A Call for Complexity ~ S2E1 Psyche Design Psyche Design

Transcription:
Hello, my name is Meghan LeVota, and you are listening to the Psyche Design podcast. This is the first episode of season two. And, I'm not fully sure everything that I'm going to talk about in this episode. But for myself, I'm treating it as almost like a personal manifesto of "How I Intend to Talk About Personality Type Moving Forward," and just some general ideas to set the stage.
So, I'm calling this episode a Call For Complexity. Because that is partially what I'm calling for, is a way in which to talk about Carl Jung's theory of Psychological Types — as well as the 16-type model that was popularized by the MBTI (Myers and Briggs), and all of the other systems that have followed.
And I guess what I want to bring up right off the bat, is that Carl Jung himself was pretty long-winded and convoluted, one could say. And in the book, Psychological Types, he talks a lot about the problem of opposites, and how opposites interact with one another, and what to do about it, and what problems that gives society dealing with those opposites. And then at the end of the book, he goes into the eight cognitive functions, which I'm not going to go into what those are just yet. So if you're new to personality type theory, and you want to know what these functions are, you might want to check out another episode.
But for those of us who have been in this personality bubble for a while, basically, the way I see it is, Carl Jung talked about the psyche, in quite a complex way, too. And, you know, interestingly enough, he wanted his theory of Psychological Types to be something that the layperson can pick up and use. However, in the way in which he explained things, it was not very easy for a lay person to pick up and use, what did people do, they jumped right to the section about the categories. And they just read about the categories and skipped over the beginning part, I've been guilty. I'm guilty of this literally when it comes to reading that reading his book. And I think that, you know, based on how the ego works, according to Jung and psychology, this shouldn't be that surprising that our ego is automatically going to go toward the information in which we, our ego feels like we can use something from it. Whether this is our self-concept, we're going to understand ourselves better. Or other people, maybe we want to get along with other people better. And so even though Carl Jung had hopes that his book Psychological Types would be able to be used for the layperson to be able to figure out how they are dealing with their problem of opposites, in instead went over a lot of people's heads. And I'd like to argue that it's going over our heads right now. I'm not even trying to claim that it hasn't gone over mine, I just want to bring out right off the bat, that the guy is pretty dense when he writes and not all of us have read all of it through.
And I'm not even a Jungian purist here. However, I am someone that philosophically aligns more with Jung than Freud. And I tend to agree with his philosophy on the psyche in the shadow a little bit more so than, like mainstream modern psychology. And so, whenever the Myers Briggs came to be, it was inspired by Psychological Types. And it went with the categories that Carl Jung proposed with the eight cognitive functions and it uses his theory about how we have a dominant and we also have an auxiliary function and then we have an inferior function that is opposite to our Dominant function. The MBTI was able to put those categories and use his theory and turn it into 16 types Next. And there are there are some debates and whether or not Carl Jung agreed with the MBTI. And there's some debate and whether or not the two systems even can work well together. But for most of us in 2022, for learning about personality, we're probably first learning about it through the lens of the 16 types. And then if you get more interested in the background, then you go back and look at some of the dept