in large halls and auditoriums. He enjoyed interacting with all manner of men and was as comfortable under critical scrutiny as he was when receiving standing ovations by hundreds of people.

In other words, where Freud and Jung would pour their organizational energies into forming small tightly-knit groups and ensuring that these groups were loyal to their style of thinking, Adler would devote himself to interacting with thousands of people, if only to speak for 10 minutes with each one.  So on the one hand, Adler did spread himself too thin, as described in our prior article on the subject. But on the other hand, Adler was not an authoritarian: Where both Freud and Jung would evict members of their movements for deviating too much from the orthodoxy of their own thinking, Adler never aspired to control his followers intellectually. In fact, Adler’s idea was the very converse: Each individual should pursue his own creative ideas, drawing freely on whatever ideas seemed valuable to him and disregarding any orthodoxy. In Adler’s view, this would create an intellectual climate that would “allow a hundred flowers to bloom.”

Yet when the carnage of World War 2 was let loose upon the world, Adler’s organizational structure (of thousands of people who each felt a little sympathetic to him) was not at all as capable of withstanding the social upheavals brought on by the war as Jung and Freud’s small groups of people who had poured their whole life into supporting and developing the ideas of either Freud or Jung. In the cases of both Freud and Jung, one can draw a direct lineage from the psychologists who belong to these schools today and directly back to the original circles surrounding Freud and Jung themselves. Adler’s contributions to psychology have no such custodians; no such protectors and preservers to carry on his lineage. His ideas are like an intellectual flotsam, spread to all winds and existing simply as ideas with no movement or school to back them up.

One question remains: Was World War 2 the proximate or ultimate cause of Adler’s decline? Would Adler still be bigger than Jung if there had been peace in Western Europe from 1918 to now? Obviously we don’t know, but we suspect that Adler would not have been as overshadowed by Jung if it had not been for the disruption of cross-country intellectual communications during the war. In fact, Jung might have been a lot less famous today if it weren’t for the fact that he, as the only non-Jew of the three, would purposefully use the anti-Semitism of the Nazis to insert his own ideas into the mainstream of central European psychology. Still, it is hard to say whether Adler’s “flotsam approach” of liberally spreading his ideas to the winds might not also be self-defeating when it comes to making a (permanent) name for oneself.

At any rate, what can be said with certainty is that Adler’s ideas concerning ‘Individual Psychology’ – namely that the individual should be affirmed for his own individuality while at the same time being supplied with a “bridge” back to integration with the community, and viewing the individual as a person of equal dignity and worth as the therapist, and seeing the person who has been wounded by emotional deprivation and to try and supply that emotional support in order to heal that wound – are far more in line with the thinking modern mainstream psychology than either Freud or Jung’s ideas.

As such it is profoundly ironic that Adler is the one of the main three original pioneers that is forgotten today.

NTJ/NFP: The insides are the insides.

NTP/NFJ: The outsides are the insides.

NTJ/NFP: The outsides are the outer layers around the insides.

NTP/NFJ: The outsides are the outer layers around yet more outsides.

NTJ/NFP: It is the insides that determine a thing’s true nature and worth.

NTP/NFJ: It is the outsides that determine a thing’s relative nature and worth.

NTJ/NFP: The outside is impractical convention, to be disregarded in the name of authenticity.

NTP/NFJ: The inside is impractical crookedness, to be straightened in the name of harmony.

NTP: I trust the outsides because they form predictable patterns.

NFJ: I trust the outsides because they are shared with others.

NTJ: I trust the insides because the insides are the source of the outsides.

NFP: I trust the insides because I must be my true self.

NTJ/NFP: The insides are the essences; the outsides lead people astray.

NTP/NFJ: There are no essences; believing so leads people astray.

NTJ/NFP: The core is the core. It is the experience of ourselves in the world. It is the true heart of existence.

NTP/NFJ: The core is that there is no core. There is only an oceanic feeling where the boundaries between subject and object are lost.

The third letter details whether one tends to base one’s decisions chiefly on logic or chiefly upon one’s personal values; whether one decides with the head or with the heart. People who prefer to use Feeling will often adopt an appreciative and accommodating attitude when interacting with others, which is why some researchers also refer to Thinking/Feeling as skeptical/agreeable.

