SUCCESSFUL SELF EPUB ED EB

Dorothy Rowe

• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780006373421
• eBook ISBN: 9780007381890
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Applied Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Is it possible to be truly successful as a person? Or must we, as most of us do, continue to live our lives feeling in some way trapped and oppressed, frustrated, irritable, haunted by worries and regrets, creating misery for ourselves and others?

In 'The Successful Self', leading psychologist Dorothy Rowe shows us how to live more comfortably and creatively within ourselves by achieving a fuller understanding of how we experience our existence and how we perceive the threat of its annihilation.

She demonstrates how to develop the social and personal skills we lack, retaining the uniqueness of our individuality while becoming an integral part of the life around us and learning how to value and accept ourselves.

With the originality, clarity and unfailing wisdom she has become famous for, Dorothy Rowe enables us to revolutionise our own lives and the lives of others in the process of becoming a Successful Self.

Extraverts and Introverts

2

Our Two Realities

While you have been reading the first chapter you might have wondered whether the two ways of experiencing our existence relate to being an introvert or an extravert. Indeed they do. I am just not very happy about using the words ‘extravert’ and ‘introvert’. They each have so many meanings that conversations where they are used can be very confusing. So in this chapter I shall talk about some of the ways the words are used, and I shall try to define very clearly what I mean when I call someone an introvert or an extravert.

There are three main ways that the words ‘extravert’ and ‘introvert’ are used:

(1) as descriptions of the ways people behave,

(2) as labels for that kind of group which psychologists call a Type,

(3) as the preference each of us has for internal or external reality.

‘INTROVERT’ AND ‘EXTRAVERT’ AS
DESCRIPTIONS
OF THE WAY PEOPLE BEHAVE

When someone is rather withdrawn, quiet, not very talkative we can describe that person as ‘introverted’. If that person behaves like this persistently we can describe that person as ‘an introvert’.

When someone is very happy, talkative, sociable and active we can describe that person as ‘extraverted’. If that person behaves like this persistently we can describe that person as ‘an extravert’.

Most of us can behave in both introverted and extraverted ways.

When we feel tired, or sad, or worried, or shy we can become withdrawn and silent. If the conditions that make us tired, or sad, or worried, or shy persist over a long period of time we can be so silent and withdrawn that people might describe us as ‘an introvert’. We might think of ourselves as being ‘an introvert’.

Similarly, when we feel very happy, or excited by news of good fortune, or with friends who stimulate us, we can become excited, sociable and talkative. Some of us are very good at being excited, sociable and talkative so that the people we are with won’t see how sad and worried or shy we really are. If the conditions which make us excited, sociable and talkative persist people might describe us as ‘an extravert’. We might think of ourselves as being ‘an extravert’.

‘INTROVERT’ AND ‘EXTRAVERT’ AS
TYPES OF PEOPLE

One form of structure we all use all the time is that where we see some feature which a number of people possess we use that feature as a way of grouping those people together and labelling that group. This is how we bring order into the chaos of a multitude of individuals where no two people are the same.

The first of the structures we call a group which we create is ‘mother and me’, which later we extend to the group ‘family’ with the contrast ‘not family’. At the same time we are creating groups we call ‘male’ and ‘female’, ‘adults’ and ‘children’. Then we go on creating groups wherever we see some aspect of people which we think is important – friends and enemies, blacks and whites, golfers and non-golfers, and so on.

Useful though this technique is in reducing confusion, it is dangerous because it can lead us to forget that in creating the structure of the group we have ignored certain important characteristics of each individual in the group. Thus, we can come to believe that if a person is in such and such a group the characteristics of that group explain everything about that person. Then we say things like, ‘You behave like that because you’re a man’, or ‘You must be good at sport because you’re an Australian and all Australians are good at sport’, or ‘You and I will get on well together because you’re a Sagittarian and I’m a Virgo, and Sagittarians and Virgos always get on well together’.

Dangers like these have never stopped doctors and psychologists from putting people in groups, slapping labels on the groups, and then explaining everything about each person in terms of these labels. Woe betide you if you find yourself put in a group and labelled ‘schizophrenic’ or ‘hypochondriac’ or ‘neurotic extravert’ or ‘Type A personality’. It’s no use jumping up and down and waving your hands and saying, ‘I’m not like that. I’m me, an individual, like nobody else’. The doctor or the psychologist has put you in a group and labelled you and that’s that.

