• Carl Jung wrote of archetypes—those symbols, myths, and concepts that appear to be inborn and shared by members of a civilization, transcending and not depending on words for communication and recognition. Different cultures may have different forms of their archetypes, but the concepts are universal.

• One means of perception is the familiar process of sensing, by which we become aware of things directly through our five senses. The other is the process of intuition, which is indirect perception by way of the unconscious, incorporating ideas or associations that the unconscious tacks on to perceptions coming from outside.

• Those people who prefer intuition are so engrossed in pursuing the possibilities it presents that they seldom look very intently at the actualities. For instance, readers who prefer sensing will tend to confine their attention to what is said here on the page. Readers who prefer intuition are likely to read between and beyond the lines to the possibilities that come to mind.

• The child who prefers feeling becomes more adult in the handling of human relationships. The child who prefers thinking grows more adept in the organization of facts and ideas. Their basic preference for the personal or the impersonal approach to life results in distinguishing surface traits. This is the TF preference: T for thinking and F for feeling.

• In consequence, their personalities tend to be practical and matter-of-fact, and their best chances of success and satisfaction lie in fields that demand impersonal analysis of concrete facts, such as economics, law, surgery, business, accounting, production, and the handling of machines and materials.

• The introvert’s main interests are in the inner world of concepts and ideas, while the extravert is more involved with the outer world of people and things. Therefore, when circumstances permit, the introvert concentrates perception and judgment upon ideas, while the extravert likes to focus them on the outside environment.

• There is a fundamental opposition between the two attitudes. In order to come to a conclusion, people use the judging attitude and have to shut off perception for the time being. All the evidence is in, and anything more is irrelevant and immaterial. The time has come to arrive at a verdict. Conversely, in the perceptive attitude people shut off judgment. Not all the evidence is in; new developments will occur. It is much too soon to do anything irrevocable.

• The success of introverts’ contacts with the outer world depends on the effectiveness of their auxiliary. If their auxiliary process is not adequately developed, their outer lives will be very awkward, accidental, and uncomfortable. Thus there is a more obvious penalty upon introverts who fail to develop a useful auxiliary than upon the extraverts with a like deficiency.

• This is a regrettable mistake. It leads not only to an underestimation of the introvert’s abilities but also to an incomplete understanding of his wishes, plans, and point of view. The only source for such inside information is the General.

• A cardinal precaution in dealing with introverts, therefore, is not to assume, just from ordinary contact, that they have revealed what really matters to them. Whenever there is a decision to be made that involves introverts, they should be told about it as fully as possible. If the matter is important to them, the General will come out of the tent and reveal a number of new things, and the ultimate decision will have a better chance of being right.

• The ablest introverts achieve a fine facility at extraversion, but never try to be extraverts. Through good development of an auxiliary process, they have learned to deal competently with the outer world without pledging any allegiance to it.

• Whereas extraverts tend to broaden the sphere of their work, to present their products early (and often) to the world, to make themselves known to a wide circle, and to multiply relationships and activities, the introvert takes the opposite approach. Going more deeply into their work, introverts are reluctant to call it finished and publish it, and when they do, they tend to give only their conclusions, without the details of what they did.

• Another useful aspect of the detachment characteristic of introverts is that they are little affected by the absence of encouragement. If they believe in what they are doing, they can work happily for a long time without reassurance, as pioneers usually must. Such behavior does not make sense to most extraverts.

• Typical weakness lies in a tendency toward impracticality, very conspicuous in extreme types.

• ANYONE PREFERRING SENSING to intuition is interested primarily in actualities; anyone preferring intuition to sensing is mainly interested in possibilities.

• Thus the innovator, the pioneer in thought or action, is likely to be an intuitive. In the early days of colonial America, the appeal of the New World’s possibilities were probably felt so much more strongly by intuitives than by sensing types that it introduced a potent factor of selection.

• The proportion of intuitives varies widely from one educational level to another. It is particularly low among students in vocational and general high school courses, and at least twice as high in academic high school classes, and still higher in college, especially in very selective colleges.

