THE RELEVANCE OF PERSONALITY TYPES IN PSYCHOTHEARPY This assignment will include analysis of the elements model, Freuds clinical

pathological medical and Jungian typology. I hope to illustrate how the models relate to one another and how they possibly contrast and overlap with each other when applying to individual clients in a therapeutic setting. I shall be relating the models to an exparnter who will act as my client for the purposes of this assignment and will refer to her as Maria. BACKGROUND: MARIA Maria is a 37 year old single women living in an upmarket location in the Canary Wharf area. She currently works for a pharmaceutical company as a hospital rep responsible for sales and marketing of particular products, she has held this position for the last 10 years. She graduated from uni with a law degree. Her father is a retired doctor and her mother works for the tax office. Her brothers are both trainee Drs Working in hospital environments. THE ELEMENTS MODEL The elements model of qualities uses the 4 elements which are then further divided into 3 aspects. The 12 groups of qualities are then associated with an archetype that is the ideal for each. The expressive qualities are more extroverted and relate to the path of the master. The receptive qualities are more introverted and relate to the path of the saint. And balance would relate to the path of prophet. It is sometimes said that the soul incarnates with particular tendandicies, and the aim of the elements model is to develop the qualities that are missing or to recover repressed qualities so that we may bring balance and harmony between the elements. Approaching the client first from the perspective of the elements model as a diagnostic tool. I am suggesting that Maria seems to exhibit strong Fire (bilious) qualities as her primary position. I am presuming from my understanding that she follows the achievers path with regards to her inner development. The fire element is responsible for producing energy in a person or as in the analogy a fire in the belly drives which is a common attribute amongst most high achievers. The client Maria tends to have an active fire element which when expressed in its extreme has the quality of being mercenary and dangerous ,certainly when applied in work situations and group or team work dynamics, causing her personal motivations to impact the aim of the group and at the cost of the objective to be achieved. Her approach and mindset is that the needs of the one outweigh the needs of the many. Her approach to life is to succeed and compete at the highest level and that the purpose of life is to achieve all that can be achieved, like the sun, her radiance is constant and inexhaustible. Her attitude is one of optimism and enthusiasiasm with regards to money, status career and progression and may extend to personal relationships also, having the perfect 2.4 children and household status. The achiever is seen as action orientated and will accept almost any challenge as long as it is

fianacally rewarding or provides some sort of physical comfort and pleasure. The actions they take must leave them with feelings that they have worked hard, struggled and overcome barriers so they may shine and bask in the glory of achievement and experience their own success. Her fire seems to be exclusively Expressive exhibiting the typical arctype of Warrior. She applies a work hard, play hard methodology, so after a long day of breakfast, lunch and dinner meetings, all sales targets achieved and surpassed, the only way to celebrate would be more drinks, a few bars and then a nightclub and dancing for anyone that could keep up. She must be constantly on the go and in action be it physically or mentally, the depressive personality is known to be constantly on the move to avoid their feeling but this type is doing it more for the recognition that they are able to achieve all this in a day and tomorrow surpass those achievements. They find fulfilment and satisfaction through perseverance and not being beaten by a task or challenge regardless of the time, cost or energy it takes to do, which could include completing own task returns as opposed to getting an accountant, doing her own business plan, learning how to create their own web page and on the rare occasions where she is unable to achieve the task herself will resort to using her power and radiance of personality to influence, manipulate , suggest and create whatever environment is required for the successful completion of that task. She has limited reservations when there is something she wishes to acquire be that a job, a home, relationship and willing to risk facing rejection or failure and not being able to sufficently commit to a financial deal with providence. With regards to how this reflects her shadow aspects, certain impulses and desires when unconscious or hidden can be pre-emitted based on the manifested qualities and could be observed quite quickly during a single conversation, a business deal/transaction or in the space of an evening dinner date. Due to the deep desire to succeed and achieve ,the term at all costs indicative of a war cry could actually harm and work against the client, which as a process may lead to incongruent opposite qualities. In her quest to get the job done the personality adapts language and methodology till it becomes so fierce that it results in verbal abuse as well as recounting historical evidence including all the incidents and favours that justify her current level of aggression with regard to her request, as justifiable. In the pursuit of the goal, the party involved becomes nothing more than a means to an end and may experience being ordered or dominated even if the current state of affairs does not require that level of abrasive communication but the clients own needs and desire for it to be achieved her way, seem to justify the means. This attitude would extend to the point where the parties involved are them blamed and held responsible for the lack of success and become another challenge to overcome, a hindrance that is unneeded. Ultimately it leads to the client taking over the whole task herself in a vain attempt that the other parties will see the correct way for the task to be achieved and follow her lead. Other shadows qualities of gambler and exhibitionist seem to be expressed in their somewhat literal sense. It seems that these qualities become distorted for these types as not merely activates one is engaging in but become who they truly believe they are. The visits to casinos and exclusive establishments have become a way of life, a way of defining oneself and outer expressions of they

