Comment: Freud has got to be an INTJ. It seems unlikely that an Si-dom would have invented a field as abstract, personalized, and disconnected from reality as psychoanalysis. Almost every quote on your infographic could just as easily apply to an INTJ. Freud didn’t use a data-oriented approach; he generalized from his own and his patients’ subjective experience, and then organized his intuitions into a (vaguely) logical system. Pure Ni-Te. What’s more Ni than dream interpretation? He’s treated today more like an abstract literary lens rather than a concrete scientist.
Additionally, look at his relationship to tradition. He wasn’t dominated by it – he was a great innovator who beat to his own drum, but he allowed a lot of Victorian norms to creep into his ideas about women and the Oedipus complex, which he then tried to pass off (along with the rest of his subjective interpretations) as pure fact. Speaking as an INTJ, this can be a real weakness for us. His thought is in many ways very similar to Nietzsche’s (will to power vs. libido and “desire to be great), and Nietzsche is the ultimate INTJ. Additionally, Freud had none of the hallmarks of the ISTJ, beyond a careful, methodical approach, which could describe any IJ. Nor does his thought match the thought of the ISTJ.
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Answer: We used to believe that Freud was NTJ too. That is the most ‘obvious’ typing of him. If we knew nothing about the man, but only the system that he made, we would indeed infer from that that he was NTJ.
The point of our infographic has not been to argue that Freud wasn’t INTJ, but to show his views opposite those of Jung. You are right that most of the points don’t speak for one Ni/Si preference over another with the possible exception of his extreme stability and dependability. In our experience, such an inclination is more often found in Si types than in Ni types. And also the last point shows Freud’s inclination to not leap ahead and branch out or stray from the topic, whereas Jung said specifically in his Seminar on Zarathustra that the Ni-with-Te types go “round and round amplifying” until they have formed a “complete picture” of everything that their intuition has caught ahold of.
So we agree with you that NTJ is the ‘obvious’ or ‘default’ typing. But in researching Freud, the more we read, the more convinced we become that Freud was not at all an Ni type. This page provides a good overview of our research. Characteristic of Freud is the way that he always exhibited great patience in his writings, particularly his early writings, and how he tends to move from the fact to the whole (and rarely, as Jung, from the whole to the fact). Likewise, we note how Freud’s findings are almost always contextualized (again entirely opposite Jung or Nietzsche’s free-flowing style).
As van der Hoop has said: With Freud, the focus is on the specific individual and his specific history. With Jung, the focus is on the collective history of mankind.
Freud and Data
In the comment it is claimed that Freud did not take a data-oriented approach. But in his case studies, Freud actually did use a very data-oriented approach for his time. In that sense, Adler and Jung actually represented a step back from Freud in the history of psychology as an empirical discipline. Unlike Adler and Jung, Freud would more often argue from specific facts, rather than from generalized mental associations. Posterity has since been able to raise some doubts as to the authenticity of Freud’s data in certain situations, but that doesn’t change the fact that he took great care to frame his argument in terms of facts and specifics at a time where he didn’t have to. The meticulousness and extreme attention to detail does not, in our opinion, point to him being an Ni type.
Leaving aside the fact that Freud may or may not have fabricated some of his records, the problem with Freud’s approach to data was not so much that he didn’t use data, as the comment seems to imply. The problem was rather that Freud did not make it clear to himself when he was observing raw data and when he was interpreting those data. But that was really what everyone was doing back then, so it hardly says anything about Freud’s personality.
Freud and Dream Interpretation
The comment says that dream analysis goes well with Ni. Ni does indeed sit well with dream interpretation, but again Freud’s suggested interpretations of dreams are often characterized by something very singular, such as an isolated detail, fact, or pun, that Freud then purports to be the gist of the dream. An example is given in A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis, part 2. XII.
Here Freud relates the following dream:
The dreamer’s uncle is smoking a cigarette on a Saturday. A woman caresses him as though he were her child.
Freud’s proposed interpretation of the dream then runs as follows:
- The dreamer and his uncle are Jews.
- It is impious for Jews to smoke on the Sabbath (Saturday).
- The woman must be his mother.
- The message of the dream is that it is impious for the dreamer to accept his mother’s caresses just like it is impious of his uncle to smoke on the Sabbath.
Though dream analysis naturally deals in the abstract, this interpretation is nevertheless heavily factual and contextualized in our opinion. Indeed, as Horace Gray has said of Freud’s endeavors in dream analysis, he is “selecting all the precious fragments and carefully laying them together in a way which he judges valuable” – it is fragmentary, it starts from facts and details, and then adds up to show us the greater whole.