• The sensing child’s native language is the reality spoken by the senses. The intuitive’s native language is the word, the metaphor, the symbol, spoken by the unconscious.

• Sensing types are sound and accurate and enjoy exactitude, so they make fine accountants, payroll administrators, navigators, and statisticians.

• Whereas the intuitive children like to learn by insight, the sensing children prefer to learn by familiarization.

• Are by nature initiators, inventors, and promoters; having no taste for life as it is, and small capacity for living as it is, and small capacity for living in and enjoying the present, they are generally restless.

• Contribute to the public welfare by their inventiveness, initiative, enterprise, and powers of inspired leadership in every direction of human interest.

• Jolande Jacobi (1968) says that thinking evaluates from the viewpoint “true–false” and feeling from the viewpoint “agreeable–disagreeable.” This sounds like a thinker’s formulation. “Agreeable” is too pale a word for the rich personal worth of a feeling evaluation.

• Thinking is essentially impersonal. Its goal is objective truth, independent of the personality and wishes of the thinker or anyone else.

• The TF preference is the only one that shows a marked sex difference. The proportion of feeling types appears to be substantially higher among women than among men.

• THE JUDGING TYPES believe that life should be willed and decided, while the perceptive types regard life as something to be experienced and understood.

• The person who says “What you ought to do…” ten minutes after meeting someone new is a marked judging type.

• This might be called the standard executive type. There are other kinds of executives, some of them brilliantly successful. But it is doubtful whether any other type so enjoys being an executive, or works so hard to get to be one. Sometimes at an early age, a child of this type, with systematic purpose and natural interest in running things, becomes, popularity aside, the leader of the school class.

• Much of the extraverted thinkers’ effectiveness stems from their willingness to issue as strict orders to themselves as to anyone else. They stake out their objectives well in advance and put a lot of systematic effort into reaching them on schedule. At their best, they turn an unsparing eye upon their own conduct and revise whatever does not come up to standard.

• Intuition heightens their intellectual interest, curiosity about new ideas (whether immediately useful or not), tolerance for theory, taste for complex problems, insight, vision, and concern for long-range possibilities and consequences.

• ENTJs are seldom content in a job that makes no demand on intuition. They need problems to solve and are likely to be expert at finding new solutions. Their interest is in the broad picture, however, not in detailed procedures or facts.

• Executives of this type are likely to surround themselves with other intuitives, because they like people who are quick on the uptake, with minds that work in the same fashion as their own, but they do well to have at least one good sensing type on their staff to keep them from overlooking relevant facts and important details.

• No type has everything. The introverts and thinkers, though likely to arrive at the most profound decisions, may have the most difficulty in getting their conclusions accepted. The opposite types are best at communicating, but not as adept at determining the truths to be communicated.

• The feeling type should be brief, however. The characteristic that probably annoys the thinkers most is the tendency of the feeling types to talk too much, with too many irrelevancies, and with too much detail and repetition.

• Regardless of who is the extravert and who is the introvert in a marriage, the differences in the sociability may cause problems. The extravert’s wish for active sociability runs counter to the introvert’s wish for privacy, especially when the introvert’s work is socially demanding. The day’s work may use up all the extraversion available; home represents a chance for the peace and quiet needed to regain a balance. If the extravert spouse wants to go out, to have people in, or at least to spend the time at home in conversation, frustration may develop.

• Likeness on TF should be hardest to achieve because there are more feeling women than thinking women in our culture, and more thinking men than feeling men, though these differences may be decreasing. In this 1940s sample, there were not enough feeling men for all the feeling women, nor enough thinking women for all the thinking men. At the very most, only 78 percent of the couples could be matched on TF.

• Similarity would appear to contribute to the success of a marriage.

• What one says will be remembered.

• Jung says that the acts of a person’s shadow should not be taken as acts by the person. Obviously this is a difficult injunction to obey, but it is important in a marriage. If the behavior of a person’s shadow is taken at face value, the partner may not only feel wounded and resentful, but the resentment may activate the partner’s own shadow; to the serious detriment of the relationship, a bitter recrimination may ensue—not between the partners but between their shadows.

