Talk:Psychological Types

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[edit] Possibly Misleading to The Average Reader

Although this article is about Jung's book specifically, it may be helpful to include a note that the science of personality psychology did not formally exist at the time the book was published and has since rejected most of his ideas. I think that is what the last line of this article was going for, but by including myers-briggs the point may be lost. Whereas Jungian based personality sorters are used in human relations departments, education, and popular culture, they are typically dismissed within the discipline of personality psychology because they are not based on any experimental process. Myers-Briggs, Keisey (Please Understand Me), and the recent True Colors personality sorters all fall within this group. It is the case however that some professionals working within counseling in it's various forms (Ph.d Clinical or Counseling Psychologist, to M.S level Social Worker) claim to find these sorters or the conceptualization behind them helpful in working with clients. This may be because a great deal of counseling theory, unlike most of modern psychological science, is based upon or influenced by Freudian ideas.

I think there is a common misconception that psychology as a science is synonymous with counseling or clinical psychology as a practice. They are not. Even within each discipline of psychological science (Personality, Social, Developmental, Emotion, Clinical, ect) there are differing value systems, conceptual linages, literature; and they do not always even have much regard for the validity of each other's contribution. And like most sciences the greatest divide is between those who research and those who practice (although this is IMO, as a counseling psychology Ph.D. candidate who does research with a developmental psychologist, silly). This is why, I believe that it is unfairly misleading to the average reader not to have at least some note that this is not considered "real psychology" by current practitioners of the science. If they were to include these ideas in the wrong a paper or dinner conversation without this knowledge, they may find themselves disregarded or worse embarrassed or with a poor grade.

Hypatia360 18:32, 28 February 2007 (UTC)

The title of this article is misleading. There are many systems of psychological types. The Jungian Myers-Briggs types have been ballyhooed to the point where references to this single (rather unscientific) typology have swamped references to various other interesting typological systems, including the ancient "planetary"/temperamental types from which were derived words like "mercurial," "martial," "jovial," etc., Sheldon's somatotypes, David Shapiro's "neurotic styles," etc. This would be all right as a subsection of the Jung article but there should be a more general article on psychological types and the search string "psychological types" should return a pointer to that article, not this one, as the first hit. Kevin Langdon 17:54, 28 July 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Merging and combining articles

The articles on typology are pretty thoroughly confused, and need to be straightened out. Personality type leads one place, Psychological type and Psychological Types lead to another, and Psychological types leads back to Personality type. God knows what other confusions exist. Somebody with a lot of Wikipedia skills and a bit of personality type knowledge needs to work on this. How can that be brought about? Lou Sander 19:27, 14 November 2007 (UTC)

This article is about a book. I've moved the things that are not about the book into the "See also" category, and have added a few articles there. Wikipedia is still lacking a good overall article on the various theories of personality type. Lou Sander (talk) 12:08, 30 May 2008 (UTC)