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This a book based on psychetypes of people. This book gives detailed descriptions of different
personality types.

Psychetypes: by Michael Malone

Foundation of book based on the author:

Which psychetype are you? Are you a Thinking Territorial like Katherine Hepburn? Or a
Feeling Oceanic, like Peanuts’ Charlie Brown? Are you more like Robert Kennedy (Sensation
Volcanic) or Isadora Duncan (Intuitive Aetheral)? Each of us is one of the eight different
psychetypes, depending on the way we look at time and space. This new theory tells how
different people experience themselves and the world around them. Developed from the
psychological types of Carl Jung, experiential typology offers a vocabulary for communicating
across barriers of misunderstanding that too often damage human relationships. As such, it can
be a helpful tool in marriage and child counseling, in education, and in business. It can also be
the basis for a revealing new “mind game,” which like astrology is fun to play in typing yourself
and your friends.

How do you relate to time? Is the past important to you? Do you like to make plans for the
future? Are you able to enjoy the present moment for its own sake? Your answers to such
questions will determine which of the four kinds of time orientation is yours; whether you are a
thinking, feeling, sensation, or intuitive type of person.

Do you have a concrete sense of the space that is “yours”? Are you one of those people who
says that “things are the way they are”? Or are you more interested in ideas than in tangibles?
Do you tend to “go with the flow”? Answers to these questions lead to the four spatial types:
territorial, volcanic, aetheral, and oceanic. The eight possible combinations of these dimensions
are the psychetypes.

In addition to showing you how to type yourself and your friends, this book is rich with
examples of psychetypes for famous people and literary figures. The cast Tolstoy, Gandhi, John
Kennedy, Elizabeth Taylor, Eleanor Roosevelt, Archie Bunker, Scott Fitzgerald, MAOA Tse-
tung, Hamlet, and Winnie the Pooh. Psychetypes is not only a useful new language for
experience that really helps us to understand each other, it is also fun.

Author’ Note

This book is a study of personality types based on a theory of experiential typology; in other
words, a theory of how different people experience their selves and the world around them. It
outlines a system for distinguishing eight basic patterns of personality and offers a vocabulary
for describing these psychtypes.

This is not a how-to-book. It will not give you advice or formulas on how to meditate, be more
aggressive, say no, influence people, scream, gain power, save your marriage, perfect your
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divorce, raise your kids, or enjoy your sex life. It will not tell you in sixty hours whether you’re
okay, not so hot, playing games, or in fear of flying.

This is a how-are-you book. How we are alike, and how we are different. If, as this theory
assumes, each of us has a natural typological set, perhaps by coming to understand its
components, we will better understand, as well, both ourselves and others. To help us
communicate this knowledge, experiential typology provides a detailed descriptive vocabulary, a
kind of systematic short-hand of personality traits. It offers a language for experience.

Introducing a Language for Experience pg 1-15

We humans have been puttering about in the universe for a few thousand years now, trying to
sort out everything in it. In this perennial pastime some of us have gone in for collecting and
labeling stacks of facts, while others have been more involved in defining how, where, when,
and the why of things–the which of the what of it all.]

Naturally, and despite the fact that astronomers have taught us better, we consider ourselves the
center of this universe; after all, we seem to be the only creatures even bothering to sort it out,
and so our favorite subjects of exploration has always been “us”, ourselves and our relationships
to each other. We fascinate ourselves. “What piece of work is a man…What is this quintessence
of the dust?” Throughout history people have stood ready to answer Hamlet’s question, often to
debate or defend their answers to the death. Poets and philosophers, preachers and teachers,
psychologists and songwriters, we’ve all been telling each other what man is ever since man was.

Probably the first thing that strikes us about the nature of human nature is its extraordinary
multiplicity and diversity. You and I may both eat, sleep, dream, work, and make love, but we
probably won’t be alike in our ways of feeling, thinking, and acting, in ours styles and habits, our
likes and dislikes. And there are still wider discrepancies among our disparate cultures and
during different periods of history.

Confronted with this multiformity, the human impulse is not always to cry “Vive la difference!”
We are social, syncretizing creatures,, and we tend to seek common denominators that will unify
us as this species of featherless bipeds. So, “I think, therefore I am.” Man is the only animal
who thinks, who weeps, who worships, who laughs, who kills for pleasure.” This impulse to
unify and define has been one of the causes of our survival, as well as one of the hopes of our
salvation, for the wretched record of history reminds us that out of the Pandora’s box of our
differences have endlessly roared far too many horrors, form individual bigotry to international
wars.