Down the centuries, when doctors and psychologists have wanted to explain why people behave as they do, they have said that there were various groups or types of people, and everyone was one of these Types. These Types were based on things like ‘bodily humours’, or ‘temperaments’, or constellations of stars, or the bumps on a person’s cranium, or the yet unidentified set of genes a person is born with, or the answers a person gave to a set of questions.

Thus, you might think that you feel frustrated, angry and disappointed because from your earliest childhood your family have prevented you from being yourself and doing what you want to do, but according to the Typologists you are wrong. You feel like that because you have a ‘choleric temperament’, or were born when the sun was in the ascendant, or you have a big bump on your cranium, or you have a ‘manic-depressive’ gene, or because you got a high score for Extraversion and Neuroticism on the Eysenck Personality Inventory.

Thus do Typologies take power from us and give it to ‘the experts’, and prevent us from changing.

Whenever we become very interested in a typology it is very easy to see it operating everywhere. You can pick a Sagittarian by the way she walks down the street or a Neurotic Introvert by the way he behaves at a party. But if we are interested in finding the truth and not just in proving ourselves to be right we have to ask, ‘Does this aspect of people really exist or is it just something I have imagined and then projected on to the rest of the world around me?’

I used to think that that aspect of people which is usually called ‘introversion-extraversion’ was just a figment of some psychologists’ imagination and bore no relationship to real, lived experience. Early in my career as a psychologist it was the fashion to use a statistical technique called ‘factor analysis’. Psychologists were always claiming to have found such and such a ‘factor’ after having given their subjects a ‘battery of tests’ (a ‘battering by tests’ is a better description of what actually went on). There were great arguments over the existence of these ‘factors’. Some psychologists said we all had one big Factor G of General Intelligence and lots of little S Factors of special abilities, while other psychologists said there was no Big G, only lots of little S factors. What neither side would admit was that whether a psychologist ended up with a Big G or not depended on the way he did his sums and grouped all the correlations he had done together. Meanwhile, other psychologists were discovering all these different Personality Factors. (Which Personality Factors were found depended which professor the psychologist worked for. Psychologists working for Professor Cattell in America found factors different from those psychologists working for Professor Eysenck in England.) We were all supposed to have these Intelligence and Personality Factors, large and small, inside us. If you believed all this you could think of yourself as being like a sweets jar, jammed full of different sized lumps of candy. What you were supposed to do with these ‘factors’ was never explained, although everything you did do was explained in terms of one or other of these ‘factors’.

However, as time went by, evidence that the distinction between extraversion and introversion did exist kept appearing in my own research, first in my work using the Rorschach Inkblot Test, and then in my studies in Personal Construct Psychology. I had to go back to re-reading psychologists as opposed as Carl Jung and Hans Eysenck, both of whom group people into extraverts and introverts. I could see in their work links with mine.

Jung, in his book Psychological Types,¹ wrote that, ‘introversion and extraversion, as a typical attitude, means an essential bias which conditions the whole psychic process, establishes the habitual mode of reaction, and thus determines not only the style of behaviour but also the quality of the subjective experience. Not only that, it determines the kind of compensation the unconscious will produce.’ In Jung’s view, an harmonious life for the individual comes from a balancing of the attitudes of introversion and extraversion.

My research has led me to agree with Jung thus far, but after that we part company. Jung felt that grouping people into extraverts and introverts was not enough. In his obsessional way he went on subdividing his groups. He created Thinking as against Feeling, Sensing as against Intuiting, and Perceiving as against Judging Types which could be combined in one person in different ways.

Sixteen different ways in fact. The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator² identifies sixteen combinations of Jung’s Types and describes each combination in positive terms. The MBTI is becoming increasingly popular, especially in business and health care institutions where people working together amicably and actually talking to one another is actually much rarer than it should be. Seminars where a group of colleagues fill in the questionnaire and discuss their answers can be an extremely useful exercise in discovering that each of us has an individual and unique way of perceiving ourselves and our world. Also, knowing that you are an ISTJ, or an ENFP or whatever, can be very useful in providing you with an excuse for your bad behaviour. Then you can say things like, ‘Of course I’m outspoken. I am an ESTJ, and all ESTJs say what they think.’

However, when a senior executive decides that all his management team should be the same psychological type, as measured by the MBTI, he shows that he has not understood why every organization, be it a family or a multinational business, needs to be made up of individuals with contrasting and opposing perceptions. That way we can complement each other, make up for one another’s deficiencies, and, by comparing and contrasting our different perceptions, have a better chance of discovering what is actually happening as distinct from what we imagine is happening. Thus we can act more effectively.

