Hello, and happy June!

I hope you’re enjoying the approach to midsummer/midwinter. Here summer is definitely coming up on us. Summer is our longest season in North Carolina, and it starts heralding its arrival sometime in May or even April, and hangs around until early October. So we are girding our loins and checking our AC units.

I wanted to do a deep dive into some esoteric stuff today, but first a quick announcement: I’m in the process of rotating a lot of my ebooks off of free for a while. However, The Breathing Sea is still free for the moment. Snap it up here!

Okay, now about that character deep dive…if you’ve read many of my books you’ve probably guessed that I’m very interested in psychology and in particular depth psychology. Depth psychology is the study of both the conscious and unconscious elements of the psyche. Of course, depth psychology is hard to study in what modern science would consider rigorous trials, and is often prone to misinterpretation. However, like literature, it offers a picture of human behavior that is much more real and true than what can generally be achieved by observations using the scientific method.

An offshoot of depth psychology is personality types. You’ve probably encountered personality typing in some form or another; maybe you even know that you’re, say, an INFP, 9w1. Or maybe you look at that and go, “Huh?”

Those strings of numbers and letters refer to two popular but often derided personality typing systems, the MBTI and the Enneagram. The MBTI is based on Carl Jung’s work on psychological types and was developed by a mother-daughter pair in the mid-20th century to help guide the large influx of women entering the workplace in finding appropriate careers. It argues that it is scientifically validated, but many people think it’s pretty woo-woo. Nonetheless, I managed to work it into my dissertation 🙂 The Enneagram is supposedly based on various ancient wisdom traditions and sacred geometry. It was developed into its current system in the 20th century by an Armenian-Russian spiritual teacher and a couple of Latin American psychologists. It is unquestionably woo-woo.

However, if you’re a student of human nature, both systems provide deep levels of insight, much more than things like the Big Five personality assessment, which I always considered to be an object lesson in why we mustn’t let hard scientists run amok through things they totally fail to grasp. Or in MBTI speak, Te is completely unsuited to deal with F and N matters. But I digress…

While both the MBTI and the Enneagram describe specific personality types, they divide them up according to different criteria. The MBTI (and Jungian psychological typing) describes a person’s psychological functions: how they take in information and make decisions about it. The Enneagram describes people according to their core fears and desires. 

What they both share is the idea that each person is essentially trapped in a box of unconscious but predictable patterns of behavior. By learning about your specific type, you can learn to recognize these patterns of behavior and liberate yourself from them. While you will still always be, say an INFP, 9w1 (not my type or the type of any of my main characters, by the way), by learning more about the tendencies of INFPs or 9w1s you can stop engaging in the same old mistakes over and over again. The ultimate aim is to become the best, most enlightened version of yourself you can be, with access to many different patterns of behavior as is appropriate for the situation. 

This sounds fun but, like most personal growth, often involves a lot of unfun experiences. In the case of fiction, this often means going on an epic hero’s journey and/or confronting your Shadow in very concrete form (think Luke Skywalker in The Empire Strikes Back cutting off Darth Vader’s head only to see his own face staring back at him with dead eyes). While it wouldn’t be very pleasant–or survivable–to actually have those experiences, fiction provides us with a mental training ground to dive down into our unconscious and discover who we really are, without the need to slay any actual dragons.

Okay, that’s the theory review. I hope it was interesting rather than soul-deadening. Stay tuned for the next episode of this thrilling saga, in which I reveal my own and my heroine Slava’s personality types! And in the meantime, if you’d like to share your MBTI and/or Enneagram types, I’d love to hear about it! I have an insatiable curiosity about that sort of thing.

Until next time, and happy reading! 

E.P.