People who have a strong preference for Feeling generally take pride in seeing themselves as empathetic, considerate, friendly, generous, and helpful. Some Feelers even experience such a strong sense of concern and involvement with regards to the problems of others that they can feel compelled to drop what they are doing and offer their aid to the other. Conversely, people who prefer Thinking more often take pride in being critical, logical, insightful and truthful. Taking a darker, less optimistic view of human nature than their Feeling counterparts, they are also less prone to spontaneously help people who are not their close friends or where they do not see a ‘rational’ reason to do so.

Some of the most widely-known descriptions of Feeling tend to depict Feelers as unanimously goodnatured ‘happy puppies’ (this is true of Keirsey‘s book in particular). Many Feelers take issue with these portrayals, feeling that such descriptions portray them as overly gullible and one-sided. Consequently, many authors have attempted to portray ‘the dark side of Feeling’ as an ‘ability to socially manipulate people’ and an ‘egocentricity beyond what is reasonable’. These may very well be true of a given Feeler, but they are most likely NOT traits that are specifically pertinent to Feeling. Rather, what appears to be the true ‘dark side of Feeling’ is a propensity to internalize conflict and make it personal beyond what most Thinkers would do. One could perhaps say that as Feelers tend to take generosity and consideration as their starting point, they do not expect conflict, nor do they feel that it is reasonable that conflict be brought upon them.

It is a striking fact that while all of the other dimensions explained here are gender-neutral, Thinking and Feeling are unevenly distributed amongst the sexes so that most men are Thinking and most women are Feeling. Precise figures are unreliable, but a generally accepted guideline is that 65% of males are Thinking while 65% of females are Feeling. This tendency is observed in all cultures and is backed up by every other system of personality out there.

Philosophers like Judith Butler and Simone de Beauvoir have traditionally blamed culturally defined gender roles for this occurrence: “A woman is not born, she is made.” However, in recent years, scientists have turned the problem upside-down, speculating instead that over the generations women have been sexually selected for sweetness and caring, causing more critical and strong-willed women to hit an evolutionary dead end. Similarly, scientists have speculated that since women have traditionally been entrusted with childcare, they may have developed Feeling traits as these are speculated to be helpful in nurturing a child.

While Thinking women may experience some difficulty relating to groups of women that are exclusively defined by Feeling, particularly in adolescence, Thinking women are generally accepted, and even cherished, in today’s liberated and knowledge-based society.

Unfortunately, the same cannot be said where Feeling males are concerned: Society viciously expects men to be tough-minded, logical, and in control of their emotions (save perhaps rage and anger). Some Feeling males, particularly of the ESFJ type, simply just ‘get it’ and have little trouble fitting in. (Sometimes they may overcompensate and become ‘macho’.) Such males frequently do well with the police or in the military.

Other Feeling men, however, are not as lucky: They tend to take an interest in aesthetics and interpersonal relationships that is not shared by other men. Throughout life, Feeling men may have a hard time relating to other men, and while they may have an easier time forming friendships with women, there is always the danger that women think of them as ‘friend material’ and not ‘date material’ if they are conditioned by social norms. Rather than try to reform their personalities, such males need to have confidence in themselves and in that it is okay to be different. If friends and acquaintances prove intolerant, a change in friends and social scene may be the only cure, though it may seem like an excessively drastic step, given the Feeler’s propensity to sympathize with those whom he knows.

When Jung first defined Feeling around 1915, he referred to it as ‘rational’. Unfortunately, this has caused a great deal of confusion for both newcomers and seasoned typologists alike. By ‘rational’, Jung meant that the output of Feeling is ‘internally consistent’, which appears to be untrue. In terms of internal consistency, Feelers are generally more likely to hold contradictory views, often on the same topic. A negative view of this tendency may be found in the work of psychologist Drew Westen (himself a Feeler) who posits that our Feeling faculties stem from an earlier evolutionary stage than does our Thinking. Conversely, a more positive view of the same matter may be that the only ways we have in which to measure contradictions all rely heavily on formal logic, which is naturally attuned to Thinking rather than Feeling. It may well be that our current ways of measuring contradictions are simply too formalistic to encompass the subtleties of Feeling. As the poet Walt Whitman said: “Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes.”

