Do You Have the Personality?

‘The strong, masterful personality of Holmes dominated the tragic scene …’
‘THE ADVENTURE OF THE SOLITARY SCIENTIST’
We all make sweeping judgements about people. Him over there is arrogant, her in the corner is needy, and as for her friend … well, where do I
start?
The truth is that many of the judgements we make about personality are instinctive and say as much about us as they do about the person we are
judging.




 The study of personality can never amount to an exact science. However, there is a body of long-established research into personality that
gives us a good basis for discussion. So how does your personality type match up against that of Holmes?
The founding father of the psychological classification of personality types is Carl Jung, who published his landmark study Psychological Types
in 1921. He outlined two pairs of cognitive functions. On the one hand, the ‘perceiving’ (or ‘irrational’) functions of sensation and intuition, while on
the other hand, the ‘judging’ (or ‘rational’) functions of thinking and feeling. In layman’s terms, sensation is perception as derived from the senses;
thinking is the process of intellectual and logical cognition. Intuition is perception as derived from the subconscious while feeling is the result of
subjective and empathetic estimation.
As if all this weren’t quite complicated enough, Jung threw in another element: an individual’s personality may be classified as extrovert (literally
‘outward-turning’) or introvert (‘inward-looking’). In Jung’s analysis, each individual has elements of all four functions to a greater or lesser degree,
with each manifesting in an introverted or extroverted way.
Jung’s philosophy was subsequently developed by many different parties over the years. Among them were the mother-and-daughter team of
Katharine Cook Briggs and Isabel Briggs Myers, who developed the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), a trademarked assessment first
published in 1962 that categorises personality into one of sixteen types based on four dichotomies:
Extraversion (E) – Introversion (I)
Sensing (S) – Intuition (N)
Thinking (T) – Feeling (F)
Judging (J) – Perception (P)
Personality types are represented by a four-letter code comprising the relevant abbreviations noted above. Of course, Sherlock Holmes never
underwent such a personality test because he pre-dates them, is fictional, and would have had no truck with psychobabble. However, others have
retrospectively attempted to assess him, with a broad consensus that he would probably lie somewhere between an INTP and ISTP classification:
introverted, favouring intellectual reasoning over reliance on his feelings, and generally acting in response to information gathered rather than prejudging
a situation. The question of whether he best fits the sensing or intuition classification is much less clear. Incidentally, it has been suggested
that Watson’s profile best fits an ISFJ classification.
But what about you? Are you more of a Holmes or a Watson? Surely not a Moriarty? The MBTI test can be undertaken under the supervision of
registered practitioners but there are many other Jungian-based tests that are free on the internet and can be self-administered. However, it is
worth noting that personality testing should not be treated as a game nor as an exact science. Answering half a dozen questions on the internet
cannot define your personality, for better or worse! But using a reputable personality test might offer you some useful insights into how you operate.