Introvert / Extrovert – In Two Minds

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Hello, welcome to Origin Story.

It is a between-season bonus episode

where we talk about some of the ideas

that influenced our world today.

I'm Dorian Linsky.

And I'm Ian Dunn.

Ian, this is one of your topics.

Just tell us what it is.

Introvert, extrovert.

I'm startled by the

regularity with which this comes up.

More than it ever used to.

Yeah.

And I think it's sort of part and parcel for me

with this current obsession

with self-categorization.

Am I type A or type B personality?

Or like the Myers-Briggs stuff.

Or I say, oh, are you an INTJ or an ESFP?

Or like, there's this sort of sense of almost relief

that you can hear in people

about being able to apply these

sort of scientific kind of terms to themselves.

But it's just not clear how valid

any of these terms actually are.

Because it's different from, you know,

like neurodivergence

that you can, you know,

you could be screened for autism

or ADHD.

And then that really gives you

a better understanding of yourself

and it can give you a tool kit

and maybe, you know, maybe medication

or then you understand which situations

you should avoid and, you know,

what works for you.

These are really kind of useful

like medical interventions.

And I'm just fascinated by where, you know,

personality and neurodivergence overlap.

And it seems to me that with introvert,

extrovert, there is not an official screening.

It's how people feel.

But people can come very strongly connected

to that identity.

And I suppose people do this with all kinds of things,

their identity.

Not a kind of, you know,

racial identity or gender and a thing like that.

But all these other kind of ways in which you labor yourself

and that you feel that your tribe is under siege.

Yes, yes.

You know, the politicization of so many different things.

And almost like the politicization

of whether or not you find parties

energizing or exhausting.

And I don't know whether it's healthy

to make all of those things politicized.

I think a lot of that came out of lockdown, actually.

A lot of people felt, you know, a lot of introverts felt,

oh, actually, I like this.

I like not having all these social expectations,

which is perfectly fine on a personal level.

But then it became, it went into some quite weird political places.

Well, it's just sort of like the world kind of swung on its axis, right?

Because generally speaking,

extroverts have a better time of things.

The world is kind of geared up for social contact.

You know, and whether you're popular at a party

or whether you're going to get the job that you go for interview in,

you'll probably, you would rather be an extrovert in that scenario

in order to maximize the outcomes for yourself.

But during lockdown, everything changed.

And suddenly, I mean, for a lot of people

that felt quite introverted, they were like, oh, shit,

it just turns out like I'm in the kind of like personality ruling class

for the next day, because I'm actually kind of okay with all this.

But then some of that, therefore, they sort of lacked empathy

for extroverts.

You know, people that I can think, I mean,

I would say that I'm an extrovert,

but people who are like extremely extrovert, I know.

I think there was a sort of withering away.

Yeah, oh, God.

Especially if they were single.

Like, you know, those are the people you really worried about.

You know, and your friends, you were worried about extroverts

who weren't in a relationship who weren't living with someone.

And they were there with people you checked in on,

like as often as you humanly could.

And I've heard.

But what I'm excited about here is that I actually don't know

anything about the history of these concepts,

and the history of these labels,

and you know, how much kind of, how much works,

psychologists have done on them or anything really.

They really are ones that people just use quite loosely.

And I have found it useful though.

I have found it useful that around the time you lock down,

some of my friends almost came out of the closet as introverts.

And I was kind of like, oh, oh, okay, right.

Like I get it.

And I get like, where you behave in a certain way,

or I get why I'm always the one that has to arrange to meet up.

And they do want to meet up.

But they don't feel that same compulsion to a rate made up.

To a rate maker plan as I do.

And so, you know, actually on that level,

I found it really useful to sort of have an understanding

of how your social battery works.

That was the image that I found most useful.

You're raising two of the things that I think are most kind of

compelling in this story.

And incidentally, the story is much more batshit

than you can possibly fucking imagine.

Wow, good.

So one of them is, I think the really positive attribute

of all this, which is clocking

that people have got their own thing going on

and everyone's different.

And actually, what's helpful about having these kinds of words,

introverts, actually, aren't the only kind of words there.

As long as you have a sensible approach towards them

and recognize that there's a spectrum that's being discussed here

and there's any one of many facets to your personality.

As long as you're not binary and crude and simplistic about it,

it can actually be really helpful in just clocking

where other people are at and just realizing

they've got stuff going on.

They won't have the same motivations and the same feelings

and particularly the same energy levels as you.

The other is that this story weirdly just covers this

really nebulous concept of energy.

It's about where do we get our energy from?

What is the energy doing?

And over the course of the story,

lots of people try for different explanations

of what that energy is.

For most of the story, it's going to be described

as sexual energy.

Because these terms originate in psychoanalysis.

And libido, which doesn't have the phrase

that we have for now,

it's just basically like all energy comes from sexual energy.

It's a brilliant way of looking at it.

And now we have this metaphor that is so deeply entrenched in us

that I think we can't think past it,

which is the idea of the battery.

Is the battery down by virtue of talking to people at a party

or is it recharged by talking to people at a party?

Obviously, the thing about someone like a hundred years ago,

they would never have been able to conceive of that metaphor

in the first place.

So our whole notion of ourselves as human beings

is just done by virtue of the technology

that we happen to be surrounded by.

I'm not saying it's not true.

It's definitely true that there is energy in human beings.

When we have workplace psychology,

there's a lot of really good research into that energy

because we need to know it for someone working at security

in an airport.

We need to know the point in which they stop doing the job properly

because they're tired and bored.

This stuff is really well documented.

But there's something quite telling and crude

about the manner in which we visualize it.

That can sort of play on your mind a little bit

once you start poking away.

Oh, in truth,

because I only came up with some metaphor a couple of years ago

I was interviewing an actress who was an introvert.