By contrast, Jung was always convinced that the scope of dream analysis was much larger and much more narrative than Freud believed. Jung always regarded dreams in terms of metaphors and symbols.
Here is a dream that is featured in Jung’s Man and his Symbols, Dell Publishing 1964 ed., pp. 107-114:
A white monkey is standing on a pedestal. A young sailor is exposed both to the wind and to being beaten up.
An orthodox Jungian interpretation of the dream then follows:
- The dream was a hero myth.
- The white monkey represents a Trickster archetype.
- By placing it ‘on a pedestal,’ it becomes a symbol of creative experimentalism.
- The sailor is an advanced form of the Trickster, who is being changed into a socially responsible person by means of an initiation ordeal.
- The wind represents the natural elements in this process, and the beatings are those which are humanly induced.
Note here that where Freud’s interpretation moved from the individual facts and built upwards to form a whole, the Jungian interpretation moves from the whole (i.e. archetypical images) and “downwards” to the facts. When seen in opposition to Freud’s approach to dream analysis, then, we see that the Jungian approach could scarcely be more different. Indeed, as Jung had said:
“Freud’s way and mine also diverge very widely in the matter of dream interpretation. [Unlike him] I trace the origin of dreams back to age-old mythological influences, deriving from our remotest ancestors.” – Jung, in C.G. Jung Speaking, Princeton University Press 1987 ed., p. 44
More on Dream Analysis
Another way to showcase the difference between Freudian and Jungian dream analysis is to take Jung’s famous dream of the house, as related, among other places, in Ronald Hayman’s A Life of Jung, Bloomsbury 2002 ed., pp. 115-117:
A man is in a cellar and on the floor he discovers a ring. When he pulls it, he finds a staircase leading further down. At the end of the stairs is a cave cut into the rock. In the cave is scattered bones and broken pottery, and also two human skulls.
With regards to the Jungian analysis, Jung believed that the meaning of this dream was to show that below the personal unconscious (the cellar) there was an even greater unconscious, called the collective unconscious (the cave): A “million-year-old consciousness” that had accumulated every vestige and cultural form of our ancestors and which is stored as archetypical symbols at the bottom of our (collective) consciousness. So again we get the opposition of the Freudian interpretation which is particular, contextualized, and specific, and the Jungian interpretation, which is a free-flowing abstraction, and where the take-away is conceptual rather than tied to the dreamer’s immediate wishes or desires.
Innovation and Intuition
Next argument. The comment posits that Freud was an innovator. He certainly was, but whether he was really the kind of innovator that the official story tells is open to debate. As the psychologist H.J. Eysenck has documented in his book Genius, Freud was far from the first person to postulate an unconscious or to dabble in dream interpretation from a scientific point of view. In fact, his teacher Pierre Janet had written about the connection between dreams and conscious thoughts long before Freud. Likewise, Freud’s teacher, Josef Breuer had also connected certain personality disorders to patterns in dreams long before Freud.
But in pursuing this line of argument we fall into the error of mixing preference with ability, as it appears to be saying that only an N type could have thought up psychoanalysis. Equally, this line of argument also leads us to confuse mental processes (i.e. functions) with mental contents, (i.e. the specific psychic material handled by those functions). So we would prefer to stop that line of argument here and hope that especially this latter reservation answers the argument that Freud can’t be an INTJ because his thought doesn’t “match the thought [i.e. mental contents] of the ISTJ.”
Similarity with Nietzsche
Then there is the similarity with Nietzsche. In comparing Freud to Nietzsche, we should note that Freud’s relationship to Nietzsche is not at all clear and that there may be many twists and turns in Freud’s absorption of Nietzsche that we are not privy to. The theories range from Freud having had only a cursory knowledge of Nietzsche’s thought to outright plagiarism on Freud’s part.
“Freud had put Nietzsche’s playful, contradictory, and ‘dancing’ ideas before the screen of a strictly described reality, and given them an element of plausibility that they do not have in their original form. … [Freud] subjected the basic theories of [Nietzsche’s] ‘psychology’ to what amounted to experimental research.” – Steven Beller, Rethinking Vienna 1900, Berghahn Books 2001 ed., p. 166
In other words, Nietzsche leaps ahead to what he perceives to be the noumenon of the image, whereas Freud contextualizes the theories and binds them to empirical facts and personal experience.