are within. The shadow could be seen as the dressing up to the point of being provocative, highly visible jewellery and make up and need for approval trying to gain attention and dramatic over the top behaviour to make up show a somewhat ungrounded or undeveloped earth element or even water element as this seems the only way to access the realm of their own inner feeing. In a somewhat unconscious way Maria will balance out the tendencies of the other 2 qualities by spending extended periods of time, sometimes days or even weeks in a state of inertia. This may present itself in a manner of ways from self created illnesses or over indulgent behaviour that then seems to be the first symptoms of a deadly disease as opposed to any actions on her part. Sometimes these sudden fatal diseases come on after some sort of disappointment in their material physical world but no link is made between the symptom and the event. A deal that fell through, some transaction or relationship has not occurred as the client had hoped or persevered for. The client could then be observed as a defeated person, depressed, heavy and displaying little or no energy levels. Theses symptoms are also expressed externally with the client wearing the same clothes for days, being unkempt, unmotivated to make any effort and generally being sluggish and washed out. Client may spend whole days on the sofa in a blanket whilst spacing out on no mind TV. Although they seem to have disconnected from their primary quality you will find that they will still respond to phone calls or emails in hope that some new deal or goal may transpire that will shake them up and out of their current condition and that they may concentrate all their fiery energy on. It was said of warriors and soldiers of old that they grew fat and bored without the challenge of battle. The recepetive quality or element seems to manifest with regards to their true motives. Whilst they may be doing or planning some form of action they will only disclose details of the current lack of motivation and complaints of how their life doesnt change and how they are sick of the rat race and game of winning that they seem unable to escape only to engage in the same activates again only this time with renewed vigour and higher targets. The client would seem to be completely authentic in who they are and who they express to the world, taking full credit for herself on a material and physical level. She prefers the path of least resistance and is content to perform and respond to all the requirements and expectations society places on her. She also seems to express a receptive earth quality which seems responsible for the containment and management of her fire. A balanced earth element may help to stabilise her shadow tendencies. Her earth qualities which manifest as disciplined, ordered, strong willed can transform her fire from being explosive and consuming to focused determined action. The risk taker quality which is always present and the gambler fire quality of her personality is also balanced with the earthy quality of caution, which checks out and takes into account all the figures and details and making sure the is low or no short term risk. When out of balance the fire consumes all elements and parties and even at times risking a successful end result or goal just so that it was done her way. This attitude may also be extended into her personal relationships and career. The client regularly feels a victim of her circumstances and feels there is no choice involved on her part and that she must do what needs to be done even if this acts against her better judgement or country to her truest beliefs and values. Due to her strong willed fire quality, she seems to stay in relationships that may no longer serve or fulfil her but would see the break up as defeat on her part. Stubbornness to keep things controlled and managed could

be view as a distorted earth quality or her earth quality being out of balance. The development or encourgement of her water quality in order for her to deeply feel her pain or sorrow and do what is truly right for her may ease this stubbornness and create more flow and ease for the clients life .

JUNGIAN TYPOLOGY. Jungian typology is based on the assumption that our most predominant attribute or function will have as its opposite our most repressed unconscious function. It was Jungs observation that every human being is born with four characterises potentials for understanding our raw experiences and in turn sorting it out in order to deal with it through our processing. He refers to these four potentials as the four functions because they represent characteristic ways the psyche functions. The two functions by which we apprehend and understand the world around us are referred to as sensation and intuition. Because these two operate automatically rather than rationally, he characterized them as irrational functions. The other two functions, he called thinking and feeling, he termed rational because they describe ways we order and evaluate our experience. Jung believes that we are all born with the potential to develop each of these four functions to some extent. But due to experiences or our natural tendencies one of these functions becomes stronger or more developed, the one we seem to have a special aptitude for and is referred to as our superior function. Then gradually over time we may seem to have picked up other skills and aptitudes in the other two functions in a somewhat limited way and Jung referred to these as our auxiliary function because they support our superior function. The fourth function apparently always remains relatively unconscious and access is limited to it to the point where it may not even be used. An intuitive person is not very observant of the world going on around them. They tend to live primarily in a world of future events and possibilities, and have little interest with what is going on in the present reality and also hate to deal with details and fine print. An example of this maybe of an intuitive leaving a company business meeting coming away with lots of ideas and dreams that the company might one day achieve and accomplish and how they will impact the world but have little or no idea of any of the items discussed at the meeting, leaving the practical steps and implementation to somebody else. A sensate type on the other hand would be very apt at dealing with the practical realities and is very much involved in the world. The sensation type would be called upon to get the intuitive ideas carried out, as they are less prone to dreams and fantasy worlds of the intuitive as his sensory awareness is geared toward outer reality, accurately observing every detail of his outer environment. Like a good journalist or police detective they are interested in specifics: who, what, when, where, why and how. They look at the practicalities, is there enough money in our budget for expansion, do we have enough to stock in place after our promotion blitz, do we have adequate staff to fulfil our sales targets. Each of these two types reacts to life spontaneously. The intuitive feels out new future possibilities and gets hunches without knowing how he arrives at the information or insight. In a similar way, the sensate person will record and process all sensory information automatically without effort. In both

