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Personality Types: A Systems Science Explanation May 26, 2008
By Harland Hermann
May 18, 2008.
The MBTI relies on answers to questions -- therefore trusting validity of private ideas about interests and activities. Evaluating the MBTI reports, the `characteristics' identified in the MBTI profile, people generally react with a "Yes, that's me" or for another person "Yes, they are like that". Nonetheless, scientific skepticism is to be expected regarding validity of the data -- particularly as to how this reporting of characteristics could be confirmed. So, these particular answers offering a profile happen but `how' does this happen, and still further `why'?
MBTI theory is a reflection and elaboration of some of Carl Jung's ideas -- for one thing of Extraversion/ Introversion and for another -- less evident preference, in varying sequential order -- of Sensation, Intuition, Feeling, and Thinking. Although these four tendencies of interest can be explained they are not nearly so obvious as the rationale for extroversion/ introversion.
Can this evaluation of personality be explained in a different way, a way less `intuitive' and more `deterministic'? If that is accomplished can greater confidence in the findings follow? This is a reasonable possibility established in the 1982 book `Dichotomies of the Mind' by Walter Lowen and Lawrence Miike, and now given a second edition. This work inclines a skeptic to see that inevitable, logical, deterministic features establish the sixteen different personality types.
On the basis of Systems Analysis intriguing consistencies are apparent in the mind-maps and brain-maps developed. Instead of relying only on intuitive perceptions working inward from the surface observations, Lowen and Miike analyze from `below' with the individual's history of confronting and experiencing the world around, similar to the observations of Piaget. This gradual acquisition of consciousness levels actually establishes a human self -- which each of the levels of consciousness [`poles'] defines and enables -- until a completed personality is there and functioning. All this processing takes years through childhood, adolescence and early adulthood. Continuous relationships with other people are included as part of this `education' - in other words this is life experience, and Lowen/ Miike relate this evolution of experience to the formation of unique [but falling into only 16 generalized types] individual personality.
Systems theory also implies that once the dominant interest from unconscious choice-making [Competence] of a person is established for the profile, then a series of seven other behaviors [transactions] automatically follow inevitably into place as an entropy pattern. And the personality profile also allows yes/no preferences for dividing sixteen possibilities into each of eight personality features, also adding greatly to understanding profile dynamics.
Increased power of understanding normal and very consistent behavior variations among people is provided by this book. Although the MBTI has been so useful already, the impact of this book is to confirm the patterns by explaining why these patterns got there and how they are so strongly established. Personality aspects have a long history of development, are involuntary and generally not even in personal awareness.
-- Harland T. Hermann Sr. MD. Emeritus Professor of Psychiatry, Sanford School of Medicine, University of South Dakota.
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