- Joined
- Sep 21, 2009
- Messages
- 440
Yes, that's definitely a good approach. Ultimately the goal of Jungian analysis is to get people talking about archetypes and the unconscious in any way you can, so you can understand their inner world better. In fact, some believe that you could figure out someone's personality type in difficult cases where a self-ranked test doesn't seem to work by determining what roles archetypes are playing in a person's psyche.... with something like this, for example.
This will look like very complicated nonsense to most people, especially with the two-letter abbreviations, but this is the kind of stuff I used to work with regularly... sure, sometimes it starts with a simple personality test, but ends with dream analysis, conversations about archetypes, talking about functions playing different roles in a given person's psyche, etc. So instead of talking about how planets behave in different houses and signs, you talk about how psychological functions behave with different archetypes, which functions are used more and how they are used. But also notice how it's all made to look way more scientific... it's likely not an accident that the names of the psychological functions sound a lot like the elements of the Periodic Table, and everything is presented with these very neat, tidy charts that seem logical somehow.
But yeah, in this case Ni is actually Introverted Intuition, Te is actually Extraverted Thinking, etc. Jungian psychological functions get tossed around so much in discussions that people had to abbreviate them. While a lot more purist Jungians do like to deny that MBTI has any connection with Jung, there's definitely a very active MBTI-to-Jungian pipeline in a lot of typology communities, where people get really into Jung after hitting the limits of the official MBTI. It's like... some people get into astrology by learning about their sun sign, and may even be satisfied with that, but anyone who gets deeper into it finds it's a lot more complicated and has to learn a symbolic language with a lot of archetypes in order to talk about their inner world.
Oh, Jungian analysis is doing fine... people did stuff like that for years all the time on the typology forum I was on, and honestly the collective unconscious never really came up. The problem is less that people need the collective unconscious, and more that because it has now been shown that the foundations of his theory are nonsense that take no effort to debunk, his system now has no theoretical underpinning and is thus less appealing to more rational types of people who might tend to steer clear of astrology, but would have been open to personality testing and Jungian analysis.
That was the main difference between the old typology forum I used to frequent, and this one... the old typology forum had more intellectual types who need to look at archetypes and analyze themselves, but find things like astrology or tarot to be too hard a pill to swallow. It also gave them excuses to construct their own system of doing such analysis and debate with others about stuff, etc. That was part of the appeal of Jung's system for me. Jung could sometimes get more rational people to open themselves to something they'd normally dismiss out of hand. Astrology is great, but it's much harder to sell to someone who sees themselves as a rational person than Jung's system was. Probably one of the reasons I've studied both. If they don't want to look up their birth time or don't believe in astrology, then I just have them start taking personality tests and asking them questions about how they relate to various archetypes, and they still learn about themselves and work through their issues. Makes sense, right?
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