When you do a red carpet event,

she just has to build up to it and go for it

and be as outgoing as I can

and then just leave as early as I can.

You're not going to go to the after party

by then she's depleted.

I just never really thought of it like that

and the way that mine, conversely,

would be topped up

and that I do feel slightly reduced

if I'm not seeing people

and then sometimes when I'm out,

not that I'm never socially anxious,

doesn't mean you can't be socially anxious.

But then I do feel energized

and I'm like, what are we doing now?

I want to go and talk to this person now.

It's relatively new to me,

but obviously this is not a metaphor

that was invented by this actress

who told who I spoke to.

Okay, well let's start the story.

So the story begins in Vienna

on March 3rd, 1907 at 1pm.

Wow.

And at that moment,

the Swiss psychiatrist

and psychotherapist Carl Jung

is standing outside of the front door

of the Austrian Neurologist Sigmund Freud.

These are the two most famous people.

Well, in psychology, really.

There are no two figures

that have a greater impact in psychology.

It'll be their first ever conversation.

It'll last for 13 hours.

After three hours of young talking at him,

Freud will suggest that they start structuring

the conversation with written notes

so that they can approach methodologically.

It's like Joe Rogan's show.

It's like a short, short Joe Rogan episode.

Freud, as most people probably know,

he's the inventor of psychoanalysis.

He's also the inventor of so many terms

that are so commonly discussed

that they've seeped into our kind of

the architecture of Western thought, really.

So, you know, from edipus complex to the unconscious,

to the id, the ego, the superego.

He's basically one of the core influences of the modern era.

I was trying to think as I was writing that like,

who to convert.

I thought the only person that sort of was big enough

to compare him to would probably be Karl Marx.

Just in terms of someone just like the vastness

of the contribution and, you know,

the way that you almost can't conceive of a world

in which they didn't exist.

Well, like, you know, Einstein, I mean,

you really are talking about somebody's famous thing

because of the world, aren't you?

Yeah, and it's kind of weird to be doing this.

I was like, it's weird that this is the first time

I think we've ever mentioned him in an origin story.

Like, it's quite odd that it's the first time

that he's come out.

Karl Young, of other concepts,

which again sort of trip off the tongue,

synchronicity, archetypes, the collective unconscious,

and extrovert introvert.

Ha!

He's 20 years younger than Freud,

so he's a bit overroared by him.

But the thing with Freud is also, you know,

he's dealing with some pretty marquee stuff.

It's, you know, the early 20th century

and the shit that he's saying does not sit well

with a lot of people.

So he's a controversial figure

and he's not necessarily like a safe person to be.

You know, professionally associated with.

They've been writing letters for some time.

Young is just increasingly obsessed with going to visit him.

He has this word association process

that he plays with patients, you know,

tries to assess how quickly and with what words

they reply about a word that he says.

When he gets one of his assistants to do it with him,

he just goes, Vienna, Paris, yes, soon.

That's basically, he's like, I must go to Vienna.

I must meet Freud.

I must establish contact, though.

So he travels there with his wife, Emma,

and his colleague, the magnificently named Ludwig Binswanger,

who sounds like a character in the day-to-day,

who's a pioneer in existential psychology.

The four of them turn up, arrive at the house.

They sort of fall in love with each other, really.

Like, young things he's found

are sort of farther figure or in a mentor.

Freud thinks he's found an heir and a kind of son.

There's this weird, it won't surprise you to learn

that there's a weird kind of sexual energy

these guys that they occasionally allude to.

And you're like, yeah.

I mean, these men are like absolutely insane,

kind of neurotic fuck boys.

Like, they are just out of control

in pretty much every aspect of their behavior

over the next few years.

They turn up again the next day, young and Binswanger return.

And Freud, which gives you a pretty good indication

of how the conversations between these people works,

goes, oh, so tell me about your dreams last night.

And Binswanger expends his dream.

Freud's like, I think you've taken a sexual interest

in my older daughter.

Young explains his dream.

Wow.

And Freud just says, I think you want to

to throw in me and take my place

by this tenor of conversation.

Please explain your dream to me.

I will now talking really quite cute

and awkward terms about what I think that is.

When I do something about her dreams,

I just go like half listening.

Sounds crazy.

Oh, man.

I go dreams are crazy.

I can't think of anything worse

than someone telling me about their dreams.

If the moment that comes up, I'm just like, I, what will it?

Like, what do I have to do with my face

to look interested while you continue down?

Because you just want to kind of go, this didn't happen.

Yeah.

I was at my school.

I mean, it wasn't really my school.

It was like, kind of, there were different rooms there.

And I'm like, why does any of this matter?

It doesn't.

It doesn't.

I'm sorry for it, but it doesn't matter.

It's just a bunch of regurgitated brain guff.

Like, that's all it is.

Anyway, I'm sorry also for any psycho.

And there's a therapist listening,

going like throwing the phones across the room.

I'm in no position and have no authority

in order to make these kind of judgments,

but it's never stopped me before.

So we'll just grab on now.

And there is a core early distinction,

which is basically for a belief that sexuality is kind of,

the root cause of pretty much all psychological phenomenon.

And young believes at this point that it is predominant,

but not exclusive.

You know, that there are other forces motivating people's behavior.

I mean, obviously true.

Right.

But in that context of the...

So to hear, it's like the economy for commerce,

but not exclusive.

100%.

To be honest, I think the sex and the economy thing,

that's exactly what they've discovered this thing,

that's clearly really quite crucial importance.

And by virtue of being such a pioneer in it,

you're kind of unable to see around the fact

that there must be other factors that matter.

But there are points where young is literally reduced

to sort of say things like, yeah,

but when someone's hungry and they want to eat bread,

that urge is not sexual.

