The following blog was inspired by the IDRlabs articles "8 Common Typing Mistakes" and "Typology Lessons from von Franz." Those articles were made about a decade ago (God help me), and while many of the problems they pointed out are still relevant today, there are also other points that I feel we have moved past now (e.g. thinking all military commanders are N types). This will sort of be like an updated version of the aforementioned articles regarding the common misconceptions I see within the typology community to this day.
"When people first get into typing, many try to cram all psychological information on a person into the Jungian cognitive functions. And in doing so we are actually apt to betray the functions themselves." – IDRlabs Admin Team: Why Frank Ocean is ISFP, 2012
"A common mistake Jungian typologists make is to take every behavior, viewpoint, and fact about a person’s life as a sign of one or more of their cognitive functions. That is an error. Not everything about a person’s life is related to their Jungian type." – Dylan Shapiro: Why Woodrow Wilson Is INTJ, Part 2, 2015
"A person’s [personality] type does not exhaust everything about his personality. However, since many practitioners of Jungian typology are not well-acquainted with [the] domains of [psychological] studies, they tend to construe everything they observe about that person’s personality as having to do with his type." – Boye Akinwande: On Kanye West and the ISFJ Type, 2015
(1.1): The fallacy of equating correlation with causation in typology:
"While there are certainly correlations between type and such contents (behavioral traits, interests, ideas, skills, etc.), they cannot be taken as the direct constituents of a person’s type, the way 90% of the internet does. For a simple explanation as to why, consider how the existence of such contents in an individual’s psyche is often more a function of time and place (the culture in which he is situated, for instance)." – Boye Akinwande: On Kanye West and the ISFJ Type, 2015
"To give an analogy, in most modern depictions of Santa Claus he tends to wear a red outfit. But it would obviously be an error to say that if somebody wears a red outfit, he must then be Santa Claus. This is exactly what people are doing [in the typology community] ... They are pointing at people in red, assuming them all to be Santa Claus." – IDRlabs Admin Team: Why Bill Clinton is ESFP, 2013
(1.2): One's type is NOT a causation of one's level of intelligence:
“Like stupidity … [intelligence] is not a function, but a modality; the word tells us no more than how a function is working, not what is functioning.” – Jung: Psychological Types §949
"[What] appears to have happened is that intelligence (IQ) has been conflated with intuition. Thus we get the familiar arguments that since Bill Clinton was a Rhodes Scholar, he really cannot be an S type, and since Frank Ocean can speak in complete sentences, he can’t be an ISFP, because certain other ISFPs are inarticulate. But IQ has nothing to do with type. If it did, then typology would cease being typology and start being a covert intelligence test, albeit with no actual requirements for purporting to have a high IQ. If it did have actual requirements, then anybody who reached a certain level of competence and smarts would automatically become an N type, no matter what their personality was actually like." – IDRlabs admin team: On the Bias against Sensation, 2013
"[Some] will want a tool that measures cognitive abilities and intelligence. To them we would recommend the study of IQ and IQ testing. The idea of multiple intelligences may also be to their taste." – IDRlabs admin team: On the Bias against Sensation, 2013
(2): Fantasy and imagination is not synonymous with the N functions:
“Intuition is not identical with fantasy which Jung regards as a human capacity independent of the functions.” – Von Franz: C.G. Jung: His Myth in Our Time, 1972
“Fantasy can find expression via thinking, feeling, intuition and perception [i.e., sensation] and is therefore probably an ability sui generis, with deep roots in the unconscious.” – Von Franz: C.G. Jung: His Myth in Our Time, 1972
(2.1): Creativity and innovative ideas are not exclusive to the N functions:
“Jung attaches great importance to the creative activity of fantasy, which he even puts in a category of its own, because in his opinion it cannot be subordinated to any of the four basic functions, but partakes of them all. He rejects the usual notion that artistic inspiration is limited to the intuitive type. … Fantasy is indeed the source of all creative inspiration, but it is a gift that can come to any of the [functions].” – Jolande Jacobi: The Psychology of C.G. Jung, 1942
"Take, for instance, somebody like Miles Davis. Here you have a guy who initiated several big stylistic changes in the world of jazz over the years. He was at the forefront of cool jazz, modal jazz, jazz fusion, avant garde jazz and more. If you compare an album like Kind Of Blue to an album like On The Corner, they’re just on completely different planets. Miles Davis was an exceptionally creative guy with a wealth of innovative ideas. So, what one might erroneously take from this is that 'he’s constantly coming up with new ideas and thus must be an Ne type.' But, if you put these preconceptions aside and read interviews with Miles Davis, you find absolutely nothing in the way of Ne there whatsoever. As to his extroverted perception, Davis shows Se, not Ne, and you end up with ISTP for him." – Ric Velasquez: How to Fail at Typing Musicians, 2013
(3): One should separate a person's beliefs and philosophy from their cognitive process:
"If you read chapter VIII in Psychological Types, you will see that Jung’s innovation on James’ typology was to use the terms *psychologically* instead of *philosophically*. For example, David Hume was a radical empiricist, but in Jung’s typology, we cannot say that because he was a sensory empiricist, he was therefore a Sensation type. If we did that, we would not be using a *psychological* classification of material, but a *philosophical* one." – IDRlabs Admin Team, 2014
"We are not saying that Jung’s typology has no bearing on philosophical beliefs, [but] we are saying that such bearings are incidental and not essential. For example, NTP types are on average more likely to give credence to the Kantian Noumenon than NTJ types, in our experience. But these are correlations and to apply the typology psychologically we must regard that as circumstantial evidence compared to the direct evidence of looking at how a person functions psychologically." – IDRlabs Admin Team, 2014
(4): Function terms should not be taken literally:
"Jungian intuition is KANTIAN intuition. It has very little to do with the way we use the world ‘intuition’ today. To be ‘intuitive’ in the popular parlance is actually more of an indication that someone is sensing. For example: Who is most 'intuitive' by the informal meaning of the word: Bill Gates or Paris Hilton?" – IDRlabs Admin Team, 2013
"In the [IDRlabs] article 'On the Bias Against Sensation',
it is mentioned that Jung himself did not partake in the popular and
widespread bias against [S] types. While that is true, Jung could
perhaps be said to have contributed to the bias in his own indirect way:
By calling that function ‘Sensation,’ he implied an overly crude and
unthinking relationship between the mental processing of the S type and
the unmediated influx of sense-data upon the psyche. But I would argue
that sensory input is really just one means to the preferred ends of the
S function, which is to grasp ... and interact with the actual ... to a fuller degree than N types do. The real irony of this argument is that, for all intents and purposes,
the most descriptive name for Sensation will then be Intuition! Instead
of implying that S types are mindlessly thrown about by their senses,
the ‘Intuitive’ label would rather imply that S types meet life more
naturally, intuitively, and without the need for a lot of the
high-flowing and stilted reflection that the N types so often evince." – Sigurd Arild: Sensation and Intuition as Names and Misnomers, 2016
(4.1): Thinking types are not wholly rational and strong emotional reactions or convictions doesn't necessarily indicate a Feeling preference:
"Unconscious and undeveloped [i.e., inferior] feeling is barbaric and absolute, and therefore sometimes hidden destructive fanaticism sometimes bursts out. ... These people are incapable of seeing that, from a feeling standard, other people might have another value, for they do not question the inner values they defend. Where they definitely feel that something is right, they are incapable of showing their feeling standpoint, but they never doubt their own inner values." – Von Franz: Psychotherapy, 1993
"From a Jungian perspective, no one is wholly rational." – IDRlabs Admin Team, 2014
(5): One shouldn't confuse preference with ability:
"In [Freud’s] mental make-up sensation was a far more active element than intuition. This statement is of course perfectly compatible with the thesis that intuition, though the less active of the two functions in him and though deprecated by him, may have been of a quality superior to most men. But it cannot be repeated too often that the types … aim to discriminate between people, not in merit, but broadly in their usual ways of mental operations..” – Horace Gray: Freud and Jung; Their Contrasting Psychological Types, 1949
"It is important to separate preference from ability. Jungian typology is
a study of personality, not necessarily of the specific and concrete
efforts and contributions that a person made." – IDRlabs Admin Team, 2013
"Jungian functions are, as Costa and McCrae have written, structures that govern the organization and flow of consciousness. Because these functions are relatively powerful, we can then colloquially speak of 'Si activities, Ni activities, Te activities,' and the like. But at the end of the day, what we refer to as, say, 'Te activities' do not have to be solved by the Te function. So in the comparatively rare case where you have an ENTP who is good at organizational management and the like we would – strictly speaking – be observing an ENTP who has learned to deploy his Ne, Ti and Fe in ways that gets the Te job done. Sort of like when you use a lighter to open a beer cap or when you use a pair of tweezers to drive a nail into a wooden board." – IDRlabs Admin Team, 2013
(6): Not Factoring in Personality Disorders
“[Jungian typology] is but one segment of
our new [psychological] knowledge, it is but one section of science in
general; and this new … body of knowledge must … receive some sort of
integration before the function of each particular branch is disclosed.”
– James Oppenheim, American Types, 1930
“We try to be careful to use the system
as it was intended: It says something about the arrangement of the four
functions and their orientations. All sorts of other factors that
pertain to the personality are, in effect, irrelevant to the system. For
example, whenever people see a Hollywood star with narcissistic traits,
they immediately think that person is some type with Fi because 'narcissists are frequently at odds with social norms and so are Fi
users.' So in reality, most people have a sort of psychological myopia
where they want to fit everything into typology because they are not
acquainted with anything but typology.” – CelebrityTypes Admin Team, 2013
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