Although there are many difficulties that people characteristically run into in trying to use a piece of art to assess the artist's personality type, there are four which seem to stand out -
Detail of a portrait that a 13 year old girl drew of her family. One of numerous plates from a study of children's art and personality type conducted by Herbert
Read. 10 About this portrait Read says, 'This extremely sensitive drawing suggests an integrated feeling+sensation type with extravert attitude (empathetic+decorative)'.
One can have a lot of fun trying to guess an artist's type from the work that he or she has produced. But although many people with whom we spoke before conducting our little on-line experiment in art and personality type had rather strong beliefs that they could guess correctly, very few actually succeeded - even when the artwork was accompanied by short narratives written by the artist, explaining the work.
So why do we so often fail when we try to guess? Sometimes it is because we don't have an adequate comprehension of the nature of each mental 'function'. This problem is not easy to avoid, even by the likes of a Herbert Read -
a bright and skillful art critic who also had a deep and abiding interest in personality theory and was exceptionally well read in both fields. 11
But even when there is no mistake made about the nature of the 'mental functions' per se, it can prove difficult to discern which function is the individual's DOMINANT one by merely looking at a painting, since the inferior function is as likely as the dominant to find strong expression in the painting. 12 Since one of course needs to know the artist's dominant function in order to
arrive at a conclusion regarding type, this problem can negatively impact
one's accuracy in typing.
Furthermore, although it may be true, as Read suggests, that 'each [Jungian personality] type possesses a distinctive mode of AESTHETIC expression,' it is not likely to be the case that the characteristic mode of expression will be one in which the dominant function is OVERTLY displayed in some manner that will be obvious to the viewer. In order to accurately determine which function is the dominant one in the artist, an analysis of the PROCESS whereby the piece of art is produced, not the features of the product itself, may be what is required.
In order to succeed in doing this type of analysis we may have to know more about the individual and the individual's intentions than we tend at first to think necessary. And this may entail, more often than we might be comfortable in acknowledging, a need to know more about the movements, styles or schools in which the artist is involved. In this way the 'second' approach to the relationship between art and personality type (which asks if there is a relationship between particular schools and certain mental functions) is
likely to offer valuable insights.
The Importance of Thinking in Terms of Process
When we speak of needing to know the artist's 'process', what do we mean?
Let's take as an example an individual who we'll call Jack. Jack is an INFJ. When he paints, however, it is not iNtuition, his dominant function, that he begins with, but Feeling. He has a feeling about an object that he is looking at, or about a remembered situation. It is what we might call an 'outwardly' directed feeling (Fe), used in a receptive manner - to pick up on the 'feeling tone' of some object or event. Although he will characteristically soon engage in applying line and color to the page, he does so for the sake of further exploring the feelings with which he is working. He makes his choices&160;- regarding color and line and composition&160;- without any guiding idea about what he is doing, without any 'thought' or 'plan'. At some point, what he is drawing takes on 'meaning' (Ni). And if the experience is a good one and comes to fruition, the meaning seems to deepen as the process continues. This REVELATION of meaning is for him the real purpose of the activity. And although he may like to afterwards 'interpret' the piece that he has created - put its meaning into words, and further analyze it (Ti) - this is not an essential part of the process, and hence not always an activity that it is necessary for him to engage in. We might finally observe that rarely does Jack show the work, frame it, or do anything material with it at all (Se) - such as sell it.
One observation about Jack's process that will be of interest is that
the order in which he nests function-related frames - which shows the relative significance that he gives to them - is not reflected
by the TEMPORAL order in which he uses the functions. Although Jack's process typically STARTS with Fe, it actually is structured, as the above description suggests, according to a nested series of frames (Ni/Fe/Ti/Se - with Ni being the widest frame) that reflects the values associated with the preference order that is by definition the iNfj's (or iNfp's) - Ni-Fe-Ti-Se.
We might also observe that in Jack's case one cannot read preference
order from the product itself. It is not exhibited in the product
in any overt way that will be apparent to the viewer. Many of Jack's pieces are very realistic sketches of the human face or body, which appear to be relatively sophisticated in terms of 'observation skills' (S) and 'technique' (T). And so people will, understandably, mistake manifestations of these as an indication of dominant S or T. There is also very little of what we'd usually call 'symbolism' (associated with Ni) in his work - no flying fishes, or clocks with drooping hands. This further complicates matters for the viewer - since, although symbolism occurs, in the subtler sense of profound meanings that are for Jack at play in the work, it is not crude or obvious and may not be apparent to the viewer.