That's coming from a different...

But that really shouldn't be something you need to prove,

but in this context, it was.

By 1909, there were the first signs of tension

in their relationship.

And they took a voyage to America together,

along with the Hungarian psychoanalysts,

and get lunch in the German city of Bremen,

while they're waiting to board,

and start drinking wine.

And young...

This is pretty typical for how they bicker.

Young starts talking about the corpses of, you know,

peat bog men, those mummified prehistoric corpses,

and they've just been like one of the findings

in northern Germany.

And for it, as he's talking,

he just starts to conclude like,

oh, this is like symbolic of some deep inner yearning

from young.

It becomes increasingly agitated and finding,

you know, just his peat bog men,

peat bog men, and then just faints at the table.

Revives is revived.

Sorry about those around him,

and then just looks at young and says,

you harbor a death wish against me.

Ooh.

On the voyage, young dreams,

that he's descending a house.

I mean, this is not something like a healthy dream, by the way.

Descending a house, seven floors high,

he gets down to the basement,

and in the basement, there's just two human skulls.

And so for example, I want to interpret,

will you tell me your dream?

I really want to interpret the dream.

Young, the whole time, he's just thinking like,

I can't tell him what this dream is really about.

He claimed to suddenly do it like his,

his beginnings of his interest in mythology.

And so for you guys,

well, whose skulls were there?

And young says, lying,

and then to get out of trouble,

says they're the skulls of my wife

and my sister.

It's like, wow, just use two guys.

Coraling all the time.

Young just says to Freud,

it is a hard lot having to work alongside the father creator.

Which obviously is something that you've watched at me

on many occasions.

Am I the father creator?

No, very much.

That was not my inspiration.

So same year, 1909,

while they're in the US,

Young gives a lecture at Clark University in Massachusetts,

which is the first usage of the term in the modern period.

Not quite the meaning that we have of it

and that he would later develop of it,

but the first usage.

This is later published in a journal,

along with two of his other lectures in 1910,

that's the first time the term appears in print.

So it's in lecture three called

concerning the psychic life of the child,

where he talks about the case of a four-year-old girl called Anna

and goes on to tell the story of this girl, Anna,

whose mom is pregnant.

And then the labor pains begin,

this is the night before the woman eventually gives birth,

the dad asked the girl,

what would you say if you should get a little brother tonight?

And the four-year-old girl says,

I would kill it.

To which Young's, which is pretty far long,

Young's response is,

the expression to kill looks very serious,

but in reality it's quite harmless.

Oh, no, man.

If my daughter said that, I'd be pretty concerned, frankly.

Afterwards, this girl becomes, quote,

mournful and dreamy.

And Young compares it to the kind of depression

that often strikes teenagers,

and he says the following.

To approximate the psychology of a four-year-old child

to that of the age of puberty,

will at first seem paradoxical.

The relationship lies, however, not in the age,

but rather in the mechanism.

The allergic reveries express the fact

that a part of that love, which formerly belonged

and should belong to a real object,

is now introverted.

That is, it is turned inward into the subject

and there produces an increased imaginative activity.

Hmm.

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The word introverted did exist already as a verb

and he's using it as a verb.

He's not using it as a noun yet.

To turn inwards is literally like this,

the Latin of inward to turn and inside to turn inside.

And yet, no one had used it in this kind of capacity yet.

So this is almost like reverse alienation.

That marks this concept of alienation.

You take that which is best inside you and projected

onto an external object or an external thing.

It's almost like the reverse part of that.

It's like the attention that was previously on the external object

is now brought inside towards the ego,

towards the inner personality.

Their relationship, Freud and the youngs,

continues to sort of struggle and splinter and fracture

and break down.

Mostly on this question of sexuality.

So as it is with all other phenomenon,

you have the same with the idea of energy.

Where did your energy come from?

Was pushing you towards it and there's a Freud use of the term libido.

It describes it as the energy,

regarded as a constant magnitude of those instincts

which have to do with all that may be comprised

under the word love.

Young uses this word libido as well,

but he associates it with psychic energy in general.

Desire.

Basically, not just sexual desire,

that's just one part of it.

Also, young is just getting more and more into mythology.

I mean, he basically ends up being a kind of spiritualist, really.

You know, sort of talking to me, he's like,

I would drink maybe dreams,

just a sort of memory of our ancient selves and berms

to which Freud's like,

okay, well, what were the ancient people dreaming of them?

So there's a real, they're going down separate paths.

And now, of course, the way that young is,

you know, the kind of people that mention young,

there are young, sort of therapists.

I had a young therapist.

Oh, really, okay.

You would think on the Jordan Peterson things, yeah.

I mean, if anyone here has sort of seen that kind of mad video of pizza,

sort of talking about what dragons have to exist

because the idea of dragons exists.

This is not classic young inism,

but it's the kind of sort of trail of thought that you can go down.

When you sort of think, you know,

there's a collective unconscious

and there are certain sort of key archetypes that relate that

to a broader human experience,

all really very different to Freud's stuff,

which is basically just like,

this is all just fucked up sexual energy, really.

And that's,

we're not necessarily, be the way that it would be described.

Wouldn't even really be an accurate summary,

but nevertheless, there we are.

The breaking point comes in 1912

with the so-called,

the Kretstingen gesture.

The Kretstingen gesture might be

the most absurd dispute

between two intellectual figures that I have seen in my entire life.

I'm almost embarrassed to fucking tell you about it.

A whole chapter.

I read a chapter of a book on this.

I can't believe it.

Apparently, whole schools of competing young people in Freud,

I don't know if this is still the case,

but apparently, go to battle

over the rights and wrongs of this case,

which is essentially about when a letter was delivered.

So Freud was going to go see Binswanger.

