Comment on Soren Ekstrom's Paper

This Paper compares Jung's eight psychological types with the system of classification of abnormal personality patterns devised by the American Psychiatric Association in order to clarify what is meant by personality disorder.

This pioneering attempt by a Jungian analyst to make clearer what a Jungian character analysis might be deserves our respect. Jungian analysts have long shrunk from the task of understanding the nuances of the neurotic and psychotic character so admirably sketched by such Freudian authors as Reich, Deutsch, Shapiro, and Kernberg. It would seem, moreover, that our starting point might well be the eight psychological types. Jung's own descriptions of the types (at least in the general descriptions at the end of Psychological Types) are in fact loaded with pathological inferences, implying a relation of the normal to the pathological (JUNG 5). Unfortunately, Jung never spelled out exactly what this relationship might be, with the effect of pathologising his descriptions of normal personality elements. Soren Ekstrom's paper even further confounds the normal with the pathological; so that the incautious reader might be left with the impression that a psychological type is the same thing as a personality pattern disturbance. Therefore, I found myself wanting a clear statement from him that the system of psychological types has been generally used to represent the range of normal personality differences, whereas the DSM-III system classifies abnormalities in personality structure. I think this would make the parallels that he draws between normal and abnormal personality even more intriguing, although of course still unaccounted for.

Certainly, Jung aimed to assess character not only in its normal but also in its psychopathological aspect, and in the main he seems to have distinguished the successful use of any function (such as extraverted thinking) from the pathologies that emerge when that function is so developed that it tends to inhibit the use of