W ords Abstract Concrete

Abstract

NF

SJ

NT

SP

rather far apart. Remember that Myers’s concept of types was heavily influenced by Jung’s Psychological Types, a book in which he presented the purely hypothetical notion that there are four “psychological functions”: “sensation,” “intuition,” “feeling,” and “thinking.” Positing introversion and extraversion as the fundamental attitudes that separate personalities, Jung (with Myers following suit) defined eight types by combining extra­ version and introversion with the four psychological functions, thus creating four function types—Thinking Types, Feeling Types, Intuiting Types, and Sensing Types, each with two variants.

I must say I have never found a use for this scheme of psychological functions, and this is because function typology sets out to define different people’s mental make-up—what’s in their heads—something which is not observable, and which is thus unavoidably subjective, a matter of speculation, and occasionally of projection. A good example of the difficulties such guesswork can introduce is the way in which Jung and Myers confound introversion with intuition, saying that the introverted types are the ones “interested in ideas and concepts,” while the extraverted types are “interested in people and things.” In my view, which is based on close observation of people’s use of words, the intuitives are the ones primarily interested in ideas and concepts, while the sensing types are those primarily concerned with concrete things. Indeed, after forty years or so of typewatching, I have not found any SPs or SJs who were more inclined to discuss conceptual matters (abstractions) than to discuss factual matters (concretions). The sensing types are more perceptual than conceptual, while the intuitive types, NFs and NTs, are more conceptual than perceptual.

To take some of the guesswork out of temperament theory, I base my type definitions on what people do well, their skilled actions—what I call their “intelligent roles”—which are observable, and which thus can be defined more objectively. (For those interested in the specific differences between Jung’s and Myers’s function types and my intelligence types, see note 10 in the Chapter 2 Notes at the end of the book.) Let me point out that during most of the 20th century intelligence was also thought to be in the head, defined as “the ability to think abstractly,” and of late, as “cognitive ability.” But this has never been a very useful way of defining intelligence. Common sense tells us that intelligence is being smart in what we do. In other words it is not how well we think, but how well we act in a given role. If our behavior is adaptive to circumstances, so that we act effectively in such circumstances, then we can be said to be intelligent in those circumstances. Other circumstances are likely to call for different kinds of action, and hence different intelligent roles.

The reason for Myers’s and my differences is that we start from widely different premises. Myers unwittingly adopted Jung’s 19th century ele- mentalism, which assumed that personality could be pieced together from independent elements. On the other hand I was imbued with the 20th century organismic wholism of men such as Karl Biihler, Kurt Goldstein,

Psychological Functions vs Intelligent Roles 31 George Hartmann, David Katz, Wolfgang Kohler, Kurt Koffka, Kurt Lewin, Max Wertheimer, and Raymond Wheeler, to name the more prominent organismic psychologists. So I have long believed that personality, like anatomy, comes about not by an integration of elements, but by differenti­ ation within an already integrated whole, emerging gradually as an individ­ uated configuration. I claim an organism never becomes integrated because it is always integrated. It differentiates by a process of evolution into the mature form it is meant to become. Thus, in the view of organismic wholism, traits of character emerge just as cells do, by a process of differentiation, with the traits clinging together, cohering—not by association, but by a common origin and a common destiny. The tiny acorn, a fully integrated organism from the start, looks forward to the stately oak tree it is destined to become.

The next four chapters will examine the four integrated configurations of personality separately and in some detail—first the SP Artisans, then the SJ Guardians, next the NF Idealists, and last the NT Rationals—defining their many traits of temperament and character, including their intelligent roles and their role variants.

3

Artisans

Don’t be afraid....Taste every thing....Sometimes I think we only half live over here. The Italians live all the way.

This was the creed of the young Ernest Hemingway, after returning home from his tour in Italy as a volunteer ambulance driver for the Red Cross in World War I. Hemingway was still on crutches, convalescing from a shrapnel wound, but the experience of the war had whetted his appetite for excitement, and shown him how thrilling and necessary it was for him to “taste everything” and to “live all the way.” And so, for forty more adventurous, creative years, Hemingway boxed, he ran with the bulls in Pamplona, he hunted lion and buffalo on the Serengeti Plain, he fished for trout in Idaho and marlin off Cuba, he skied, he boated, he survived a car wreck in London, a hurricane at Key West, two plane crashes in Africa. And of course he wrote, not only some of the century’s most gripping novels and short stories, but he also dashed off hundreds of articles and dispatches from every war he could get himself assigned to, making him the most famous and daring war correspondent of his time.

In the mid 1970s I wrote of Myers’s SPs as “Dionysians,” after the Greek fertility god Dionysus. Reborn in the spring of every year, Dionysus would return from the underworld to release the land from the death-grip of winter, exciting his followers to shake themselves free of the cold, to feel the blood coursing in their veins, and to make the land fruitful in flora and fauna. For the “Artisans” (as I now call them), life’s cup is to run over, people are to be enjoyed, games are to be played, resources are to be expended. To be human is to be generous, to spend and sow freely, impet­ uously, spreading bounty like scattering seed.

In recent years I have come to think of the Dionysians as fox-like. There have been many such characters in history—the Desert Fox (General Erwin Rommel), the Red Fox of Kinderhook (President Martin Van Buren), the Gray Fox of Hyde Park (President Franklin Roosevelt), the Gray Fox of Arlington (General Robert E. Lee), the Swamp Fox (General Francis Marion)—and the wily President Lyndon Johnson, who once quipped “I’m just like a fox.” Foxes have got to be the craftiest of the mammalian predators, and human foxes, such as those mentioned, have got to be the