He's going to see Binswanger at the Kretstingen,

which is quite a sense of me to say it.

This is like you're having a dream,

where you have to say a lot of German names.

I could have pretty horrific dreams about Scows

that I'd prefer than this.

So he writes to young,

says,

I'll be there for 48 hours,

starting on May 25th.

He sends the letter late enough that it arrives on that morning,

and young is kind of pissed off about it.

This is the time it was timed in order to avoid me.

So they argue about this for several weeks,

until young finally writes,

now I can only say,

I understand a Kretstingen gesture.

And that's the point that it takes on this name,

Kretstingen gesture.

And their personal correspondence ends for months.

Freud tells a friend,

he must now be in Florid Neurosis.

There is a final attempt to reconciliation

in November of that year,

in November 1912,

at a conference in Munich.

They walk around together, they have a chat,

young usually kind of differs to a menu

and starts becoming apologetic about the things he said.

He says, oh, this is my father complex.

And then they have lunch.

And Freud starts talking about the fairies.

Specifically, he starts talking about

the Pharaoh Akhenaten,

also known as a Manifest IV.

This is the guy, I don't know if you had,

he's the Pharaoh that tried to create a monotheistic solar cult.

So there's, you know,

that's completely against the way the religion was treated

in ancient Egypt.

There's just one Pharaoh that tried to create monotheism.

He scrubs out the name of his father

on the monuments,

sort of which Freud, you know,

is very pointed about

and wants to discuss things about

he's later wiped out of Egyptian history

and, you know, his statue is a destroyed.

He's only rediscovered,

I think, in the 19th century.

And as he keeps on talking about it,

young just becomes increasingly angry,

especially when he keeps on mentioning the fact

that he scrubbed out his father's name,

you know, on sculptures.

This is in some sense.

If a young says,

this derogatory way of judging

and then offers the fourth,

got my goat.

So he starts telling Freud,

you're being simplistic about this in journey.

And then Freud faints again.

Once again,

falls off his chair,

has to be revived,

young picks him up.

So basically every time their arguments

get to a certain point,

Freud just collapses on the floor.

And picks him up.

And writes later,

I shall never forget

the look he cast at me.

In his weakness,

he looked at me as if I were his father.

Freud later writes,

unfortunately by my last attack,

I have lost a portion of my authority.

There is some piece of unruly homosexual feeling

at the root of the matter,

which is like,

which at least,

the very thing you have to credit these guys with is,

at least being Freudians,

they don't allow that subtext

to sit there in the background.

No, I'll just block that right out and check it out here.

And there's a final angry letter from young,

really ferocious.

And Freud writes back,

I propose that we abandon our personal relations entirely.

I shall lose nothing by it.

From my only emotional tie with you,

has been a long, thin thread

the lingering effect

of past disappointments.

And so ends that friendship.

What happens over the following years,

is that young essentially tries to sort of formulate

what happened or comprehend it.

By virtue of his psychological work.

He's trying to think like,

why would it be like,

what is there that's fundamentally distinct

in people's personalities?

That means that people with mutual interest

looking at the same sort of facts

would like fall out in such a spectacular way

that means that they can't work together at all.

And in 1914,

he starts, the process,

quite a long process,

actually, of trying to work this into a new theory

of personality types.

It starts with a presentation paper

called on psychological understanding,

where he swaps the Freudian term libido.

He doesn't like any more

and he replaces it for the word,

form.

To say it again.

Quite, I don't want to.

It's alarmingly,

alarmingly good.

He describes as an

urgent expression for psychological values.

He's still talking about energy, basically.

And here, for the first time,

he's using the phrase introvert

and extrovert as nouns.

There is a kind of person that is this.

Not, this is the kind of action they're doing,

but there's a kind of person that is this.

Or he, by the way,

he never talks in binaries on this.

He, to be very, very fair to him.

Because a lot of his theories

absolutely fucking nonsense.

But like, he's very fair.

It's spectrum all the way.

And he's sort of very clear.

And no one's ever going to be

just one thing or the other.

You know, everyone's on that spectrum

at some point, you know,

on one side of the other.

Yes.

Because that's where I suppose it becomes

most annoying,

almost if the whole world has divided

introverts and extroverts.

And it's like some people,

of course, I know people

extreme extroverts, extreme introverts.

I know people where I couldn't actually say which,

and they'd be more in the middle.

And then, of course,

there's the idea that everybody has

a mixture of things.

I like going out, and I took me,

and then also, sometimes,

I just feel, you know,

eventually I do get worn out.

Not after a couple of hours,

but maybe after a few, you know.

And sometimes you just,

and then I spend a lot of time,

you know, as to you,

you're just sort of like,

writing on your own.

And so, you know, you say,

well, many writers just

in the nature of what they do,

rather than like running a restaurant

or something,

that can be quite an introverted.

So constantly,

I just find that whole idea,

when people talk about a binary,

doesn't make any sense,

because everybody has,

you know, they have,

they have, you know,

good days and bad days,

or kind of, you know,

loud days and quiet days.

Well, if I'm glad that,

that you're right away,

it's like, don't get it twisted.

Yeah, and it's not like,

two kinds of person.

Exactly.

And no one has that opinion.

But no one at any,

people on the internet too.

Exactly.

Well, this is the thing,

but I sort of think like,

the trouble is,

we can talk about spectrums,

all we want, you know,

whether it's right left

or whatever.

Once you have a binary,

say spectrum,

but people don't,

they just will not talk that way.

Because obviously,

what you should say is,

I'm more on the introverted side

of the spectrum than whatever.

But you don't,

you just end up,

once there's a binary,

you end up finding more sympathy

with one or the other,

you say it.

And then I think a process takes over,

which could potentially be quite dangerous,

where you just start to,

potentially limit yourself,

you know,

or best simplify yourself

on the basis of it.

