Excerpted and adapted from John Giannini's forthcoming book Compass of the Soul, published by the Center for the Application of Psychological Type (CAPT).

Copyright © 2000 by John Giannini. All rights reserved. Used by permission of the author.

In the foregoing descriptions I have no desire to give my readers the impression that these types occur at all frequently in such pure form in actual life. They are, as it were, only Galtonesque [read simplistic] family portraits.... Closer investigation shows with great regularity that, besides the most differentiated function, another, less differentiated function of secondary importance is invariably present in consciousness and exerts a co-determining influence (my italics).

In 1962, Myers picked up these ideas and developed a phenomenology of the four couplings in this order: ST, SF, NF, and NT in her little brown book, Introduction to Type and in her Manual. She expanded on her ideas in her 1980 book, Gifts Differing. In effect, she was describing archetypal structures. Her sixteen types are based on combinations of the attitudes introversion and extroversion and the functions of thinking, feeling, sensation and intuition.

My book expands on these couplings as archetypes, and in fact argues that Jung intended all the types to be understood as archetypes as evidenced by his type mandala and by his occasional reference to individual types as archetypes. However, he never systematically developed this idea. In the figure below, the type mandala (or compass as Jung also called it) appears as he pictured it for the first time in his 1925 Seminar Notes:

The Four Traditional Adult Archetypes (Moore & Gilette) with the Life Journey

First Stage of Life

Proceeding clockwise, this diagram also depicts the journey of life, from the standpoint of typology. Birth begins at the place of F, Feeling and continues in Sensate Feeling (SF) the Parental quadrant. The SF quadrant depicts an ideal home environment in which a holding maternal containment includes the necessary practical needs (S) and the necessary caring and warmth (F). Actual family pathologies, of course, alter this ideal structure. Yet, since all the types originate in the Self, this structure remains the archetypal base for future healing.

The next coupling of types in the cycle is the Sensate - Thinking or ST. In this quadrant, the person learns to work, first at home and then at school, college and in the job world. In this archetypal quadrant we learn to function pragmatically, to plan and finish a task in the large human behavior we call work. The first archetypal name given this ST coupling was "Structural," that part of us that makes maps, outlines tasks and becomes a Warrior. You may recognize this latter as one of the traditional archetypes that Toni Wolff developed as feminine patterns and which Robert Moore and Douglas Gillette expanded in their book King, Warrior, Magician, Lover. Moore concurs with this idea, though he was not giving any thought to types when he did his work. No matter what our personal typology may be, we move through these two quadrants, the SF and the ST, in the first stage of life and hopefully realize their archetypal demands.

There is still another dimension of types: understanding cultural typology. Jung explained that our Judaic-Christian and Greek-Roman culture has become quite EST. In my view, our culture is so dominantly ESTJ -- extroverted, sensation, thinking, judging -- that it now represents a cultural pathology. We must keep this masculine/patriarchal type overlay in mind in our work with each other. I will demonstrate its impact on our lives and our dreams.

I know now that Jung was very much influenced by this cultural type overlay, in general because of the powerful overall influence of the culture and specifically because of Freud's seeking to tailor his psychology to the culture's ESTJ outlook. In Jung's l925 Seminar, he discusses his early belief that he was a dominant thinking type and at the same time was suppressing his natural introverted intuitive genius. In his fantasy work, the prophet Elijah scolds him for ignoring his intuitive gifts. Try rereading Memories, Dreams, Reflections with an eye for the influence of cultural typology on Jung's early and middle age dreams.

I, too, was deeply shaped by our ESTJ culture and familial childhood issues. In l956, I began work with my first analyst, Victor White. This was my presenting dream:

I go into the House of Studies (the Dominican name for our monastery), walk into its office, and pull open a file with the intention of filing a senior brother's papers. Instead, I see a series of valentines popping up, one of which features a great red heart beautifully designed and painted. I am deeply moved by it. Suddenly the brother comes in with more papers and is angry that I am not doing his work.

Cultural overlay influences our first stage of life development, our mid-life crises, and our second stage of life.

