this post was submitted on 02 Jul 2024
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Opinion on Carl Jung? (lemmygrad.ml)
submitted 4 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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All I remember is he comes after Freud, some of his followers are annoying, there’s a Marxist podcast that likes him called ‘the return of the repressed,’ and I don’t think Lukacs liked him.

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 4 months ago (2 children)

MBTI makes the fundamental assumption that each personality axis is bimodal, and pushes people to one side or the other. Actual research shows that people tend towards the center.

The whole test is pseudoscience made by non-psychologists and propped up by "research" from organisations that profit from the test.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 4 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 0 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

A number of common critiques of Jungian typology and the MBTI are often voiced in no uncertain terms by people who have comparatively little knowledge about these fields.

Notably, the authors don't give their own qualifications.

In terms of empirical evidence, types don’t exist. Human traits are distributed on a bell curve, not as two camel humps.

True.

People who take the MBTI multiple times often come out as different types (Low Test-Retest Reliability).

True.

MBTI descriptions contain vague and flattering statements that anyone would agree to (Forer Effect).

True.

wow.

However, as we will discuss below, the MBTI is not an end in itself. It is an attempt to quantify C.G. Jung’s cognitive theory empirically. And as most people who have grappled with Jung’s theory will readily attest, his concepts are by no means as straightforward as the Big Five’s ideas that someone who delivers his work on time is ‘conscientious’ and someone who talks a lot is an extrovert. Jung’s concepts of the cognitive functions are not only staggeringly complex, they also stand in a dialectical relationship to each other where they alternatively imply, negate, and complement each other.

In other words, the complexity that goes into the definition of Jung’s cognitive functions is well beyond what we are currently able to prove or disprove empirically. Since Jung’s cognitive theories were not laid out in a format suited to empirical analysis, the advocates of Jung’s ideas can always claim that the fault lies not with the concepts but with the process of translating and interpreting the concepts into a format that will suit empirical testing.

Saying that the theoretical basis of MBTI is beyond empirical analysis doesn't help their case.

You'll probably get just as much out of this test from the same site: https://www.idrlabs.com/pusheen/test.php

Why Use This Test?

  1. Free. This test is provided to you free of charge and allows you to obtain your scores related to the characters from the Pusheen universe.

  2. Statistical controls. Test scores are logged into an anonymized database. Statistical analysis of the test is conducted to ensure maximum accuracy and validity of the test scores.

  3. Made by professionals. The present test has been made with the input of people who work professionally in psychology and individual differences research.

It's made by professionals!

[–] [email protected] 0 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Tbh I just linked it because they agree with what you said about the bell curve.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 4 months ago

Sorry, I was definitely overly aggressive.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 4 months ago

That's fair. I don't pretend it is "scientific." Where I've seen value in it, in practice, is as a framework (like a lens through which to think about thinking), not an empirical description of reality. I'm just not sure if the potential benefit outweighs the harm it can cause. Now I'm reflecting on it more, the notion of tension in the psyche between the dominant and inferior function might be the most salvageable part of the theory, on the fact that it's looking at contradiction and tension between opposites that is never fully resolved. Not unlike dialectics, in spirit, even if the rest of it is a bit iffy. I could maybe see value in examining the psyche as tension between contradictions, where instead of viewing the "cognitive functions" as static preferences that stay dominant and inferior throughout life, there are primary contradictions and secondary contradictions that can shift and change as you develop as a person. This is closer to one alternative take on the theory, which views the cognitive functions more as something you flow between rather than as static preferences.

But in practice, it would still probably be more useful to ground such a view of contradictions in the details of a person's life and upbringing and so on, rather than through a generic lens of preferences like Intuition or Sensing.