But there is a recognition,

all the way through this.

Like, obviously,

obviously,

there are not just two types of human beings,

you know, with, like,

on or off,

on this question.

There we go.

Listen up, everyone.

It's covered two types of guy.

And people go,

is there perhaps a third type,

and he goes,

I said,

two types of guys.

So,

that's okay.

What's still unusual here is,

or at least none,

he hasn't quite got there yet,

is he's really,

basically just talking as if these are,

explanations for pathologies.

So, on the one hand,

with the extraversion type,

associated with hysteria,

and on the introverted type,

it's associated with psychosthenia.

These are both outdated terms.

First, it's like a distressed person,

and the others,

an anxious person.

Obviously, you know,

we don't use these,

well, I use the word hysteria,

all the fucking time.

But I use it in political comment.

You know,

you never know the design.

Yeah.

So, he says,

the introverted type is characterized by the fact

the places of harm,

chiefly to himself.

But the extraverted type applies his

harm to the external world,

to the object,

the non-ego.

Hmm.

Still quiet.

He doesn't quite got there yet.

But he does get much closer to it in 1921,

when he publishes the book,

Psychological Types.

And this is the book,

really, that popularizes the word,

introvert,

and the word extrovert,

and where it starts to enter into the mainstream.

It's still not quite.

I mean, it's still pretty weird

compared to our conception of it now.

And he's primarily

concerned less with feeling and energy,

although that's in there,

than he is with almost particular types of thinker,

almost like particular types of philosopher or almost.

Oh, okay, yeah.

To the point where he starts going through history

at a certain point,

it's based on the American Psychologist William James'

distinction between tough-minded and tender-minded,

tough-minded in this understanding

where empiricists who just,

you know,

are incredible fucking...

He tries to die.

Exactly.

Now, just amazing,

the kind of phrases that they would use

in order to hang their intellectual architecture.

Tough-minded are empiricists

who decide things on the basis of external facts,

tender-minded are rationalists

who interpret the world through a certain principles.

Oh, no.

Yeah.

No.

Where are people interpret the world through vibes?

Where's that?

I think you did.

As well, so when I say,

yeah, agreed, I should point out

that Dorian is making skeptical faces,

because it's possible for the radio,

that this is not the greatest way

to present this information,

but there we are.

Okay, what I find interesting about that is that

it comes as, actually,

it seems as the materialist,

idealist, distinction, and philosophy.

You know?

Like, is the fundamental stuff

the material world outside?

You know, or is it mine?

And obviously, that has a much longer tradition

than any of the ideas that we're talking about here,

hundreds of years by this point.

It's quite telling,

and I think this is important

for what happens here,

that it fits into that borrow so easily,

because we're going to talk about why, young,

said this stuff and what he meant.

But it's almost like he accidentally kind of stumbled

on this extremely intuitive,

distinction in people,

that as soon as people kind of heard it,

we're just like,

oh, no, I think I get that.

You know what I mean?

I think I get this.

Which is different,

because I think materialist,

idealist, is not that intuitive.

Most people don't think of themselves as just like,

they've not come to a conclusion about whether

material circumstance is shaped ideas,

or ideas shape the material world.

But they probably do have intuitively strong opinions

on who likes being out and about,

and who would rather have a quiet night in.

You know what I mean?

Like, it's got that thing that was anybody

without any interest in philosophy, psychology,

whatever,

could kind of glom onto the basic,

or at least a dumb-down version of that idea.

Yeah, and by God they do.

You know, this is like one of those guys' examples

of an idea once it is born.

Just like a comet fires out of the book

and just travels around the world

with extraordinary speed.

Young embraces James's kind of model,

the binary of it,

but he changes the content.

He uses the word extrovert,

an introvert instead,

and he defines it really

by the extroverts defined by the object,

the external.

They are self-confident,

exhibitionist.

They flourish in the regard of others.

They are gregarious.

They act on first thought.

These are all his words.

Obviously I'm not saying that any other stuff is true.

This is a very different conception than we would have now.

Introverts are subjective,

inhibited in their self-expression,

detached.

They act on reflection.

They're much more likely to be solitary.

So there's lots of different things here.

But then he just chucks more stuff on it.

He has this sort of four-fold model of attributes,

thinking, feeling, sensation, intuition.

And he attaches those to each of the types.

So you then have eight human types.

So you have sort of like introvert thinking,

an extrovert thinking.

It's sort of a taxonomy of different types.

It's utter nonsense.

I mean, literally the only reason this four of them is because

it's essentially a neurological brain at this point,

under the influence of mysticism,

has decided it has to be the number four.

So before, you know, it's fine.

He didn't need intuition.

He's kind of just made up intuition

so that before, rather than three,

I mean, he goes through the book,

just goes a bit mad.

I mean, he starts talking about,

he essentially traces this kind of binary through history,

to an Aristotle or introverts and extroverts.

And it goes into Christianity.

He says at one point,

that niche and incant are the same psychological type.

So I'm not being funny,

but anyone who's read either of those men

is not going to put them in the same bucket.

You know, he's just like,

this doesn't make, what you're doing doesn't make any sense.

I think we could write a book called Two Types of Guy,

which basically just,

which basically just takes all these ideas.

Literally, everyone who has ever existed

can just go in like one basket or another

because so much philosophy is like that, isn't it?

There's still people arguing about Aristotle versus Plato.

Right, right, right.

And if you just map them all on to all these other things,

and you can have a unified theory of humanity,

which would be complete bullshit.

I think we'd sell very well in airports.

If you come up with any binary

and just say, all humans fit this type,

something in us would do it.

Like if I was to say,

tight trousers or loose trousers,

all figures in history go for it.

Now, I just think you would just start quite quickly

being able to just do it, basically.

