Resource: Articles

Informational resources to support your wellness and health

The 8 Types

Each of Jung’s 8 psychological types includes certain aptitudes—“gifts”—depicted on the Gifts Compass Inventory® (GCI). Gifts offer guidance about pathways in life that can be most fruitful. They are essential elements of self-awareness.

This series of short articles on the types reviews the “gifts” for each type—aptitudes readily available and enjoyable for an individual. They also consider the types as a “shadow types”—that is not enjoyable and less accessible.

The types as “gifts”—that is accessible and enjoyable—are shown in brighter colors a the top of the bar chart on your GCI Profile, starting with yellow for the most enjoyable. The shadow types on the Gifts Compass Inventory® appear in the darkest color range, at the bottom of the bar chart.

The Extraverted Types

The extraverted types, as a group, are generally oriented to the world outside—to the tangible, traditional realm of of facts.

Extraverted Sensation: The Realistic Gifts

Extraverted Sensation: The Practical Gifts

To feel the object, to have sensations and if possible to enjoy them–that is his constant aim. — C. G. Jung In the last article,

Extraverted Sensation in the Shadow

The unconscious personality can best be described as an extraverted sensation type of a rather low and primitive order. – C.G. Jung With this

Extraverted Sensation in the Shadow II

“If people can be educated to see the lowly side of their own natures, it may be hoped that they will also learn to understand

Extraverted Intuition: The Catalytic Gifts

Because he is always seeking out new possibilities, stable conditions suffocate him . . . So long as a new possibility is in the offing,

Extraverted Intuition in the Shadow

“Whereas true extraverted intuition is possessed of a singular resourcefulness, a ‘good nose’ for objectively real possibilities, this archaicized intuition has an amazing flare for

Extraverted Intuition in the Shadow II

“. . . the archaic intuitions come to the surface and exert their pernicious influence, forcing themselves on the individual and producing compulsive ideas of

Extraverted Thinking: The Constructive Gifts

In its essence this thinking is no less fruitful and creative than introverted thinking, it merely serves other ends. — C. G. Jung Extraverted thinking

Extraverted Thinking in the Shadow

“Although the unconscious thinking is archaic, its reductive tendencies help to compensate the occasional fits of trying to exalt the ego into the subject.” –

Extraverted Thinking in the Shadow II

Although the unconscious thinking is archaic, its reductive tendencies help to compensate the occasional fits of trying to exalt the ego into the subject. If

Extraverted Feeling: The Social Gifts

A feeling judgment of this kind is not by any means a pretense or a lie, it is simply an act of adjustment. – C. G.

Extraverted Feeling in the Shadow

“Often he is gauche in his behavior, painfully anxious to escape notice, or else remarkably unconcerned and childishly naive.”– C.G. Jung We know much

Extraverted Feeling in the Shadow II

“Often he is gauche in his behavior, painfully anxious to escape notice, or else remarkably unconcerned and childishly naive.” – C.G. Jung In the

The Introverted Types

The introverted types, as a group, are generally oriented to the world within—to imagination, ideas, and ideals.

Introverted Intuition: The Visionary Gifts

This image fascinates the intuitive activity; it is arrested by it and seeks to explore every detail of it. It holds fast to the vision,

Introverted Intuition in the Shadow

Anne Rodrigues Although his intuition may be stimulated by external objects, it does not concern itself with external possibilities but with what the external object

Introverted Intuition in the Shadow II

“… intuition, the noblest gift of man, [turns] into meddlesome officiousness, poking into every corner; instead of gazing into the far distance, it descends to

Introverted Intuition

“Had this type not existed, there would have been no prophets in Israel.” – C.G. Jung In this issue of the “Becoming Whole” articles, we

Introverted Sensation

We could say that introverted sensation transmits an image which does not so much reproduce the object as spread over it the patina of age-old

Introverted Sensation: The Aesthetic Gifts

Sensation . . . undergoes considerable modification in the introverted attitude . . . How extraordinarily strong the subjective factor can be is shown most

Introverted Thinking in the Shadow II

The unconscious thinking reaches the surface in the form of obsessive ideas which are invariably of a negative and depreciatory character – C.G. Jung In

Introverted Thinking in the Shadow

“What he dislikes most of all is introverted thinking – thinking about philosophical principles or abstractions or basic questions of life.” – Marie-Louise von Franz

Introverted Thinking: The Conceptual Gifts

The thinking of the introverted type is positive and synthetic in developing ideas which approximate more and more to the eternal validity of the primordial

Introverted Feeling in the Shadow II

Barbara Miller “It is an outstanding peculiarity of unconscious impulses that, when deprived of energy by lack of conscious recognition, they take on a destructive

Introverted Feeling in the Shadow

Barbara Miller “These preexisting mental images into contact with which the stream of our personal experience comes, I call the subjective factor” – C.G. Jung

Introverted Feeling: The Idealistic Gifts

The depth of this feeling can only be guessed–it can never be clearly grasped. It makes people silent and difficult of access; it shrinks back

Falsification of Type

The types—gifts—provide guidance for life. We don’t choose our gifts, we notice them. To attend to developing one’s best gifts builds confidence and ego strength. But to deny them—to attend to those types that are less enjoyable and less accessible—has its costs.

The following articles address what has been called a “falsification of type” where, due to familial, social, or economic conditions, other types take credence over the types most naturally available.

Recovering Forgotten Gifts

“When a function that should normally be conscious lapses into the unconscious, its specific energy passes into the unconscious too.” – C.G. Jung In

Geneva lake at Montreux, Vaud, Switzerland

Type Falsification: Costs and Benefits

I do not think it improbable, in view of one’s experience, that a reversal of type often proves exceedingly harmful to the physiological well-being of

Falsification and the Un-lived Life

“. . . he must, as is often the case with children, re-enact under unconscious compulsion the unlived lives of his parents.” – C.G. Jung

Falsification of Type

“As a rule, whenever such a falsication of type takes place . . . the individual becomes neurotic later, and can be cured only by

Type Dynamics

The types also play a prominent role in what C. G. Jung, the founder of Analytical Psychology, called “individuation”—the process of unifying one’s unique personality.

The importance of psychological types is not in how they characterize a person’s “persona”—the outward behavior—but in how they dynamically interact to attain a balanced unification.

This series of articles considers that types for “individuation”—the unification of unique personality. Individuation includes