Temperamental Differences and Sexual Dimorphisma

What I would like to discuss in this paper is still unfinished work, although it's a theoretical position that I started working on and stated very briefly in Sex and Temperament1 but never completed. First, I think it is important to develop the question of psychological types and to recognize the extent to which almost any classification that makes any sense works if the theory includes the entire human race. If it doesn't include the entire human race it immediately gets into trouble. Even astrology—which goes around a circle and includes everybody, because everyone was born in one month or another—in the end seems to produce a kind of pattern. There was a period when some astrologers had a nursery school, and they published three or four issues of a nursery school journal in which they reported on observations about children according to astrological signs and discussed characteristic behavior of Leo, Aries, and whatnot; and they found no difficulty in doing it.

Any of you who have worked with Jung's types know that everyone fits into them, although some fit better than others, because Jung took the entire range of personality as he knew it and then made the assumption that this was a closed system. One of the great differences between my work and Ruth Benedict's was that on the whole she was concerned with those aspects of personality that presented an open system—that is, those that were so extraordinary and unusual that one would not be likely to find the same type recurring. So although she talked about culture as personality writ large and discussed particular cultures in terms of particular types of personality, she didn't care whether or not the descriptions she used had any systematic relationship to each other. Thus, she termed one culture megalomaniac, another paranoid, another Dionysian, and another Apollonian. The Dionysian and Apollonian made a pair, but they made a pair on an axis that wasn't necessarily applicable to any other. She wasn't concerned