Well, well, I use the Artur Berlin one,

Foxes and Hedgehogs.

Yeah.

And again, it's like,

do I believe that they're literally two types of people

and those are the two types?

No.

And yet, I find it somehow appealing and useful.

I mean, you and I having dinner the other day,

and someone that we're having dinner with told us

that there are any two types of faces,

rat or frog,

I'm basically from weeks after that,

or I could think every time I saw someone's face was frog.

Or rat.

But like, I couldn't,

I actually couldn't get past the binary at all.

Like it completely corrupted my entire visual sense

of the human face.

However, this isn't really,

you know, the thing that's motivating young.

And the thing that's really motivating him

is that it gives him an opportunity

to work through his relationship with Freud,

because for him, Freud does an extrovert,

and he is an introvert.

And once you kind of clock that,

and then he has precise,

in the sort of set of eight, you know,

he has precise places where he wants to put them both,

you kind of realizing what's motivating most of it,

it's basically more of a self-critical,

self-pitying, self-justifying diary entry,

than it is a work of psychology.

He writes about his introvert type.

I mean, all of this is just,

it's just so self-pitying.

He, obviously basically,

is just talking about himself.

He usually has bad experiences with rifles in his own field,

because he never understands how to curry their favor.

As a rule, he only succeeds in showing them

how entirely superfluous they are to him.

He has only to be convinced of a person

seeming innocuousness to lay himself open

to the most undesirable elements.

He lets himself be brutalized and exploited

in the most ignonious ways,

if only he can be left in peace to pursue his ideas.

He simply does not see when he is being plundered

behind his back and wronged in practice.

When he starts looking at the specific Freudian extrovert type,

the rage just kind of spills onto the page,

this idea of someone who's a worshiper of facts,

which he builds into a theory,

which becomes totalizing,

which then becomes fanatical and intolerant,

exactly as he sees Freud reacting against his attempts

to change his ideas.

He then writes,

its habitual mode is best described by the two words,

nothing but.

The book is very poorly received.

Freud damningly says of it,

a new production by young of enormous size,

700 pages thick, inscribed psychological types,

the work of a snob and a mystic,

no new ideas on it.

He clings to that escape he had detected in 1913,

denying objective truth since psychology

on account of personal truths

and the observer's constitution.

No great harm can be expected from this quarter,

but he's kind of wrong,

because even though, I mean, no one,

literally no one stands up to any kind of psychological,

you know, argument over the four types and the this

and the that, absolutely not.

And if that even young drops those categories later on,

the popularity of it is immense and pretty much instant.

The Freudian James Glover at the time spots it pretty quickly.

Says young type classifications contain an element of judgment,

which has caught the popular fancy

and enriched the vocabulary of domestic recrimination.

By the way, one of my chief career ambitions

is to enrich the vocabulary of domestic recrimination.

1931, the Jewish American psychologist AA Robax

has introverts and extroverts has been universally accepted.

That's a way of separating the individualistic,

more or less shut-in type from the social,

talkative and usually more superficial person.

1939, the English psychologist William Stevenson says,

introvert and extrovert has slipped into everyday language.

This reminds a little bit when we did the eugenics episodes.

And there's a bit about IQ and how the original IQ test

was a really rather kind of quite precise

and quite benign was a way of identifying,

a very humane way of identifying students,

people at school who needed extra help.

And then it became,

it went down a dark eugenics path

and then just became popularized as something

that was profoundly real.

And you still get people now, you know,

on the American right or whatever,

will dismiss and tech world

and they've dismiss low IQ people.

Oh yeah.

And it's like the idea that IQ is this

uncontested 100% reliable way of measuring people.

And I wonder whether there is something about,

it happens in the 20th century,

where you were measuring people

from creating types.

And obviously in some ways,

this is an advanced in knowledge

and it's wonderful to be able to identify people

that might have sort of, you know,

it might be neurodiverse.

And then again, might need extra consideration

and help or whatever.

But in the more pop-sciencey way,

I can tell you what, you know,

when the Myers-Briggs test is developed.

But it just seems to be all part of that story of like,

you've got psychologists or medical professionals

who have been there for years on one level.

And then they escape into basically like the newspapers.

Yeah.

And then they become this kind of,

this becomes the sort of mania for measuring and labeling.

Yeah, it's a fantasy.

It's a fetish for categorization,

which has never been more pronounced than in our own time.

But you know, it's part and part of it,

I think kind of the modern era.

And also, it sort of feels like it fits

in the kind of like industrial capitalist society,

you know, what are the component parts of everything?

What genre is this music?

You know, it has to have something.

So you can market it properly.

So you can do this.

It's part and part of that thing.

We need to put labels on things.

And the thing that we most like putting labels on paradoxically

is ourselves.

Even though that feels quite constraining.

But it actually has, I think, quite a liberating sense to people.

They think, you know what?

That explains it.

I've always struggled with this.

That explains it.

That helps me.

I remember doing a test when I was a teenager,

because I couldn't work out how I could be,

really enjoy people's company

and really like going to parties and stuff.

But also sometimes it could just be

suddenly very socially anxious.

It would take me a while to get into it.

Or suddenly I just felt,

ah, this isn't happening for me.

And I was like, why am I an extrovert?

I don't know why I was so into this idea.

It must have been really good.

And I did this test.

And it said, you know,

I have no idea the legitimacy of this test.

But included I was a neurotic extrovert.

And I found that so useful.

And I sort of still do it in a way.

That kind of, it seemed to me to be that,

was there was a pseudo formal explanation

for how I could combine an enormous enjoyment

and need for social interaction

with a degree of social anxiety.

And it was like, oh, that was where I was.

That was the quadrant that I was in.

No idea on what this is based.