When we focus on PROCESS as opposed to PRODUCT we begin to ask a different set of questions - questions to which the product itself is unlikely to be able to supply us with immediate answers: What is the main consideration of the artist? In the artist's process, what are the relative values that the artist places on the function-related frames - in what 'order' are they nested? Only the answers to these question, which may very well require us to know more than the art itself may be capable of revealing, will begin to tell us how the artist typically structures his or her experience.
Only when the viewer understands the intent behind the artist's work can he or she begin to discern precisely how the functions are being relatively valued in the work, so as to identify the way in which the function-related frames are nested, and hence predict the 'preference order' that is likely to be the one associated with the individual, determining type. 13 In order to succeed in guessing the type of an artist from the artist's work, in other words, it will be necessary to understand what the artist is TRYING to accomplish in his or her work, and precisely how he or she goes about doing that. This is something that Jung himself ironically failed to do in his 1932 analysis of Picasso's work.
Using Personality Theory to Characterize What is UNIQUE in the Individual
There is another factor that further complicates matters. People are capable of tremendous complexity and variety, and their most creative projects ('artistic' or otherwise) will almost by definition seek to offer
UNIQUE solutions to age-old problems. In order to accomplish this, they may need to combine functions in ways hitherto untried. 14 These will involve new ways of manifesting the functions, methodologies that are difficult to recognize as function-related because they are so unfamiliar to us. To map the experiential structures that are traced when such an individual nests function-related frames in the complex ways that their unique solution requires, much more information will be needed from the individual than can be gleened from a short narrative on the subject of art, or even from an extensive personality 'sorter' such as the MBTI.
This does not mean, however, that analysing a particular piece of art in terms of personality theory is doomed to failure, or that such an
enterprise is capable of render no useful insights about the artist. What it does mean is that we might have to take a less restrictive approach to how we utilize personality parameters to characterize human activity - one that requires us to gather information at a more SPECIFIC level of information than is commonly achieved by administering a multiple-choice test. 15
This will be an especially important consideration in the case of artists
who actually SUCCEED in successfully addressing profound cultural problems presented by their epoch, as these will be individuals who not only utilize their functions in unprecedented new ways, but while doing so also change the face of our culture. To comprehend the import of the cultural revolutions that become manifest in them, and through them, will require an historical perspective that is rather difficult to achieve. This may prove especially problematic when it comes to understanding the significance of the contributions that are made by one's contemporaries. Assessing major shifts in culture as they are happening is rather like trying to type on a keyboard on which the location of the letters keeps changing. This is one of the reasons that Jung's assessment of Picasso, as it turns out, failed so miserably. And why neither he nor Einstein could comprehend what was happening in early twentieth century Modern Art at the time that it was
happening (see About Face Again).
We furthermore want to suggest that the artists who at certain critical junctures in a culture's development rise to the top are often the ones who address its most egregious 'functional' deficits by providing a viable compensatory point of view. It can be argued, for instance, that the Modern Art movement gradually developed out of a Romanticism that offered itself as an NF antidote to the 18th century ST approach that was ushered in by the Enlightenment. Picasso's work, at which we will take a closer look in the above-mentioned article, was the culmination of a gradual 'turning inwards' of art which occured at the apex of this movement, during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In About Face Again we show how this project, which, in Cubism, offered 'the most radical innovation in Western art since the Renaissance' 16 sought, in a characteristically 'introverted iNtuitive' fashion, to explore the essential STRUCTURE of the human psyche, the very structure of consciousness itself.
Although revolutionary artists - the socalled 'culture heroes' in
any given historical period - may not themselves be capable of
transcending preference, it often seems to be the case that they do not manifest their functional preferences in culturally typical ways - the ways that we come to expect, through exposure to instruments like the MBTI or RHETI, that the functions SHOULD be expressed.
Although difficulties in typing can result from -
- there is an even more fundamental mistake that is often made.
People assume that under ordinary circumstances they should be ABLE to read the personality type of the maker of a work from the piece itself.
Why is this a mistake? Because 'psychological type' is, after
all, a very complex construct. In order to correctly assess type, one has
to determine the relative values that an individual has assigned
to a fairly large number of hidden parameters. Is this the type
of information that is easily encoded in a piece of art?
