Type, Archetype, Culture, & the Self

The Fractious Formational Forces of Individuality

Unity eludes. The self does not refer to a singularity, but a multiplicity. My body evolved over billions of years of complexification: cells coming together, groups of cells coming together, groups of groups coming together, and so forth at dizzying scale in duration beyond our temporal comprehension, and continuing as we speak.

The mind, which is an overlay of central awareness deriving from a communication network that permeates the physical body, and which is thus inseparable from the body, likewise emerges from the fusion of multitudinous strata of sensory data-gathering sources and data-processing mechanisms.

Our title terms (type, archetype, culture, and self) tend to be used loosely and interchangeably, and require more specific definition and understanding.

In our running series about psychological type, we have been examining patterns of bias and error preference. The collection of all of these patterns of bias across several spectra compile into what people would colloquially refer to as “personality types,” and find their way into sorting systems such as MBTI, the Big Five, and others in various combinations.

Archetype, by contrast, represents the outward expression of mimetic aspiration by a type.

King, Crone, Mother, Warrior, Trickster, and countless hundreds or even thousands of other archetypes reside in the collective unconscious, according to Jung. Importantly, there is no necessary correlation between type and archetype.

Think of two chefs given the same set of ingredients. They are told that they do not have to use all of the ingredients, but they do not get to have any more. The two dishes that come out could be so different that, at first glance, they are completely unrecognizable as being the result of the same ingredients.

Type is like the ingredients, and archetype is like the dish. A particular type (composite bias pattern) may combine with an archetype (psychological image) to produce a differently-tinted manifestation of that archetype. For example, an individual with a sadistic social bias pattern may attempt to embody the archetype of the King, and produce The Tyrant.

Take the tyrant from Germany and have him born in Brazil instead, and there will be yet a different manifestation. Give him different parents, religion, socioeconomic class, childhood friends, teachers, summer vacations, etc. etc. and the result will be yet more diverse.

This is how 16 or 32 typical patterns of bias can produce truly infinite diversity between individuals.

As Emerson says, “God does not deign to repeat himself.”

Progressing from looking at particular biases in isolation toward examining composite patterns of behavior, and then learning how to identify them in others, we must prime ourselves with the understanding of the broader context that forms individual selves, or else we will be perpetually falling short in our assessments.

Any psychological typing system that uses exhaustive or exclusive language is almost a guarantee that it will lead you astray. For example, one should be skeptical of any claim that such and such a type would never do x, or would always do y.

Bias patterns are probabilistic, not deterministic. Even adding archetypal patterns, cultural patterns, familial patterns does not get us to a deterministic model, but merely alters the probabilities.

If a person presents as quiet and unassuming, for example, you might be quick to assert they must be an introvert, but if you have not considered their culture, religion, language, and other factors, you may have misjudged the situation.

I have spent the bulk of my adult life living in Latin cultures, both in the Americas and Europe, and after those places, I have spent the next most amount of time in Eastern Europe and the Baltic countries. To the uninitiated, it would be easy to confuse a Brazilian introvert with an Estonian extrovert. Likewise, a spatially-oriented German may still be more “on time” than a temporally-oriented Argentinian.

Archetype, culture, and personal context can balance or exacerbate typical patterns of bias. For most people, some selection of their bias patterns will be balanced by mimetic influences, while others will be exacerbated by it. Only a few individuals in any given culture will find themselves wholly in-sync with their context, or wholly at-odds with it. They do exist, of course, but represent the extreme ends of the spectrum. Beyond patterns, we must also make room for what in physical biology would be described as mutations. Depending on varieties of complex factors that cannot always be accurately traced or explained, individuals just come out different.

We may have been born with some of these differences that separate us from other people of similar type, or they may have been developed along the way through unique life experiences and reactions to them.

For example, my typical patterns would push me toward a more disembodied life of the mind, curious and detached, prone to over-intellectualizing and excessive abstraction. But I happened to be born and raised on a blueberry farm in the Ozarks with a hunter-fisherman-outdoorsman father. From a young age I was driving tractors, using farm equipment, shooting guns, practicing archery, and generally getting my hands dirty.

Much of it was, especially at first, a nauseating experience for me. I had a weak stomach as a child, always gagging at everything. As torture, my younger brother would squash juicy grasshoppers in front of me, just to watch me gag. The first time I had to gut a deer after shooting it, it was all gagging, beginning to end.

A good friend and former student of mine has described me as having a relatively unique combination of exceedingly high disgust response and extreme openness to experience. My rural upbringing and natural curiosity pushed me to explore and use my capacity for abstraction in the midst of embodied experience, rather than detached from it.

Had my parents been university professors, I cannot imagine that I would have spent my college summers doing wilderness backpacking in Alaska.

Similarly, I grew up in a conservative evangelical cultural context that caused me to delay many experiences of life (alcohol & drugs, dating & sexuality) until much later than most people first encountered them. This gives me a different perspective on much of life, consequentially.

Because of these differences, I have learned over time not to project too much of my own behavioral peculiarity onto my assumptions about other people who are the same personality type as I am. You will read in subsequent essays that the nickname I have given to part of my psychological type is “the Heartless Bastard” (Temporal + Objective). When I meet other Heartless Bastards, I have to be careful to not make too many assumptions about them, by projecting myself onto the whole type.

Indeed, if I do not want to find myself in error, I have to wear the robes of extreme epistemic humility — and so I ask myself constantly “is this a Heartless Bastard trait, or just a Skinner trait?” Similarly, I have to be aware that I have the tendency to project all of my primal examples of type onto everybody else of those same types. My mother is a Spineless Panderer (Temporal + Subjective), my father is a Smug Asshole (Spatial + Objective), and my brother is a Narcissistic Prima Donna (Spatial + Subjective). While they possess the usual representative traits of their type, all of their traits are not typical traits.

This will prove true for everybody who delves into this body of knowledge. You will have to fight yourself to avoid erroneous projection. As you come to have an embodied understanding of your own patterns, and those of others, you may even have to fight the urge to hold a grudge against one or more other types in general because of conflicts and injuries caused by a particular specimen of that type.

To reinforce our understanding of this necessity to look twice, let us examine dogs. Dogs are all the same species, Canis lupus familiaris, and yet there are more than 330 recognized distinct breeds of dog in the world. If you were an alien from another planet and knew nothing of dogs, and were presented with both a Chihuahua and a St Bernard, it is unlikely that you would intuit that they were the same species of animal.

Even within the same breed, we can find wide-ranging diversity of phenotypic expression. The Great Dane has seven distinct coat colors/patterns, and sometimes they appear in combination.

Human psychological types are even more diverse than this, and we must constantly be on the lookout for the subtleties that point us toward the clearest picture of what makes a person tick.

If you ever hear somebody talking about personality types in a familiar system (MBTI, for example), you should be skeptical of lines of inquiry such as “what is a good job for an ENFP?” or “what type should I hire for this marketing job?”

Instead, you should learn to ask questions like “how would a Heartless Bastard function in this managerial role compared to a Spineless Panderer?” or “how would a team of mostly Narcissistic Prima Donnas respond to a Smug Asshole supervisor?”

There is no type more or less fit for any job, inherently.

There is no type that is more or less fit for a relationship with another type, inherently.

Rather than reducing individuals to the bias patterns of their type, we should think of it in the reverse: “how can I more quickly build an accurate map of an individual by identifying their type and establishing a baseline against which I can test other hypotheses and adjust my expectations and assessments as a result?” Not only is this the more humane and empathetic approach, it is also the more accurate one —

There is no such thing as a context-free individual.