Page 9 - My FlipBook

PERSONALITY TRAITS
Now we wade into deeper waters. Personality traits, which are an
expression of temperament, are considered to be intrinsic to who
we are and have been studied as a way to categorize people into
certain psychological “types.” Researchers are consistently coming
up with new studies on this topic, but the theory of different kinds of
personality types is largely based on psychological preferences that were
the brainchild of a Swiss psychiatrist named Carl G. Jung (1865–1961).
He worked with Sigmund Freud, who has fallen out of favor these days
but is still widely considered to be the father of modern psychiatry.

Jung was a complicated man with a lot of issues. (When he was a
child, he used to faint every time he had to go to school or study.)
He viewed the human experience as a kind of mythic journey and
used the word archetypes to describe primordial patterns of behavior
that give our lives significance. Behaviorists and psychologists
either love him or laugh at him; yet his work lives on and can
be a useful lens to look through to see ourselves, our struggles,
and how we think. Jung believed that human behavior, varying
as it does from individual to individual, is actually the result of
major differences in how we use our mental capacities. In his
theory, personality is dependent on a temperamental tendency
toward external or internal processing, plus other opposing mental
functions: the way we receive information (sensing or intuition) and
the way we process information (thinking or feeling). During World
War II, two American women, Isabel Briggs Myers and her mother,
Katharine Cook Briggs, added a function to Jung’s basic theory
on personality. They described two ways in which a person might
prefer to classify information (perceiving or judging).

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