Posterity and Personality
The comment also raises the interesting point that Freud’s thinking is mostly used in literature and art these days, much more than it is used in science. Yet to this we must say that while the public’s conception of a man’s legacy is probably accurate most of the time, probably no one would be willing to grant that the public’s understanding of a man’s legacy is correct all of the time. Take for example the political theorist Samuel Huntington, author of ‘Clash of Civilizations‘: Because of his contentious thesis (that civilizations are bound to clash and conflict rather than co-exist peacefully) people instinctively assume that he is some pugnacious, dogmatic ideologue, fixed in his doctrine, and set about his ways. But in fact, Huntington is nothing of the sort; he is amiable, laid back and really quite psychologically flexible in his approach to his admittedly inflexible thesis. Now if such a distortion of the man can happen with Huntington in a time where people can look up first-hand video interviews with him on YouTube, simply on the basis of the nature of his ideas, then what might we suppose could happen with Freud, who died in 1939, of whom no first-hand video material exists, and who purposefully took care to obscure his true self?
As for the observation that Freud is widely regarded today as a philosophically minded theoretician dealing in abstractions, that is certainly true of the generalist’s conception of Freud, and also of the Freud that we commonly meet in academic textbooks. However, when studying the work of Freud specialists, the picture of Freud that we there encounter is rather one of Freud as a “reluctant philosopher” – as a practical man with only a modest zest for philosophy. In fact, as Paul Roazen concluded after collecting a series of first-hand accounts of Freud from people who knew Freud personally:
“Despite how hardworking he was … and the importance he attached to good practical results, it is all too easy for people nowadays to think of Freud as a closet philosopher thinking up his ideas independently of concrete, practical pressures.” – Paul Roazen, How Freud Worked, Jason Aronson Books 1995 ed. p. 264
So in other words, though his theory grew to eventually encompass the whole of human nature (at least in Freud’s own eyes), his theory was, at the outset, conceived as a practical way to answer practical challenges. Unlike the Ni type, who tends to proceed from the whole to the part, Freud’s system was born out of the part and was eventually extrapolated to (attempt to) encompass the whole.
And it is exactly here, incidentally, that we find the cardinal flaw in Freud’s theory: It is too monolithic and singular to ever fit with the entire range of human experiences. In this way, again, Freud is unlike Nietzsche who would postulate a drive like the Will to Power in one place, garb it in the garments of universality, and then postulate some competing or ulterior drive a few pages later. Indeed, as one of the most important Nietzsche scholars of the 20th century has said:
“Freud’s prose was much more rational and patient than Nietzsche’s. … Nietzsche could formulate a thought as lucidly as possible but then delighted in sudden reversals, in startling us by not staying with a train of thought and asking us instead to reconsider not only our own position but also his. … Nietzsche’s wit was unruly and refused to stay in harness.” – Walter Kaufmann: Freud, Adler, and Jung, Transaction Publishers 1992 ed., p. 14
So again, if we can accept Jung’s dictum that INTJs “do not deal with things [by] elucidation” as much as they just “catch an intuition … going round and round amplifying [it], so that in the end we get a complete picture” it would seem that Nietzsche is indeed a textbook INTJ, whereas Freud is something more cautious, thorough, and methodical.
Freud and Tradition
Finally, we get the observations in the original comment that:
- Freud wasn’t dominated by tradition.
- He allowed a lot of Victorian norms to creep into his ideas.
- He tried to pass his ideas and interpretations off as pure fact.
- This can be a real weakness for INTJs.
We’ll try to answer these in tandem.
First we must nitpick a little and say that we don’t think that ISTJs are necessarily “dominated” by tradition. To our ears, such phrasings reek of that massive bias against sensation which crept into Jungian typology in the 1970s, and which is only now in the process of being rectified. This bias has become so pervasive that not even actual ISTJs can recognize themselves in the ISTJ description. Naturally we don’t know the commenter, so we can’t say anything about his or her attitude to sensation types, but it is important to us to make clear that to us, cognitive functions like Si and Ni are ways of processing psychic material and not in themselves indicative of lifestyle, ability, or the kind of theory that one comes up with. That said, we will nevertheless attempt to “tell truth by untruth”, so to speak, by pointing to how Freud’s life and work is nevertheless in accordance with usual manufactures of the Si function.
