Describe and evaluate Carl Jung’s theory concerning personality types and show how it might usefully help a therapist to determine the clients therapeutic goals?
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Word count 2247
Personality can be described as the individual’s characteristic patterns of thought emotion and behaviour together with psychological mechanisms-hidden or not behind those patterns. The influence of both genetics and heredity factors alongside upbringing, culture and experience are recognised as influencing an individual’s personality. Within the counselling arena the client’s unique personality will influence their movement and path to finding solutions to issues and problems they bring. This essay will be evaluating Carl Jung’s type theory of
One criticism of Jung’s theory of personality types is that it compartmentalised personality and tended to put a person in an either/or a particular type rather than being able to be positioned along a point between two opposing types such as ‘thinking’ and ‘feeling’. Hans Eysenck applied a different approach to the understanding of personality types. Having given a long list of adjectives to many thousands of people he applied a specialised statistical procedure known as factor analysis to his collected data, which resulted in the Eysenck’s Personality Questionnaire( EPQ) The resulting scores from a persons completed questionnaire enabled Eysenck to place an individual anywhere along a trait dimension. Similar to Jung, Eysenck’s first trait dimension was that of extroversion – introversion on which a high score indicated extroversion and a low score introversion. Applying the same formula Eysenck then went on and identified two other significant dimensions, the first being that of neuroticism versus emotional stability. Individuals scoring high on the neuroticism dimension tended to be of a nervous disposition whilst low scorers presented emotional stability. The second dimension he identified was that of psychoticism.High psychotic scorers may not necessarily show signs of psychoticiscm but they had agreater potential to devlop mental disorders than those with lower scores. When comparing Jung’s and Eysenck’s