ST types will negotiate the first stage of life quite well, especially those who are ESTJs. NFs, especially INFPs, will struggle with this stage of life. One dreamt that in order to awaken her very extraverted SF mother from death, she would have to be her servant (and the servant of all of her sibs and others) for life. She began to feel a shift when she dreamt that her introverted SF father and the mother divorced, so that she could think: "Now I and my father will be free."

Some of you, incidentally, might want to check out Jung's description of the two stages of life in his essay "The Stages of Life" from The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche (Collected Works, Vol. 8, paragraphs 749-795) and look there for implict type indicators. We will consider his article on the stages in our work together.

Here is another dream from a minister that touches on the cultural type issue:

I am in a church building. The ground is dirt. I am standing with my mother. My father is on the top of a high dirt mound, holding a shotgun and threatening me if I dare move in my own right.

Second Stage of Life

The second stage of life is made up of the NT and NF quadrants. A very few people move easily through a relatively mild midlife crisis and enter into the philosophical systems that begin to intrigue them in this stage. For example, an NT Magician is an inner knower. Even on an intellectual level, at midlife, we begin to look at the big picture in a somewhat introverted way, particularly if endowed with the creative inwardness of intuition. Such people will dream large visions typifying the Self, such as a mandala, a symbol typical of the Ethereal NT makeup.

I know little of what happens to STs in the second stage of life. They seldom show up in therapy, in Jungian workshops, and are rare in the Association of Psychological Type circles. Like the arrogant ST Phil Conners, played by Bill Murray in the movie Ground Hog Day, they have to suffer many psychic deaths and rebirths. They have a devil of a time finding a humanistic NF depth with which to embrace their instincts (the groundhog) and their emotions (Rita, played by Andie MacDowell).

At midlife, an ESTJ type dreamt that he was on the second floor of a restaurant and bar and knew that he would have to go to the first floor to listen to some music (the place of creative breakthroughs). Most of us take similar plunges into the NF Lover and Oceanic place, in experiences and dreams in which we experience its powerful feelings and images. This is the same process Jung entered after his break with Freud.

It is no accident that we experience the NF Oceanic quadrant in dreams in which we fall into watery places, or find ourselves underwater. One man, an INTP, was trying in a dream to get to the woman who had suddenly rejected him in waking life. He was racing across a high bridge that traversed a deep canyon and river. Suddenly there was no bridge, and he found himself plunging into the depth, with his mother at his side. This was a man who had never acknowledged his NF Lover, his relational place, not in a previous marriage nor with his four daughters. He had serious work to do with his mother, a very controlling lady, typology unknown.

For most of us, it takes this kind of falling or oceanic experience before we can ascend eventually to the NT place and systematically construct a new philosophical or theological understanding of life and of ourselves in that global picture. All along, we need to be reminded, we encounter resistances from childhood hurts by parents and sibs as well as by early defenses, now needing to be removed, like the ones described by Donald Kalsched in his The Inner World of Trauma. Our resistances and defenses often have an ESTJ structure.

• C.G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections. New York: Vintage Books, 1965.
• C.G. Jung, Psychological Types. A revision by R.F.C. Hull of the translation by H. G. Baynes. Bollingen Series XX. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1971. [Collected Works, Vol. 6, paragraph 666].
• C.G. Jung, The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche, 2nd edition. Translated by R.F.C. Hull. Bollingen Series XX. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1969. [Collected Works, Vol. 8, paragraphs 749-795].
• Donald Kalsched, The Inner World of Trauma: Archetypal Defenses of the Personal Spirit. New York: Routledge, 1996.
• Robert Moore and Douglas Gillette, King, Warrior, Magician, Lover: Rediscovering the Archetypes of the Mature Masculine. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1990.
• Isabel Briggs Myers, Introduction to Type (revised edition). Palo Alto, CA: Consulting Psychologists Press, 1976.
• Isabel Briggs Myers, The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. Palo Alto, CA: Consulting Psychologists Press, 1962.
• Isabel Briggs Myers, with Peter B. Myers, Gifts Differing: Understanding Personality Type. Palo Alto, CA: Consulting Psychologists Press, 1980.