cases these observations are immediate and automatic, and both types may argue that their point of view is correct and the truth, despite any logic or reasoning to the contrary. Thinking and feeling types on the other hand seem to operate more deliberately or consciously. The thinking type would organise all his experiences into a logical order and sort them into specific categories. In the context of our big company business meeting, this type would happily take responsibility for making a list of all the things that need to be done before the next meeting and to also organise the agenda and take the minutes, and if there was a guest speaker for the meeting they may wish that the speaker be a genuine authority on the subject he will be discussing. The feeling type would take a different approach and react somewhat differently. With regards to the speaker for a company business meeting, the feeling type would be more interested and concerned about the speaker expressing themselves well and presenting the material in interesting way that helps the listeners connect with the material according to its feeling tone than its content. According to Jung feeling does not just mean unbridled emotion but characterizes it is a rational function because it can be just as precise and discriminating as thinking. A superior function can sometimes be recognised and distinguished by observing how you behave, or might behave, in an emergency. Over time (sometimes a number of years) we may gain awareness of our third function whilst the fourth remains hidden and unconscious. This fourth function has been so buried in darkness and so unpractised that it is a very threatening aspect for the ego identity. My experience of the client is that she primarily operates from an extraverted sensate function with a strongly repressed intuitive function, her third and fourth functions are operating from strong introverted feelings with extraverted subjective thinking. Client relates a lot of importance to her image and appearance and seems committed to keep up with current trends/fads, fashions and social expectations in her current environment, at the cost of being limited to her thinking or feeling or the acceptance that there may be other ways to live in the world. Client therefore takes a judgemental stance against those, be that individuals of a different type or even beliefs, as abnormal and socially unacceptable and would regard them as being the problem with the world. Feeling types when they are extraverted generally tend to look for external approval and acceptance and use the comments, views and feedback they receive as reference points for what they should be currently experiencing and feeling. Client tends to label feelings as a hindrance and refers to them being a fools game that generally has no winner and seems quite unnessarsary as most things end in tears. Her experience of them is that they are unpredictable and dangerous, due to her negative experiences, and all her current expectations seems to be the only logical outcome and effect possible, maybe due to a number of early childhood experiences which has caused her to bury and repress this function. As this function would now pose and cause a threat to the present superior function which developed to compensate for pain and inability to deal with those emotions at that time, she understandably holds this as reality in her world. So the client continues to build on her superior function by being constantly active, out for drinks, restaurants night spots with increased regularity over time as the undeveloped functions fights for

attention and acknowledgement the client has to step up the actions of her superior function. This may sometimes be referred to a personality split, as the client experiences dissatisfaction from the routine and something within seems to be in conflict with their present way of being. The client therefore constantly feels drained, strung out, and tired and complains of boredom with their current lifestyle and existence only to then to fully book social engagements at the usual establishments and people for the coming week. These actions are then justified by claims such as how could i let my friends down, they need me......i could never let them down. This split continues to be evident in her close personal relationships and her feelings of being obliged as opposed to genuinely wanting to help and not wanting to appear selfish and therefore fell guilt. The client would feel she is being held against her will by fulfilling on a personal promise she made have made to a friend so i will go on holiday with you turns into I have to go on holiday with her, she has no one else to go with, and she so needs a holiday right now and I may become ill from not relaxing and it will all be my fault. This internal conversation would then lead to her needing to buy new clothes for the holiday whilst frantically looking for all the places to be seen at when she actually gets there. All of her relationships seem to be based on the need, of her friend and acquaintances, to want and need in her in some capacity or another in order for her to feel that she actually exists or that her existence is meaningful on some level, but really only seems to be there due to her own inability to access this quality within herself. The effect of this behaviour is that it leaves her feeling powerless and regresses her back to a state of a helpless and disregarded child, submitting to the demands of her parents, fearing the exposure of her true feelings. This results in childlike acting out, from general temper tantrums, spiteful comments, crying and sulking which everybody in the vicinity should notice and observe so they may rescue her from it. Another cause for upset and disagreement would be off any suggestion that this is of her own doing and creation. Any conversation involving mention of an inner world, inner truth, inner feelings or anything that does not involve our everyday psychical reality is met with inappropriate defence. She dismisses the whole inner experience as something aligned to wishful thinking and seemingly intangible that it does not require reflection of any sort as there is no where it exists objectively in reality. In her opinion much of the world does not operate this way and the search for inner truth or god is delusional. This can be typical of extraverted sensate types as they relate primarily from their five senses and reality for them is what they experience in concrete enjoyment. The client would feel a deeper sense of inner satisfaction from enjoying an expensive meal, a trip to a local health spa where they offer chakra alignment would be the extent of their inner explorations. Her repressed intuitive functions regularly presents itself in distorted ways, primarily and most easily observed in her romantic relationships. Her unconscious or repressed intuitions emerge in the form of projections. She will automatically jump to conclusions, adamant that an affair is going on and that working late actually implies that an affair is present in reality and so experiences high levels of anxiety and suspicious. As sensation is not a rational function her arguments and accusations seem quite justified and real and the only way of dealing with the pain of these thoughts is to eat or shop compulsively so she may feel better about the injustice.

