We're Too Jung for Our Own Good

Personality is a very broad notion. Essentially we’re all different – even twins – with no two people behaving in perfect unison or reacting to life’s obstacles in quite the same manner. So for now, let’s forget the types of personality and concentrate on the person behind the personality. Now I’m no Maslow, Jung or Freud but for me there are three types of person, comprising of the following:

1. Those that project a personality according to what they believe others consider fitting of them. The sort of person who’s objective in life is to correspond to how other people perceive them. You’re female and have blond hair? Act all dizzy and confused intermittently! Well, it’s what’s expected so why not?

2. Those that project the personality that they desperately feel that they were denied at birth. The sort of person who’s objective in life is to attempt to prove to themselves that they’re not an insipid sack of scrotal off cuts. Basically, any man who exfoliates in order to stoke the infernal blaze of narcissistic necessity.

3. Those that, quite frankly my dear, don’t give a damn either way. The sort of person who doesn’t care what others think; who doesn’t even care what they think of themselves.

Of course, the latter can – and almost certainly always will – be contained within the confines of the previous two, i.e. there are people who like to project that they don’t care for the thoughts of others and also those that like to kid themselves that they don’t care. Both scurrilous buggers, if you ask me.

Which one am I? The majority of people will instantly, and most of the time wrongly, put a tick next to box three but honestly, the first description suits me best. Due to my profession, the people I know expect me to have strong integrity, honesty and a degree of expertise. They expect me to be the sober, calming voice of our somewhat barbarous rabble. In their eyes I don’t make mistakes and the fact that I do is inconspicuously hidden from them, but there’s no harm in keeping up the pretence.

That’s the type of person I am in accordance with my earlier assertions, but is this my actual personality? I honestly don’t know – it’s hard to judge oneself on such matters without somehow being extricated from my own being. Preferably, this can be done one day without the need of hacksaws. Besides, the question is practically moot considering that the subject of personality is being saturated by the modern era’s fascination with labelling. In my day (quiet at the back, young pups) an unruly child was beaten with a ruler in school and then with a leather belt at home. Nowadays, they’re sent to a psychiatrist to be diagnosed with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder and sent on holidays to Italy. It’s not the child’s fault that he’s a little bastard; it’s the chemicals in his brain, y’see.

This mantra is carried on throughout contemporary society. Criminals don’t need punishment, they need rehabilitation. They need a better standard of living than many law-abiding citizens. They need a Playstation and a DVD player and they most certainly need to be let out at weekends. It’s conducive to “repairing” their personality, assimilating them among the normal. It makes them a better, more valuable member of humanity and before you know it they’re hot-stepping it up the ziggurat towards respectability and obedience. I tell you, they’re not as stupid as they appear these criminal types, because they’ve been taking the British penal system on a magical mystery tour for some years now.

ADHD and criminality are just two examples comprising the slither of psychosomatic iceberg that humankind seems destined to scrape its rusting hull against. There appears to be a gratuitous excuse for every major fault in personality. It’s no longer feasible to plainly admit that a person is flawed out of the simple reasoning that there can exist not one single perfect human being. Each and every deviance from the standard model must be categorised and explained. In this sense, psychologists have chosen the path of scientific rigour when I don’t feel that it can be applied so strictly within this specific field. As touched on by a previous writer, it’s like trying to fathom out the exact qualitative and quantitative behaviour of each and every atom in the universe – an impossible, impractical and unrealistic undertaking to say the least.

So why do they bother? A vain, arrogant man obsessed with the consumption of his own queef-fuelled ego was once just exactly that. Not to a psychologist, oh no. To a psychologist he’s a prime case of Narcissistic Personality Disorder or what is more commonly known as “My reason to stay in academia and avoid getting a proper job”.