If you've arrived here without having taken the Thomson-Maidenbaum Personality Inventory (TMPI), you might want to click on the above link, answer a few questions, and come back with your results. This page will probably make more sense if you do.

If you simply want a type profile that tells you what your test results mean, hover your mouse over the box to the right that matches your scores. If you want a quick idea of what the letters mean, scroll down further to the charts below the boxes.

If you already know something about type, it should be clear, from the way this page is set up, that I haven't attempted to re-invent the wheel. The TMPI has been well-verified over the years, but it's no more than an informal way to gauge your psychological orientation—that is, it will tell you something about how you approach life; how you understand your options.

By virtue of the MBTI® (The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator), the 16 types represented here have become standard in the field. Each is a combination of four letters, standing for one of four opposing terms:

  • Introversion versus Extraversion
  • Sensation versus INtuition
  • Thinking versus Feeling
  • Judging versus Perceiving

The reason I titled this section "opinionated" is that, although I've retained the standard MBTI® vocabulary, I believe that current type theory has become conflated with temperament theory and has little in common with the Jungian model from which it was derived (Psychological Types [Bollingen Series XX, Volume 6, Princeton University Press, 1971, 1976]).

The four basic orientations that Jung specified are, indeed, Sensation, Intuition, Feeling, and Thinking. However, Jung didn't define them as skills, and he didn't argue that people are disposed by core needs to develop some better than others. What he said was that most people have no strong innate preferences, and that we generally develop an approach to life that ensures some measure of success in matters of work and love.

As far as I'm concerned, the four orientations are the basic minimum of what it means to be cognitively human. As Jung put it, we know that something exists (Sensation), we know what it is (Thinking), we know what its value is (Feeling), and we know what it means (Intuition).

Adaptation to the tasks of life requires all four, but those tasks are not always compatible with each other. In order to get along in the world, we need to manage our relationships, become socialized to the assumptions of a particular time and place, and compete for status in our chosen arena. So our sense of who we are becomes modified, over time, not just by disposition and skill, but by experience and perceived options for relationship, work, and creative expression.

In fact, Jung said quite directly that he wasn't interested in people's affective determinants—what they do that lies outside their control; but in people's sense of identity as established by free-will decisions—what people do when they have to choose between two incompatible paths of action.

When Jung talked about developing one's strongest function, he deliberately used the word "differentiation," a term that he borrowed from developmental biology. All cells start out as a fertilized egg, and by differentiation, they become specialized into one of the many cells that make up the different parts of the body—heart, lungs, liver, skin, and so forth. In this way, cells are said to acquire a "type," even though the basic genetic material remains the same. In the course of differentiation, some genes are switched on, while others are switched off. As a result, a differentiated cell will develop specific structures and perform certain functions.

The terms themselves suggest, therefore, that a psychological type is derived from the same innate potential as every other psychological type. But by way of differentiation, each of us willfully narrows our functional potential so as to support different goals and talents in a specific environment. A type, in other words, has become oriented to his environment in a way that permits him to enjoy and contribute to it.

Although differentiation usually occurs in light of one's perceived skills, the type functions don't supply those skills. They're simply orientations, our means of developing psychological structures that will support our sense of identity and our goals. One's strongest function may be either Rational (Thinking or Feeling) or Irrational (Sensation or Intuition). And, as this function comes under control of the will, it is also adapted to a person's preferred attitude—Extraverted or Introverted.

Jung understood the dominant function to set the goals for the conscious personality, whereas the less-preferred functions operate at varied levels of conscious awareness, offering views in the opposing attitude. For example, if the dominant function is Extraverted Feeling, then Thinking, Sensation, and Intuition will compensate Extraverted Feeling goals in Introverted terms.

When Katharine Briggs and her daughter, Isabel Briggs Myers, combined Jung's ideas with their own temperament-oriented model, which is now operationalized in the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI®), they created a different kind of system. One reason this happened was the emphasis they placed on what Jung called the auxiliary function. Among a type's non-preferred functions, the auxiliary is closest to consciousness; so its compensatory potential is directly accessible to the type.

An Extraverted Feeling type, for example, as an Extraverted Rational, has a good deal of conscious access to an auxiliary function that is both Introverted and Irrational ((Introverted Sensation or Introverted Intuition). This dominant/auxiliary combination is what keeps a type from becoming too one-sided.

Myers and Briggs emphasized the auxiliary because they believed that an Introverted type would have to depend on his auxiliary Extraverted function to interact with the outer world. And given this assumption, their instrument needed to determine which function was dominant and which was auxliary. For example, INF results on the instrument could mean either an Introverted Feeling type or an Introverted Intuitive.

To this end, Myers and Briggs established a category of measurement implicit in Jung's system, in that he'd understood the Rational functions to Judge and the Irrational functions to Perceive. Thus, a J result would mean that the type was using Thinking or Feeling to interact with the outer world. A P result would mean that the type was using Sensation or Intuition to interact with the outer world.

By this logic, an Extraverted Feeling type with auxiliary Introverted Intuition is an ENFJ. The J tells you that this person is using his Feeling function in an Extraverted way, to deal with the outer world. And the E tells you that this is the person's dominant function.

With an INFJ, the J also tells you that Feeling is being used in an Extraverted way. However, the I tells you that Extraverted Feeling is the type's auxiliary. An INFJ is understood as an Introverted Intuitive who is using auxiliary Extraverted Feeling to deal with the outer world.

The problem with the J/P solution, of course, is that it eclipses Jung's Rational/Irrational distinction, implying that J types are Rationals (orderly, goal-oriented, focused on predictability) and that P types are Irrationals (adaptable, immediate, focused on new information). In Jung's system, however, an INFJ is an Irrational type, because the dominant function is Intuition. An ISFP, by contrast, is a Rational type, because the dominant function is Feeling.

Moreover, there is nothing in Jung's writings to even suggest that Introverted types depend on their Extraverted auxiliary to interact with the outer world. Introversion doesn't mean shy or turned away from the outer world. It means being psychologically oriented, placing emphasis on how an event is experienced and understood rather than on the event itself. If Introverts were really dealing with the outer world with skills not entirely under control of the will, evolution would have wiped out this orientation when we were still hunting in tribes on the old savannah.

That being said, the 16 MBTI® types have become standard in the field, along with the general idea that preference is innately predisposed. My own opinion is that this confuses type with temperament, and they are not at all the same. So although I'm not about to fight city hall, and my own little test conforms with the MBTI® model, I think the results can be interpreted in a way that avoids this confusion.

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