On the other hand, it is equally dangerous to deny our differences. Our insistence on uniformity
can be malevolent, oppressive, and dictatorial. I insist that you be British, Buddhist, Baptist, a
Communists, and anti-Communist, an achiever, a believer, a teetotaler, a meat hater, a
“feminine” woman, a “masculine” man, long-haired, short-haired, a company man. In other
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words, insist that you be like me. Because I am right; God knows this. That’s why he is on my
side. The fact is, though, that people can be so different that only a leap of good will seems
capable of bridging the gaps that may separate the rich from poor, Westerner from Easterner,
black from white, old from young, man from woman.

Our blessing (and our bane) is that we want to bridge these gaps. We want to understand. And
we have built ourselves a miraculously complex and versatile tool with which to construct the
bridge. That tool is language. With language we can create laws and mitigate individual
heterogeneity for a common good. With language we can communicate how we feel, what we
want, plan, hope, and need: Who we are. We can share our experiences. And we can listen.

Unfortunately, we do not always listen well, and one of the reasons we don’t is our tendency to
assume that everyone must be or should be like us, that if we speak the same language, we mean
the same things. That’s not true. We don’t always speak the same language, though we may use
the same words. Words like “right,” “good,” “moral,” “goal,” or “future” can mean very
different things to different people. In our efforts to communicate, we resort to analogies,
examples, to inflection and volume, to “body language.” And still we may throw up our hands,
sighing, “You’ll never understand me. Let’s face it, we’re in two different worlds. Either you’re
crazy, of I’m crazy.”

The truth is probably that neither of us is crazy; the problem is that we assume we ought to be
alike, that in the same situation our experience, our way of perceiving and reacting, will be
shared by another person. If not, there’s something the matter with one of us. Not necessarily
so. There are a lot different ways to be absolutely normal, and that’s what this book is about.

What are Psychtypes?

There is certainly nothing new in the desire to define the differences among people. Somehow it
makes us feel better when we have some handles, some categories, or a theory that will help us
explain why we are the way we are, and why “they” are who they are. Give us a couple who
aren’t getting along, and we’ll come up with a system to prove why. In the Renaissance, for
example, it was the humors theory: He’s Choleric, and she’s sanguine. Or we’ll say they’re star-
crossed lovers; he’s Sagittarius, and she’s a Gemini. If Jack Sprat can eat no fat, his wife can eat
no lean, then he’s an ectomorph, and she’s and endomorph. Or they’re incompatible because
he’s an anal compulsive and she’s an oral erotic, because he’s outer-directed and she’s inner-
directed, because she’s right-wing countess and he’s left-wing commoner, because he’s square,
and she’s hip, because he says “tomato” and she says “tomahto” and let’s call the whole thing
off. But whether they be physiological, morphological, psychological, economic, or sociological
in focus, all these systems are attempts to classify types of people. In other words, typologies.

The theory described in this book is called experiential typology. It is a theory of psychetypes
and is concerned not so much with the ways people behave differently in given situations as with
the ways they experience situations differently. Experiential typology is a descriptive theory of
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the different experiences that underlie behavior in normal personalities. It assumes that if
people experience things differently, their attitudes, assumptions, and actions will vary. These
diverse sets of attitudes, assumptions, and actions we call psychetypes. Each individual operates,
whether he is aware of it or not, out of a particular psychetype, a basic perceptual set, first for
understanding and second for dealing with reality. The perception is always primary, for while
two people may behave quite similarly, the texture of their experience (their own sense of what
is happening) may nevertheless be worlds apart. The theory of psychetypes is a way of
exploring the various experiential worlds that lie beneath, and motivate, our behavior.

Typology is not psychology. It delineates; it does not diagnose. While the theory of psychetypes
developed from certain psychological assumptions of Carl Jung, it neither attempts to assess
personalities nor to evaluate their adjustments to “reality.” Instead, it offers a carefully detailed
description of various personality types. It demonstrates that a person of a given type will have
certain tendencies and potentials, and certain orientations to time and space, and that these will
be shared with other persons of his or her type. What the person does with these tendencies is a
question of psychology and does not concern us here. Any psychetype can include people who
are self-confident, insecure, depressed, happy, outgoing, productive, whatever. Neurosis, even
psychosis, is potentially possible in all types. Nor, in a general theory, do psychetypes account
for the specific facts of background and character that affect personality; people of any
psychetype may be kind or selfish; educated or not; dedicated or irresponsible, intelligent, or
stupid, happily or unhappily married. What this book will tell you is the ways in which those
personal qualities are likely to function within the personality, in what directions they are likely
to be oriented.