In regards to not being dominated by tradition, we must make clear was sphere of action that we are dealing with here. In terms of his professional theories, no, Freud was not dominated by tradition, yet in terms of lifestyle, Freud led a very traditional and stolid life, his aesthetic and temperament was conservative, and he was very concerned with being an authority in the home, as well as with presenting a well-dressed and well-run family to his community. So in his lifestyle he was extremely traditional and with regards to the appearance of himself and his family he was extremely fastidious. That does not preclude Freud from being INTJ, but it would be something of an anomaly in a type that represses sensation.
But that still leaves us with Freud’s theory as an ingenious and innovative theory. At CelebrityTypes we do not think that one should psychologize theories. In doing so, one too often ends up depriving the theory of its epistemological value and its sovereignty as an analytical tool, and regular readers will hopefully have noticed that we usually avoid psychologizing the theories that we deal with on the site. However, if we make an exception here, how may we relate Freud’s theory to the typical propensities of the Si function?
First, it is well-known how Freud found that he was attracted to his own mother and that he wanted to oust his father to have her for himself. Next, he was also very disappointed with father’s lack of strength. In his youth his heroes had not been philosophers, but rather military men and administrators; conquerors like Oliver Cromwell and the Spanish conquistadors. By Freud’s own account, witnessing his father’s humiliation in public at the hands of anti-Semitic Austrians, Freud felt a keen sense of personal injury and he vowed to redeem the injury by becoming powerful himself. And finally, as we know from Henry A. Murray who knew Freud personally, Freud’s marriage was probably a sexless one. In Murray’s opinion had this not been so, “Freud would not have needed to make so much of” sex in his theories.
What these examples serve to show is that all of the main elements of Freud’s theories – from the Oedipus complex, to the power drive, and to the ubiquity of sex – had their wellspring in concrete, personal experience on Freud’s part. Indeed, as Roazen would later reflect:
“Inevitably Freud tended to universalize insights that were in fact personal. All of psychoanalytic theory can be seen as Freud’s autobiography writ large.” – Paul Roazen, How Freud Worked, Jason Aronson Books 1995 ed. p. 267
Thus, if we agree with van der Hoop that Si types are guided by the subjective impression released in them by the outer world (i.e. from personally experienced sensations) whereas Ni types are guided by mental inspiration (i.e. a perceived insight into the archetypical significance of the whole of the experience), then Freud would clearly be more of an Si type.
Passing Theory off as Fact
Yet we have still to deal with the commentator’s last two points: Freud tried to pass his ideas off as pure fact and this can be a real weakness for INTJs.
To this we would say that while it’s true that Ni types can have a tendency to pass of their ideas as facts, this applies to both Si and Ni types. As Jung says of these functions, Si and Ni, being the two introverted perception functions, are “based predominantly on the subjective component of perception”, meaning that both ISJ and INJ types are susceptible to pass off their own inner perceptions as facts in the outer world (for their extroverted perception is invariably inferior).
On the whole of it, however, the tendency to pass off one’s own perceptions as facts with regards to grand theorizing is more often seen with INJ types than with ISJ types, because Ni types, with their inferior Se, tend to be terribly immoderate whereas Si types, with their inferior Ne, tend to be more cautious and thorough in their approach.
However, strictly speaking, Jungian typology only informs us that an introverted perception type is wont to consider his own internal perceptions to be more real than those that stem directly from the outer world. It says nothing about his tenacity and combativeness in promoting and defending those theories. Strictly speaking, those properties tend to correlate with the narcissistic personality, and while the INTJ is perhaps the type that is most strongly linked to the narcissistic personality, any type can have narcissistic traits.
Conclusion
So in closing, we agree that Freud was a “black swan”, if you will, and that if we tried to reverse-engineer Freud’s type on the basis of his accomplishments while disregarding his personality, it would be more likely that the inventor of an introspective discipline like psychoanalysis would have been an introspective (N) type himself – a “white swan” so to speak. We will return to the theme of black swans in typology in a later article.
Finally, if you are interested in exploring our assessment of Freud as a non-Ni type, consider reading the Sigmund Freud / Lou Salome letters. The letters are not exactly exciting, but they showcase the temperamental difference between the sure and cautious approach and that prophetic propensity which so ominously strives to be the herald a greater whole.
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That’s all for now. We understand that our typing of Freud as an ISTJ is an original one (in fact, our typing of Freud as ISTJ appears to be the only one) and that not all readers will be convinced by these arguments. Unconvinced readers are welcome to share their thoughts in the comments.
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Update: See also Why Freud is ISTJ, Part 2.