Les caractères

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?