This then, is a theory of normal personality types. Moreover, it assumes that the perimeters of
human normalcy are wide, wider than we are often willing to allow. Far too many people are
deemed eccentric who are functioning will within the normal boundaries of their particular type.
A “neurotic” may be neurotic only insofar as we misunderstand his or her typology or choose to
define that typology as variant and therefore aberrant. Of course, a theory of psychetypes neither
negates abnormality nor insists that nonfunctional or destructive behavior be accepted as normal.
However, one of the ways a person can become neurotic (that is, unable to realize his own
potentialities) is by failing to develop his natural typology. (Other reasons might derive from
familial, social, or intrapsychic maladjustments). Furthermore, it is difficult for people to
develop happily when their natural typology is not recognize or respected by others. By
providing a language for experience, a theory of psychtypes enables us to communicate across
the validity of our differences.

The Eight Basic Psychetypes

There are eight basic psychetypes, that is normal personalities that can be distinguished from
each other primarily in terms of their perceptions rather than behaviors. The combinations these
perceptual sets within an individual generates in one of the four Jungian functions–thinking,
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feeling, sensation, or intuition–as a primary experiential mode. These four experiential functions
are the manifestations of two almost automatic sets of presuppositions with which we approach
life. One is our sense of time. The other is our sense of space. These temporal and spatial
dimensions are our experiential areas. In other words, the areas are those apprehensions of
“reality” that lie beneath and channel our behavior. Unlike behavior, they do not seem
amenable to our conscious control. Most of us, in fact, are not even aware that they are
perceptions; the areas seem to us instead to be simply “the way things are.” They appear so
natural that we, often wrongly, assume everyone else shares them.

We have one of the two basic attitudes toward the flow of time. With regard to time’ passage,
people are either continuous or discontinuous, that is, they perceive time either as a continuous,
recurrent pattern or a discontinuous series of unique, discrete moments. Thinking and feeling
types are always continuous; sensation and intuitive are always discontinuous.

People perceive space in two different dimensions, each of which can be apprehended in one of
the two distinct ways. First is the internal dimension of space, what “makes up” it’s contents.
We may assume reality to be concrete, specific, and physical (volcanic) or as abstract,
generalized, and theoretical (aethereal). Second is the external dimension of space, it’s outer
shape, so to speak. We may see the world as structured (territorial) or as without boundaries
(oceanic). Our primary spatial settings depend on whether we are more concerned with the
internal or external dimensions, the substance or the structure of space. When we combine a
person’s primary spatial area, we have his psychetype. The eight psychetypes are:

CONTINUOUS: DISCONTINUOUS

Thinking territorial Sensation volcanic

Thinking aethereal Sensation Territorial

Feeling volcanic Intuitive oceanic

Feeling oceanic Intuitive aethereal

The Four Functions

Thinking types are people who see time as continuously connected in a linear progression; they
are analytic, theoretical, and hierarchial. Interested in ideas and goals, they structure their world
and desire to understand its distinctions. As we will see they tend to be detached, orderly, and
competitive. Billie Jean King, Jimmy Carter, and Walter Cronkite are thinking types. Feeling
types also perceive time as continuous; it is very important to them that their present life be
connected with their past. But for them life is seen as merging, unified, and personal rather than
bounded and abstract. Theirs is a world filled with concrete, actualized, finite things. Feeling
types are generally involved, pragmatic, and receptive people. Elizabeth Taylor, Dwight
D.Eisenhower, and Albert Schweitzer are examples of feeling types. Sensation types are people
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who perceive time as a series of discrete, unique moments, unlinked to the past or future. They
live in the present-oriented world of immediate, specific actualities, and they tend to prefer
action to theory; they structure their environment and wish to control it Pablo Picasso, Amelia
Earhart, and Robert F. Kennedy were all sensation types. Intuitive also see time as disconnected
from the past; unlike sensation types, however, they are very involved in the future and its
infinite possibilities. The world of the intuitive is unstructured, speculative, individualistic, and
imaginative. Marilyn Monroe, Walt Disney, and Frank Lloyd Wright were intuitive.

We each have access to all of the four functions; each of us thinks, feels, intuits and senses. The
more we are able to realize our human potentials, the more integrated these functions are in our
personalities. Yet for all of us, one function provides the primary avenue of contact with the
outer world; we have only limited access to the others. It is on the basis of this first function that
we type individuals. No person will ever demonstrate all of the behavioral or attitudinal traits
that apply to any particular function. Our psychetype is rather the background, the stage setting
on which each of our unique, personal dramas is played.

Nor should one assume that, for example, only thinking types know how to “think” (although
some thinking types may claim this is so, just as some feeling types may believe that they alone
are perceptive to emotions). Nor do only intuitives have imagination; nor only feeling types,
profound emotions. As this brief sketch, makes clear, no individual can be totally comprehended
by a typology. It is vital to remember that when applying experiential typology to our lives. The
purpose should never be to lock ourselves in separate houses but to understand better the
different rooms in which we live.