To make matters worse, Jung also referred to certain kinds of Feeling as ‘objective’, by which he meant ‘oriented towards the external reality’, which again is not really an appropriate descriptor of the trait. In fact, neither Thinking or Feeling are especially ‘objective’ in themselves. The deciding factor with regards to objectiveness, as Jung defined it, is extroversion, which orients itself by what is objectively present.

The second letter details whether one’s attention is naturally focused on concrete reality or on abstraction. In the classical terminology regarding Jungian type, these traits are often rendered as Sensing, meaning concrete, and Intuition, meaning abstract. However, this terminology is often counter-intuitive to the newcomer.

Being concrete-minded relates to observing and experiencing the world around oneself as fully and as precisely as it appears. Conversely, an abstract-minded person often misses out on a lot of details, as his or her brain is wallowing in abstractions and associations. For example, take a look at the following picture:

A concrete-minded person would conclude that it is a picture of the Eiffel Tower taken by a photographer standing below the tower on what must have been a cold fall day since the people walking around at the base of the tower are wearing coats and the leaves on the trees in the background are turning brown. The person may even notice specific people in the picture, such as the person in the red coat and the woman pushing a baby carriage. An abstract-minded person, by contrast, would look at the same picture and then conclude that: The tower is phallic and imposing; it can be viewed as a symbol of fertility; it might have been the wish of the builder to articulate his dominance over other architects or to assert mankind’s triumph over nature. In other words, an abstract-minded person would pay heed to all of the non-immediate features of the situation, whereas the concrete-minded person would first grasp the immediate situation in its entirety, focusing on facts and details, the “nuts and bolts” of the structure, its color and its surroundings, before moving onto the abstract interpretation.

There is nothing wrong with being either abstract or concrete. They are simply two ways of experiencing the world. Without abstract-minded people, academic research would progress only very slowly, and without concrete-minded people, society would be far more chaotic and disorderly, and most crimes would probably never be solved as criminal investigators would be prone to miss essential clues and details.

Misleading terms such as “abstraction level” tend to suggest that abstract-minded people can do anything that concrete people can do, but this may be an artifact of the values embedded in the educational system. Education is geared towards the strong suits of abstract-minded people, such as coming up with clever interpretations and using difficult words. However, the real world has equal use of either orientation.

While having a high degree of abstraction often entails a certain cerebral agility when it comes to discussing abstract ideas, the downside seems to be an increased openness to unsubstantiated, and even bizarre, ideas. In philosophy, for example, there is no end to the amount of societies that have been dreamed up by abstract-minded researchers and which work perfectly on paper, yet do not work in the real world. A classic example to this end is “How would you feed New York City?” While many an abstract-minded person would attempt to come up with a new and better system for supplying NYC with all the food and drink it needs, the only correct answer hitherto proven to be successful is, “I wouldn’t.” New York City is fed by a multitude of concrete-minded and realistic people, each keenly perceptive of his or her link in the chain. There is no grand abstract mastermind, nor is there any master plan. Every time and everywhere such a master plan has been attempted for any free city, the result has been shortages of food and a dramatic decrease in the number of different foods available.

Finally, another drawback of being abstract-minded may be clinging too much to one’s intellectual intuition, that is, one’s subjective, internal ideas about how things are and what they mean. Many controversies in science and philosophy have been (and still are) really about abstract-minded people clinging to their subjective intuitions about how things are rather than weighing the evidence factually and realistically. Of this danger, the philosopher Karl Popper said:

“[Intellectual intuition] can never serve to establish the truth of any idea or theory, however strongly somebody may [intellectually intuit] that it must be true, or that it is ‘self-evident’ … For someone else may have just as strong an intuition that the same theory is false.”

In this series of posts we’re going to look at the four dimensions as if they were personality traits rather than a system that denotes the orientation and functioning of the psyche. When we type people for the site we always take a cognitive function approach, but nevertheless, in a broader context, it might be interesting to know the twists and turns that exist on the fringes of the main theory.

