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For those of you who aren't familiar with the Myers Briggs Temperment sorter, here's a brief intro...

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The heart of Jung’s psychology is a typology of personality. A typology is a system for classifying data according to certain stable characteristics. A typology aids understanding. The classification of animals and plants into genus and phylum or into species and subspecies is an example of a typology. If you wanted to better understand trees, you might go into the forest and observe certain characteristics that always that are always present and grouped together and label them a pine tree. Another set of characteristics you might call an oak tree, and a third set could be an elm tree. With this typology whenever you went into any forest, you would be able to differentiate one tree from another. This typing of trees make the forest more understandable.

A typology always simplifies and some subtle details are lost but there is an increase in general understanding. Typologies facilitate a gain in the general understanding by making clear what commonalties exist. Typologies of personality help us understand human behavior. They also simplify, but clarity is gained and uniqueness is not lost. One pine tree or one person always continues to differ from every other and thus remains unique. Applied to people a typology takes the variety of human characteristics and puts them into a limited number of categories as an aid to understanding.

The Jungian model of personality is a typology. Once we lose the unconscious wholeness of infancy and the Garden we move out into the world. Here we must begin to make choices between the paired opposites of personality functioning. These opposites are seen in the attitudes of extroversion and introversion and the functions of sensation-intuition and thinking-feeling. The attitudes and functions represent preferences. Everyone has an inherent potential of all these choices. The seeds of each exist within us. They exist as opposites. As a result of life experience we emphasize one over the other. We make choices and these preferences then determine our personality style.

The choices are:
<center>Extraversion or Introversion
Sensation or INtuition
Thinking or Feeling
Judging or Perceiving</center>

The bold letters identify the preferences and together they yield a total of 16 personality types shown by various combinations of letters. For example: ESTJ is the extraverted, sensation, thinking, judging type; INFP is the introverted, intuitive, feeling, perceiving type.

[b]Source: Climbing the Ladder of Personality Structure

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