The Temporal and Spatial Areas

The only absolute thing about time is that it consistently refuses to stand still for anyone;
otherwise, it jerks, bolts, drags, passes, and progresses with us in a multiplicity of tempos*. This
means our particular rhythm of time defines us as more or less extraverted or introverted. While
some of us are waltzing, others are doing the hustle. To type a person is automatically to
categorize his or her perception of time as either continuous or discontinuous. The continuous
person (thinking or feeling) experiences the passage of time in a continuum that is recurrent and
patterned. Each moment is linked to what went before and what will follow. To be continuous
is to believe in the evolutional nature of time, to believe that the past has created the present and
the present will create the future. It is to believe “The Grand Structure of Time.” Such people
are likely to believe in the importance of plans, to value consistency and temperateness, and to
respect traditions.

But to the discontinuous person (sensation or intuition) “pastness” is generally far less
significant. “The past is dead,” these people believe. In this world moments of time are seen as
discrete and unique. The present is existential rather than evolutional, and the innovative is
likely to valued above the “tried and true.” Between these two views of time lies an enormous
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chasm of possible misunderstanding, a chasm into which friendships, and even marriages, can
slip and fall. For as we shall see, each tends to misconstrue and to feel uncomfortable in the
other’s world. Each of us also has available to him the two basic modes of perceiving space.,
one having to do with the internal content of space (its substance), the other the external shape,
or structure, of space. In their perceptions of the fundamental content or makeup of existence,
people are either volcanic or aethereal. Volcanics (sensation or feeling types) perceive the world
as actual, concrete, specified, and substantial. Their attitude toward it tends to be communal,
active, and pragmatic. They are people who strike us as personal, as engaged and involved in
life.

The polar opposites are the aethereals (thinking type or intuitive), whose construction of space is
abstract, hypothetical, and imaginative, and whose mode of relating is theoretical, detached, and
idealistic. Reality for aethereals lies in the conceptual rather than the tangible sphere. Such
individuals are interested not so much in particular things, people, or events as in ideas about
them–their symbolic meanings, their universal essences, their future significances.

As with our view of the internal substance of space, there are also diametrically opposed ways of
perceiving its external structure. One is territorial; the other is oceanic. As the name suggests,
territorials (thinking and sensation types) are very sensitive to “territory”–their own and others.
They would agree that “Good fences make good neighbors”. Such people see reality as
structured, bounded, hierarchal, and differentiated. Their attitude toward the world, then, is
objective, controlled, goal-oriented, and assertive. From this world of observant, practical, and
disciplined individuals have come many scientists. For territorials, everything has its proper
place; objects, events, and people exist within the carefully marked boundaries that must not be
muddled or overstepped.

Boundaries are largely irrelevant to oceanics (feeling or intuitives), whose experiential world is
unified, connected, and unstructured. Oceanics see everything in a flow in which life
intermingles and merges with all other life. Their mode of dealing with the world is subjective,
personal, and flexible. They “go with the flow.” People of this type tend to be receptive rather
than assertive and are less interested in territorial “doing” than with the process of “being.” The
two sets of spatial dimensions contain opposites. We will never, therefore, find a thinking type
with a volcanic sense of spatial content or an oceanic attitude towards structure. Someone who
is aethereal (as thinking types are) is by definition not volcanic. One cannot simultaneously
perceive something as concrete and not concrete. Someone who is territorial cannot, of course,
like oceanics perceive space as unbounded. Hence, there are only certain combinations
possible–eight, in fact.

We accommodate all of these preconscious perceptions of time and space to the outside world
along certain predictable lines. For we do not live simply instinctively; instead, we attempt to
control and to channel ourselves, our environment and our situations. In so doing, we tend to act
in fairly consistent, and consequentially classifiable ways. We call these individual instances of
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behaviors traits. A given psychetype, then behaves according to the personality traits belonging
to his function.

Typing a Person

When assigning a specific psychetype, we refer to him or her not simply as an intuitive, for
example, but as an intuitive oceanic or an intuitive aethereal. This distinction indicates the
priority of either external spatial structure or internal spatial substances in that person’s
experiential world. For some people structure is primary; for others, substance. If we first
determine which of the four basic functions best explains someone, we then have to decide
which of the two possible spatial settings is most applicable, given the personality traits
observed. Say we decide someone is feeling type. We then need to know if he is a feeling
volcanic or a feeling oceanic. Does he tend to rely on assertive action, or does he tend to be very
open and subjective? If the first, he’s probably volcanic, if the second he is probably oceanic.
Suppose, however, we are first able to determine a spatial area rather than the function. We
might look next for a temporal clue. Does an oceanic appear to be continuous with regard to
time (therefore, a feeling oceanic) or does he tend to be very open and subjective? If the first he
is probably