Extroversion is the most salient and measurable of all the personality traits ever discovered. People who are dominantly extroverted are often keenly interested in learning about the world.

The psycho-analytic view (ca. 1915): The first modern theory of Extroversion and Introversion was presented ca. 1915 by Carl Jung. Jung’s theory, which has later come to be known as the psycho-analytic view of extroversion, is concerned with whether one is primarily interested in the external world on its own terms, or whether perhaps one’s consciousness is primarily directed towards the inner world of one’s own thoughts, feelings, sensations and intuitions. According to this view, extroverts will be able to experience the world more broadly and more in-depth than introverts who in turn are more likely to take the time to develop a personalized insight which they can then use to perfect their craft.

To Jung, who was himself an introvert, the downside to introversion could be that introverts tend to experience the world through the prism of their own subjective consciousness. We all do this to some degree, but according to Jung, introverts generally pay far more attention to their inner worlds than extroverts. Jung also said something about extroverts being more sexually virile than introverts, but that was largely ignored at the time, only to be taken up by later psychologists.

The biological view (ca. 1965): In his book The Biological Basis of Personality noted psychologist H.J. Eysenck contended that the extroversion-introversion split was in fact due to biological factors, namely differences in the brain’s structure. Eysenck (who was himself an extrovert) proposed that introverts had more “sensitive” brains in the sense that an introvert’s brain is more easily overwhelmed by the neurochemicals that are released whenever we humans experience something. To Eysenck, introverts simply need more time to themselves, in private, controlled environments where they can wind down as the brain recuperates. Many introverts, he continued, would then find joy in what is routine and familiar because of a foreseeable, often low, level of stimulus. In contrast, the typical extrovert would get bored with too much familiarity representing a low level of neural stimulus. Interestingly, proponents of this view have recently found that (statistically speaking) extroverts do in fact have a higher sex drive.

The contemporary view: The vast majority of modern thinkers posit that extroversion-introversion is determined by a mixture of biological and psychological factors. Various studies accord a role for genetics ranging from 40% – 60%, but though the research may be state-of-the-art, the state of the art is still far from certain on this.

Contrary to popular belief, extroversion does not say anything about the ‘depth’ of one’s personality or the person’s preferred level of abstraction. Many self-help books, including the popular The Introvert Advantage, peddle the myth that all introverts are deep and abstract-minded, while all extroverts are childlike and hedonistic, with no time for patience. However, extroversion does NOT in itself say anything about such things.

In Psychological Types §540, Jung says of Hegel:

As forerunners of Nietzsche’s intuitive approach I would mention Schopenhauer and Hegel, the former because his intuitive feelings had such a decisive influence on his thinking, the latter because of the intuitive ideas that underlie his whole system. In both cases, however, intuition was subordinated to intellect, but with Nietzsche it ranked above it.

Which means that T ranks higher than N in Hegel (and Schopenhauer). According to Jung, Hegel is thus either an ENTJ or an INTP.

As for Schopenhauer, Jung also says of him in Psychological Types §322:

Negation, therefore, is itself an attitude to the world, a particularly Schopenhauerian attitude that on the one hand is purely intellectual and rational, and on the other a profound feeling of mystical identity with the world. This attitude is introverted; it suffers therefore from its typological antithesis.

Taking these claims in conjunction, then, Schopenhauer can in Jung’s estimation can only be INTP.

* We are grateful to the users ‘Jungster’ and ‘DesmondPlusFaraday’ for working out the details of Jung’s claims here.

Update: May 2013: In The Psychology of C.G. Jung (1942), Jung’s associate Jolande Jacobi says:

“Kant, for example, was a pure thinking type, while Schopenhauer must be regarded as an intuitive thinking type.” (p. 13)

In making this statement, it would seem that Jacobi is alluding to Psychological Types §540 and §632) for these statements. What is interesting to us is that Jolande’s reading seems to be closer to the spirit of Psychological Types than the ever so many attempts to extract statements concerning specific function orders from that work. A tendency that we have been guilty of ourselves. – We should furthermore note that Jacobi had Jung himself to critique her work.

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As a point of general interest, on the inferior function, she also quotes Jung to say: “You do not have it under your thumb; it has you.” (p. 17)