But it was a, I found it to be a useful idea.

I mean, in my medical opinion,

I think you should have that as your blue sky bio.

I mean, it still holds up.

I would say.

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It's funny that you mentioned your genetics

to take a little side road into it.

And I think if this was all there was to the story of introvert, extravert,

it would just be something really quite baseless and floaty.

There's just not enough there and it's not specific enough to how we use it now

in order for it to have stuck around.

But simultaneously to young,

quenning these terms,

we were starting to find in a very curious way methodologically.

A kind of scientific validity to the idea.

And that had nothing to do with you.

That actually starts with Sir Francis Galton.

Oh, the Eugenics guy.

The guy, the founder of Eugenics.

In 1884,

Jane, so we're going to go back in time.

Sorry, an origin story.

We try not to do that.

But I have to do it.

I'm afraid for this.

He first explicitly states what's now known as the lexical hypothesis.

It's a very weird idea.

It was the idea that must be true but seems quite bizarre when you first hear it.

It's that the most important personality differences will eventually be encoded into language

and it will therefore be possible which can construct a complete taxonomy of personality traits

by an analysis of the English language.

It just makes sense, right?

If something kind of personality type kind of trait is important enough,

eventually people are going to give it a word.

And then the second thing that you learn from that fact is

well, actually, we can learn a lot about personality traits

not by talking to people or doing any kind of example,

but just by reading a fucking dictionary.

This starts with Gordon Allport.

I'm a bad to give you a very simplified version of what takes place here.

Very simplified.

If you know that please don't write in,

either with this or many of the other errors that I've made and this whole range.

But in 1936 Gordon Allport has a really quite sort of striking intervention here.

He's actually a contemporary of young.

But he approaches this hypothesis by extraordinarily picking up a dictionary

and just working his way through it.

Comes up with 400,000 words.

This is quite personality in some way, shape or form.

Are you prepared? Are you hard working?

Are you ambivalent?

Are you in any way?

There could possibly have a shade of description and personality to it.

Finds 17,953 terms which describe personality or behavior.

Among those terms are lots that relate to the idea of extrovert and introvert,

as you might imagine.

Now loads of them we wouldn't have now.

Like so, for instance, shy.

Shy has nothing to do with introvert, extrovert.

You can be a confident introvert.

You can be very socially confident.

That's not what it's about.

It's about where your energy is.

But nevertheless, those words will be bundled together, along with a bunch of others.

Now over the coming decades, this list of words is kind of whittled down.

People associate them more with one.

You start putting them under an umbrella category over and over.

The British-Americans, I call it just Raymond Cattle, for instance,

eliminate a bunch of adjectives and synonyms,

and then start using surveys to ask people to self-rate

and deploy its quantitative techniques.

Correlations, factor analysis,

and we'll start whittling down these lists.

She started bundling and bundling in 1980.

You get a symposium, Lewis Goldberg and a few others,

who analyze the existing data.

And they find, as others have before them,

there's sort of five or six core qualities,

these core umbrella terms, under which everything seems to fit.

This has now been basically as close to accepted as you can get

in this kind of areas, the big five personality test.

Now this is as close as you can get something that's considered

like scientifically pretty fucking solid.

The vast amount of personality tests that you would do,

would you get a job, or for an interview,

or that you would do online, based on this idea,

the big five personality tests.

And all the way through it, extra version was in the list.

There's a few that you see would, you know,

that wasn't given such a prominent role,

but basically throughout this sort of long, long decades of history,

of this kind of evaluating this hypothesis,

never more sophisticated ways.

Extra versions there.

It's also openness, conscientiousness, agreeableness, neuroticism,

which I'm surprised that they're still using this word,

but that is still the word that they're using, and extraversion.

And that gives you the sense that really what young,

kind of almost stumbled on, was clearly quite fundamental,

you know, seems to have quite a fundamental role.

Even if we don't, you know, know how,

you can't really test the science of it,

and sort of, you know, with any degree of, like, proper confidence.

But what you can have is this role, like, clearly,

it's something that humans notice in themselves

and in others around them.

Now, you know, they emphasize in the language

that they use in the manner that they describe their own kind of mood.

There are a few sort of efforts coming up with hypotheses

as to why these types exist.

Which sort of concern, you know, is it possible that introverts

have a higher level of cortisol arousal than extraverts?

In other words, it's almost like, you know, like, if you're an extravert,

you just have to go a little bit further

to get that kind of cortisol arousal

that is available much more easily to introverts.

Yeah.

They kind of test they do on this,

is like, literally, introverts do,

according to this one test,

salivate more than extraverts in response to a drop of lemon juice.

Which apparently would give you some indication.

I mean, this is all pretty contested.

Extraverts might have a higher sensitivity

to the dopamine system,

so they experience more reward from stimuli.

It seems that there's more blood flow

and parts of the brain for introverts

that are to do with internal processing.

For extraverts, the parts that are to do with sensory

and emotional experience.

The thing is, like,

that could be the case

as a result of the fact that you're an introvert

rather than a cause of the fact that you're an introvert.

Although it does give some kind of like credence to the idea

that these are real things that exist,

real personality types.

So there is some sort of thing around the science of it.

But really, you just have this sort of story of just the stumbling,

the stumbling upon a really quite sort of fundamental characteristic

and distinction in human beings.

And then the effect that takes place later

as people start to grasp at it more and more.

And that is the part that then becomes interesting to me,

is basically the application of the label

and how it helps you and how it doesn't.

I have friends who, you know,

I think we're a bit haunted by how much they struggled socially

or how much they would struggle in workplaces.

And haunted is all by how easy others seem to find it.

And then by using some of these terms

and there are obviously, you know, others,

you could see that there was a sense of sort of self-justification

and reassurance that comes from that.