FREUDIAN CLINCAL TYPE MODEL Personality is vital in defining who we are as individuals. It involves a unique blend of traits and qualities including thoughts, attitudes, behaviour and moods. The way on which we express these traits is ever present in our relationship to others and the world around us. Some of these traits are genetic and passed down through generations and inherited others are shaped by life events and our experiences. Initial experience of the client would expose vanity, superficiality, being self cantered and self indulgent in the attitudes and behaviours toward life. The clients prominent position is based on getting or demanding attention primarily through appearance and acting out in social and personal interactions. I would describe Maria as a hysterical (extraverted) personality. Her background history and current way of being seem to fall in line with the characterises of this type. She has reported that her father was authoritarian and had at time physically abused her and that the arrival of her two brothers had left her feeling hugely neglected. The father always dreamed of having boy as he saw them as more of a blessing than having girls (a old view strongly held in Asian culture that boys carry the name forward and are generally better at providing for their parents and that girls once married are then given over as the other families responsibility) and Maria goes from being only child to having to compete with two new babies and with the fact that they were boys. This period, as the newborns grew, created hostility within the client and drove her to regain the attention that she once received and was used too but failed as they were now the apple of her fathers eye. Her constant attempts to please the father went unnoticed, pushing the client to feel she could not compete on equal terms as she could never be a boy and resorts to play acting and over dramatisation and threats such as she feels so ill she may die. Parents may have tried to evoke some order in these circumstances but client seems to interpret this as control and physical abuse, leaving client with a discrepancy in her needs and wants, i.e. I love my father, but he hits me or I want to be close to him but I fear him . There is a deep need for approval and need to please others which stems from her inability to win her fathers approval in earlier years and this when left unrecognised will turn into furious demands, acting out and sometimes even physical violent acting out condoned as appropriate as this was her own experience. These emotions of not feeling loved or being ineffective has caused the client to over compensate with seductive and exposing dress and mannerisms. Her underlying feeling is of being defeated and not being able to compete on equal terms as she is a women so has no chance, as her fathers really wanted a sons. Her need for constant activity, work and social events, are driven with a compulsive hunger to fill what has been missing for her within, whilst all the while displaying overly dramatic and exaggerated behaviour as she accomplishes this. Her past and future romantic relationships tend to fall on troubled waters generally as the client unconsciously looks for revenge due to her deep seated resentment toward her father and her own inner masculine. SUMMARY

All three models provide us with some initial guidance and insight to the presenting client and could be described as an overview and generalization of the particular personality we are working with. They provide us orientation into the clients most obvious personality traits and how they may relate to the world and others around them, providing us a possible starting point for exploration. They may help us to gain valuable insight into the imbalances in the personality and help us distinguish what the client needs but only as far to give us road sins or markings of their condition as we accompany the client through their own journey to areas where healing is required, to take their distortions and transform them to a whole personality. But as well as helping us they may also hinder us in analysis. The human personality is complex and layered and to use the models in a rigid way could actually hinder the possibility of true healing, as therapists we should always come from a place of not knowing and inquiry and not presume the models or types can be so easily remedied in the way a doctor may when prescribing drugs to someones condition or illness. We all move between the various types and elements at some time or another and boxing a client into a category is of limited use. When the models were applied in a meticulous manner for example for the purposes of this assignment some confusion set in as all types and conditions seem to fit the client at various occasions and situations. There seems to be some basic conflicts between the Freudian and Jungian models which contribute to this confusion as they overlap with each other in some respects but contradict in others. The elements model seems over complicated due to the many variations but beneficial in the sense that it follows finding the middle way and incorporating all aspects of the personality to achieve balance and wholeness.