Perhaps we can learn something about the inherent difficulty
in the task that we are presuming that we SHOULD be able to easily
do by asking what is the BEST way to go about doing that task. How
do we find out how an individual has assigned relative values to
a set of hidden parameters? And the answer, of course, is by an INTERACTIVE process that permits one to PROBE or QUERY the individual in such a way as to elicit value-comparisons with respect to an exhaustive set of permutations
of the significant variables, comparisons about which individuals
are not usually forthcoming. But a piece of art is not interactive; it cannot be queried or probed in this way. And just like most artworks
don't bear a label announcing the artist's annual income, or the car
he or she prefers to drive, neither do they wear the functional preference
orders of their maker on their sleeves.
So what does one do in such a case? One can make ASSUMPTIONS that permits one, in the absence of good information, to arrive by alternate means at conclusions about the relative assignment of values - conclusions which are often, as a result, shakey at best. Or one can do what would come natural if it weren't for the fact that we've learned to rely on less direct means of assessment - turn to the individual who has produced the product and query HIM or HER about how comparative frames were valued and nested during the process in which the piece was created.
But then why not simply ask the individual his or her type? What need
is there to consider the art work at all? And this leads us to a rather obvious conclusion, but one that is actually somewhat extraordinary: although art can be viewed in ways that increase our knowledge about the artist,
it probably shouldn't be used as a substitute sorter. If one is interested in exploring art in the context of personality theory a good alternative approach might be to use the piece as a focus for a discussion with the artist, the purpose of which would be mutual discovery. The artist could be queried about the processes utilized to produce the piece in a such a way that the manner in which the nesting of function-related frames has been managed is revealed - but also in a way that doesn't lose sight of the intentions the artist had in producing it.
This approach may not have the thrill of a contest, and is not very helpful
if the artist is absent or doesn't want to cooperate, but it does produce rewarding and often rather unexpected insights, under the right circumstances.
Footnotes and References 9. Artists and Type - Observations on How Our Readers Went About Typing Artists 10. Plate #48 in Herbert Read, Education Through Art, 1942, London, Faber and Faber. Read went about studying personality and children's art in a rather interesting way. In attempting a classification of children's drawings, I decided not to begin with a series of pigeon-holes marked 'psychological types', placing the drawings into them as seemed most appropriate, but rather to adopt a purely stylistic classification of the drawings themselves, and to see then whether this classification corresponded to any of the existing classifications of psychological types." (page 140) He gathered thousands of drawings into groups which seemed, on purely stylistic grounds, to constitute separate categories. In this way he wound up with 12 categories, which he was later able to reduce to 8. These, when taken in pairs, seemed to him to demonstrate a correlation with Bullough's 'four types of perceptions'. (Edward Bullough was a psychologist who wrote on "The 'perceptive problem' in the Aesthetic Appreciation of Single Colors'" [Brit. J. Psych, II (1906-8), pp.406-463].) In the process, Read discovered a further correlation - between Bullough's types and Jung's. 'This correlation is all the more remarkable,' says Read, 'in that Bullough's classification was made more than thirty years ago [in 1912] on empirical evidence which owed nothing to the kind of psychiatrical experience upon which Jung's classification was later based.' Read goes on to say that 'It does not seem that Jung was ever aware of Bullough's work; at any rate he does not include it in his very general survey of the type-problem.' (Read, page 19) But Bullough would in 1903 compare his [Bullough's] system to Binet's, thinking that they showed remarkable parallels, and Jung was familiar with Binet. Binet distinguished a 'descriptive' type (interested in describing the details of the object), an 'erudite' type (interested in stating his knowledge about the object), an 'emotional' type (interested in the mood established by the object) and a fourth type (who sought to observe the 'expressive' or 'significant' features of the object - its 'meaning'). Muller, Read tells us, later adopted Binet's system, with his own modifications. (Read, page 93) Read was probably not aware that Jung, as some of his biographers would subsequently point out, appeared to have had a significant problem with what, in its extreme form, can only be called 'plagiarism'. It caused him to severely downplay the extent to which various individuals (and/or schools of thought) from whom he had borrowed had authorial priority over the conclusions that he claimed as his own.
About the protocol that Read employed in his study: it seems to suggest that he was more comfortable using the Jungian categories to characterize the sytlistic 'groups' into which the individual pieces of art fell (our 'second approach') than in using Jung's system to directly label the individual artists (our 'first approach'). Perhaps this was because he was in general more comfortable, as an art historian and aesthetician, embracing a classification system related to artistic style than with one emerging from purely psychological considerations. There is, however, also some evidence that he felt that it was easier to correlate type labels - which are, after all, generalizations - to schools of thought (which are also, in a sense, 'generalizations'). It seems to us that he nevertheless hedged his bets on this point by emphasizing that the 'mannerisms' the individual artist might add to the style associated with a school might on ocassion tell us more about the individual's personality type than does the style itself.
