Personality types: Jung's model of typology - Inner City Books

Concluding Remarks 93benefit? And how detrimentally to the individual's other possibilities?Or to the future needs of the corporation?Type tests do not show the extent to which one's type mayhave been falsified or perverted by familial and environmentalfactors; they say nothing about the way in which one's usualway of functioning may be determined by complexes; andthey do not reflect the ever-present compensating attitude ofthe unconscious. Typically, it is the persona that is takes thetest. In addition, but the person taking the test may be usingone of the secondary or auxiliary functions to answer thequestions—or indeed, responding out of the shadow or persona(see next section).Above all, type tests do not take into account the experientialreality that a person's typological preferences can changeover time.Take, for instance, a man who has acquired several academicdegrees, even a doctorate. Such a person, habituated tolong periods of solitary work using the thinking function,might very well show up on a written test as an introvertedthinking type. He may even believe himself to be one. But ishe really?Not necessarily. He may have labored for years to fulfil theexpectations of others; he may have repressed his longing forextraverted activity to the point where he himself hardlyknows it exists. Extraversion and, say, the feeling function,may be buried so deeply in his shadow that only a major lifecrisis, precipitating a nervous breakdown, would uncover it.Similarly, a woman who is apparently a feeling type, ahomemaker with an active social life, may one day discoverthe introverted world of ideas and go on to take a universitydegree. Was she a so-called false type, never given the opportunityto develop her naturally dominant thinking function?Or is thinking now simply a temporary aberration?