I also worry, though, that you just put yourself

in a position where you end up saying,

well, I can't do the presentation to the board

and I can't ever become a teacher.

And I can't do all these things because, you know,

because that's not what I am, I'm an introvert.

Or that you start saying to people,

you know, I'll never be someone who can just sit at home

and be content in my own company.

You know, I have to be socializing all the time

and find the reality of my personality.

So that sort of thing of like the reality of me has been revealed

by virtue of this pretty mercurial, you know,

clearly something there, but pretty mercurial description.

It seems like a pretty dangerous place to be,

but because we live in an era

where self-labeling and self-description,

especially with sort of like quasi-scientific phrasing,

is so popular, that seems like a bit of a danger.

To think of these things and to understand yourself better,

sometimes to understand your friends and to understand

like their needs, it's just like, even just like,

do they want to meet up in a really noisy bar?

Are they going to be happier in the corner of a quiet pub?

Even that sort of thing,

all this stuff that helps you understand yourself better,

helps you understand your friends or colleagues better,

and what their needs might be and breeds greater empathy

and understanding, all of that.

But I do resist the idea, like you said,

of the two types of guy,

where then it becomes self-fulfilling.

So rather than just being aware of the sort of

little mental idiosyncrasies that you might have,

you've just got like a load of stuff,

and it's like, I cannot do any of these self-limiting.

I can't do this because I'm not that type of person.

That seems to me to be negative.

I mean, I don't know any of this.

Did you find any of this like,

genuinely pernicious and dangerous in the way that I cue?

We are not talking about that kind of level of anything at all.

But I think when it translates into one of the inputs

in the big five tests, which is a much, you know,

sound or scientific basis,

you get rid of most of the dangers.

Because when you do one of those big five tests,

it's not, it doesn't come up like you were this.

It's a really complex, so A,

they're all spectrums, and there's five of them.

So just by virtue of that, you know,

you're positioned in a way.

It's a series of descriptive terms that give some indication

as to, you know, the things you have.

And because you're asked questions multiple times,

you know, on trying to establish sort of values

and cleverties,

you have a bit more confidence to it there as well.

And so you think, no, you could deal with that.

No one's really going to be able to,

they're going to really struggle on the big five stuff

to start putting themselves in a really brute, simplistic,

categorized box.

If it's just reduced to one binary,

they won't struggle at all in those tendencies that we have.

You know, the less scientific these ideas are,

the more our tendency towards that binary opposition

in the self-categorization is there.

But the more scientifically grounded they are,

the more complex and nuanced,

the most fascinated our sense of identity

and personality becomes.

And you know, much richer experience of assessing

how you should think of yourself,

and some of your vulnerabilities,

and maybe, yeah, some of your limitations,

but also the things that you're better at.

So how extroverts are you?

Generally speaking, I consider myself an introvert.

No, I'm really.

Oh, I'm fine.

Or social life, quite tiring,

and you're absolutely exhausted.

You see, this shows what I understand.

I always thought you were quite clearly an extrovert.

No, no, no, no.

But just with a massive ship and shoulder, quite rude.

But definitely.

But an extrovert.

No, but you know what, okay,

you know what the useful thing to me is,

I would say this,

and this is on the limitation point.

When I wake up in the morning,

if I think I don't have to talk to anyone

and I don't have to leave the house,

I will have a surge of joy in my heart.

That's the thing that most gives me joy

is to wake up and think there's nothing in the calendar.

I don't have to leave the house at all, ideally.

When I go home at night,

I'm at my happiest when I've had a really full day of stuff.

Right, yeah.

And it's like meetings and work

and a bit of good, healthy stress

and like, you know, out with drinks with friends

and someone you love, you know, in order to come back.

That's when I feel like a big life

I've had a big, fulfilling day.

And I have to keep that,

but my morning, me and my evening, me,

this makes me sound like,

you know, young would have time to say,

you know, have very different opinions

on how they want to live life.

And it's important that I have to keep on making sure

that non-limitation is making sure

that morning, me remembers what evening, me thinks.

Because if not,

I turn into quite a, quite a,

however, smaller life than the one that I actually want,

even though in that second, in that moment,

it would be my preference.

With perfect illustration of how complex it is, you know,

that just sometimes, I'm sure a lot of listeners

would feel the same way.

Sometimes you're just like, oh my God,

I don't want to have to do anything today.

I don't want to talk to people.

And yeah, other times they're just like, oh my God,

I'm desperate to get out there,

to feel part of the world, to be in a big, you know,

to be in a big, noisy place and see all my friends.

And it's just so normal, the kind of the inner,

the introvert and the extrovert.

And some people will lean more

on those directions,

but everybody's got a bit of the other.

Yeah.

Otherwise, well, if you were the most extreme introvert,

which is never, ever leave the house,

would just literally be a hermit.

And the most extreme extrovert,

we want those people at first, you meet them,

and you go, they're fun.

And then after a while, you're like, oh no!

Why wouldn't they leave me alone?

I mean, both of those types,

if that was all they were, would be insufferable.

Yeah.

Well, thank you, Christ.

That will multifaceted, complex human beings.

Guys, thank you for joining us for another origin story.

Many, we are quickly careering our way

towards the new season,

where we'll be doing longer episodes.

I'm probably like more meaty subjects.

Definitely.

Who am I to disparage?

The obvious genius of Cole Young's archetype.

And before that season,

we will be doing a massive live show.

It's going to be big.

It's going to be exciting.

We've got a big idea, isn't it?

It'll be just a great way of warming up for the next season.

If you've been to one of our show's four,

if you haven't, and you've always wanted to,

then come to this one to get a link in the show notes,

or you can just Google the origin story podcast.

And thank you for supporting us, those who do.

Cheers, guys.

See you soon.

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