11. Take, for instance, the painting by the 13 year old, above. Whereas the 'empathetic' response is best understood as predominantly a manifestation of the Feeling function, Read mistakenly associates it with Sensing; and whereas interest in the 'decorative' might indeed best be explained as an expression of the Sensing function, he sees it as a manifestation of Feeling. Since, in the case of this particular drawing, the two mistaken assumptions cancel each other out it is not difficult to go along with Read's conclusion and imagine that this piece could have been produced by an SF personality. It is interesting that Read also seems to sometimes confuse 1) Feeling with Intuition (which permits him to conceive of surrealism, which is more predominantly the product of iNtuition, as a manifestation of the Feeling function), and 2) Thinking with Sensing (which permits him to view impressionism - which appears to in fact have more to do with Sensing - as a product of Thinking). He will also sometimes interpret a drawing as the work of either two introverted functions in partnership, or two extraverted functions. This, however, was NOT a mistake per se; it was the result of operating in a pre-MBTI (i.e., purely JUNGIAN) environment, which does not share the assumption underlying the MBTI - that if an individual's dominant function is extraverted his auxiliary function must of necessity be introverted (or vice versa). [See A Third Principle Governing the Distribution of MBTI Type Across the Enneagram on these non-traditional types, sometimes called 'pure types'].
Further complicating matters for the one who would attempt to discern the
artist's personality type from her work is the fact that developed functions will manifest in different ways from undeveloped or underdeveloped functions, as we suggest in The Five Levels of the Four Jungian Functions. It is highly unlikely that the individual
who is doing the typing will have succeeded in fully developing all four functions, or in having developed them equally. As a result, he is likely to have defined each function in a way commensurate with the experience that HE has of it, and not recognize manifestations of functions of a higher level of development than he himself has achieved.
12. As previously noted (See The Enneagram and the MBTI: In Search of Common Ground, Part 3) the inferior function in an individual can easily be misconstrued as dominant, since the inferior is as likely to find strong expression in the behavior of the individual as is the dominant. But it is, after all, not the strength or insistence with which the function announces itself in the painting that is what makes it the 'dominant' function. The dominant function, by definition, is the one
most PREFERRED. As a result it is likely, statistically speaking,
to become more highly developed. The inferior function will hence
be expressed in a cruder fashion - one steeped in the 'unconscious' of the individual, according to Jung. It is (as Von Franz points out) the function that is more likely to be PROBLEMATIC for the individual.
13. Nevertheless, even when guessers in our experiment were presented with a short narrative that the artist was asked to write explaining his or her general approach to art and the significance of the particular work that was displayed, the task of guessing type continued to prove difficult. Nor did the success rates seem to improve when, instead of visual art, it was the written word that was displayed.
14. Furthermore, it may not be adequate to conceive of these new 'combinations' of functions as mere 'aggregates' that can be combined together like separate components or atomic units. At higher levels of development the functions seem to display greater interdependence. The full 'development' of one function seems to require development of the others. [For more about this, see Part III, where we look in more detail at what constitutes the 'integration' of the functions.
It may even be the case that through some artists - the socalled 'culture hero' about which anthropologists speak - significant steps in the EVOLUTION of the functions take place.
15. Is it possible, for instance, that a particular artist might have discovered how to use an iNfj approach to 'color' while simultaneously utilizing an esTj approach to 'perspective'? Is it furthermore possible that both approaches might be subservient to an overall enFj approach that this artist uses to explain her 'motivation' in painting? Is such an artist conflicted - torn between opposing personalities? Or is she a well rounded individual, who has integrated shadow parts of her personality? The answer to these questions may in the end ironically depend as much on the personality type of the ANALYST seeking to make such a determination - and on the assumptions and values embedded in the culture in which both find themselves - as on the artist being analysed.
Considerations like this may be why it was that Read, despite his in-depth
exposition on personality type and art, would in the end say that there are 'as many types of art as there are types of men' (page 28), and maintain
that 'though it is easy to make a theoretical classification of art into
four main types corresponding to [Jung's] four main personality types
[thinking, sensing, intuitive, and feeling types], in reality all the
types, whether of men or their artifacts, merge into one another.' (Read, 27)
16. Nadia Choucha, Surrealism & the Occult: Shamanism, Magic, Alchemy, and the Birth of an Artistic Movement, 1991, (Rochester, Vermont: Destiny Books), page 31.
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