If you read through the descriptions of the sixteen Myers-Briggs Types you can feel that you wouldn’t mind being any one of these types. Each of them seems really nice and tremendously sane. You won’t feel like that if you fill in the Eysenck Personality Inventory. It is full of traps – a Lie score to show if you cheated, and a Neuroticism score to show how crazy you are, even though you might never have set foot in a psychiatrist’s office. You do have a chance of ending up being labelled a Stable Introvert or a Stable Extravert, but equally you run the risk of being labelled a Neurotic Introvert or a Neurotic Extravert.

Hans Eysenck would lay no claim to being ‘nice’. He is honest, truthful and plain-speaking, qualities which can prevent a person from being thought to be ‘nice’. He is, in William James’s terms, ‘tough-minded’, and he has no time for ‘tender-minded’ psychologists, nor for ‘unscientific’ thinkers like Freud and Jung. He has stirred up enormous controversies. He has also had an enormous influence on research in psychology, both in the way psychologists do research and in what research they do.

Initially, the Eysenck research method was to take large groups of people, give them a number of different tests and look at the correlations of test scores that emerged. Such correlations, Eysenck said, could be considered to be ‘dimensions of personality’,³ which became the title of his first book in 1948. One dimension which appeared consistently in his research results was what Eysenck called ‘extraversion-introversion’, and as a quick and reliable way of measuring where a person stood on this dimension Eysenck devised the Eysenck Personality Inventory (EPI), a short questionnaire which is regularly used in a wide variety of research. What this research shows is that those people labelled ‘extravert’ and those labelled ‘introvert’ differ in many important ways, such as in the pattern of changes in body temperature, which affects how efficiently we can work at different times of the day and night, and the quickness of recovery from jet lag. Introverts have a slower recovery rate from jet lag than do extraverts. Andrew Wallace, who would score high on Introversion on the EPI, had his only ‘large shunt’ (large accident) in a racing car when he got off a plane from Australia at Heathrow and went straight to Silverstone to practise. He discovered that his reflexes were not as quick as they usually were.

Eysenck and his colleagues were not satisfied with just describing these differences. They wanted to know why, and to answer this question they looked at the neurological functioning of extraverts and introverts. This research, carried out with large groups of a wide variety of people and with a variety of methods has led Eysenck and his colleagues to conclude that a person is born and remains either an extravert or an introvert. The bases of extraversion and introversion are brain states which are innate and genetically determined. Eysenck wrote,

‘Introversion is produced essentially by high arousal levels in the cortex; this high arousal level, in turn, is produced by an over-active ascending reticular formation … People have a preferred level of arousal – if this is too low, they are bored, while if it is too high they are upset. Extraverts tend to have a level which is too low most of the time, unless the environment can provide excitement and stimulation; hence they are stimulus hungry and sensation seeking.’⁴

Thus to the extravert external reality is immensely important, for only it will provide the necessary level of stimulation. For the introvert external reality can be dangerous, for it can become painfully overstimulating. Withdrawal into the physical stillness of internal reality means a dangerously low level of stimulation for the extravert, while the quietness of internal reality allows the introvert to reduce stimulation to its optimum level. Anything we see as dangerous we also see as strange. Thus the reality which is dangerous is less real. The reality which is safe is the real reality.

All living organisms, of which we are one species, are very competent in seeking not just the conditions which will allow them to survive but the conditions which will enable them to function at their optimum level. To do this organisms have to have some inner representation or structure which relates to what the organism needs and the conditions which will meet that need. In some organisms this structure is at a level we call ‘instinct’, and in other organisms the structure involves a system of mental representations which we call thinking.

Up to recent years human beings, in their vanity, claimed that as they were the only animals who thought, talked and used tools they were the highest form of all the species, the pinnacle of creation. Now the claim to such superiority has to be made for other reasons, for what has become increasingly clear is that many species use a structure of internal representations which allow them to create a system of communications and, in some cases, tools. (To form the idea of a tool you have to have some notion of past and future and some mental picture of how one object relates spatially to another.) All we can claim now is that human beings use the most complex structure of internal representations which we reveal in the way we talk and act.

To survive physically we need a properly functioning neurological system, and to live well we need the conditions which allow our neurological system to function at its best. When we are born we have the potential to create structures which are internal representations of our needs and the conditions which will fulfil these needs. We immediately proceed to do this. We think and we engage others in conversation. As babies we know how to turn our heads away when the stimulation around us is too much and how to fuss and cry when the stimulation is too little. As adults we adjust the level of...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• Extraverts and Introverts
• The Successful Self
• Index
• About the Author
• By the Same Author
• Notes
• Praise
• Copyright
• About the Publisher