• Thus, each word babies acquire brings an additional area of consciousness into sharp focus and increases their power to think about things—to observe, compare, categorize, and remember. A new word also increases their rate of learning, even on tasks involving no outward use of speech. Here verbal ability begins, and much depends on it.

• The workings of the unconscious are more interesting to intuitive babies than to sensing babies from birth on. Intuitives therefore have more interest in the meaning of words and pay more attention to the words they hear.

• People work in hundreds of ways. They work to get raw materials and to make things out of these materials. There is a story of work behind every familiar object in everyday use.

• They tend to be practical and matter-of-fact, and they successfully use their abilities in technical skills dealing with facts, objects, and money. In the sample of accountants, 64 percent were ST, and among the finance and commerce students and bank employees, ST made up 51 percent and 47 percent, respectively. STs also do well in production, construction, applied science, and law, but among the samples of counseling and theology students, only 6 percent and 3 percent were ST.

• NT people also focus their attention on possibilities, but handle these with impersonal analysis. They tend to be logical and ingenious, and they often use their abilities in theoretical and technical development. Among the research scientists sampled, 77 percent were NT; and among the science and law students, 57 and 42 percent were NT. NTs also do well as inventors, managers, forecasters, and securities analysts. In four of the fields studied, the NTs represented only a small percent: They made up 9 percent of the accountants and of the counseling students, 7 percent of students of nursing and the health-related professions, 6 percent of education students, and none of the sales and customer relations people.

• Enjoy learning a new skill more than using it.

• Dislike taking time for precision.

• Tend to be satisfied once they reach a judgment on a thing, situation, or person.

• In an effort to improve the situation, the executive-type intuitive (ENTJ) was made Assistant Comptroller; in this job his organizing ability and his ideas for improving procedures mattered more than his personal accuracy with clerical detail. Within two years, he was offered the job of Comptroller with another company—a happy outcome for him, if not for the original company.

• By far the least attracted type was ESTJ, the businessman and businesswoman type, in which all four preferences correlate with business interests on the Strong and economic values on the AVL Study of Values. Apparently the high financial rewards in medicine, which should have special interest for an ESTJ, did not offset that type’s relatively low interest in the scientific and humanitarian aspects of the work itself.

• Communication between different types is a greater problem than is generally recognized. A statement that is clear and reasonable to one type may sound meaningless or preposterous to another. One married couple, having learned how their types differed, proudly reported their insight. “If we argue for fifteen minutes without getting anywhere, we go back and define our terms. We haven’t been talking about the same thing!”

• Sensing types, who take facts more seriously than possibilities, want an explicit statement of the problem before they consider possible solutions. Intuitives want the prospect of an interesting possibility before they look at the facts. Thinkers demand that a statement have a beginning, a logically arranged and concise sequence of points, and an end—especially an end. And feeling types are mainly interested in matters that directly affect people.

• Probably the most deeply rooted preference, and the one that appears earliest, is that for extraversion or introversion.

• Trying to develop skill in sensing and intuition at the same time is like listening to two radio stations on the same wave length. People cannot hear an intuition if their senses are dinning in their ears, and when listening for an intuition, people cannot get information from their senses.

• If, in fact, some people are born without any inner disposition to be one type or another, then outer circumstances, one might conjecture, would have a free hand in determining which (if any) attitudes and processes would be developed. Western civilization has inclined men toward thinking, women toward feeling, and both sexes toward extraversion and the judging attitude. The pressure of outer circumstance itself would seem to be toward sensing. Thus, anyone who came into the world as a clean slate would be likely to be marked ESTJ or ESFJ fairly promptly by the collective slate pencil, which may explain why there are so many ESTJs and ESFJs in the general population.

• A thought that starts “I wonder if” is probably intuition. The declaration “I see!” is a flash of intuition, and the thought “Aha!” indicates that intuition has brought to mind something enlightening and delightful.

• People who prefer intuition tend to become skilled at seeing possibilities. They learn that a possibility will come to them if they confidently seek it. Valuing imagination and inspirations, intuitive types become good at new ideas, projects, and problem-solving.