How do you think Autism related to Jungian Psychology?

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jungian_psychology

I'm curious to what everyone else thinks about this, as I'm starting to draw a bit of a blank myself...

From what I remember, I was a INTP as far as Jungian psychological type is concerned


I think that most aspies would be INFP or INTP

There are tons of jungian test around

I am an INFP

We're smart enough to recognize pseudoscience and nonsense when we see it. One of the benefits!

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autism

by your powers combined I am captain planet.

the MBTI, socionics, chinese zodiac and grecco zodiac, probably come from this obsession of categorization


the MBTI is based on the concept but limited to 16 types in relation to each other, socionics focuses on the social interaction part of things, that's what it talks about (not the intellectual methodology inside the mind)

this is an important distinction, because INTP's and INTJ's are basically reversed in the MBTI to the socionics thing

it's all technically just pseudoscience, but I've found the MBTI works best from what I've been able to see

also, zodiacs are a good version of this as well, between 12 personality types as a baseline, it's reasonable to pick something and just go with the animal emblem

nuance occurs when one adds elements into the mix, there's 5, water, wood (part of earth), air, fire, metal (different part of earth)

meaning you get 60 different personality types total (12 animals times 5 elements per animal), however it's doubly confusing because now some of the other 12 animals you dismissed could be brought more into line via the elements thing, to a large extent this seems to just serve as a form of "second chance" for crackpots, but at the same time it's fairly decent if one's acquainted with how elements are considered personality traits, and the zodiac animals are too

my association tends to be tiger and fire (from the chinese zodiac), gemini and air (from the grecco/western zodiac), so I like to think of twin tigers blitzing like lightning (fire + air) dancing around each other, as fire, and as air, sometimes combining into lightning for a strike, otherwise just being around

this is the merger of two different personality types, because both fit me but not quite perfectly, so I formed a new conceptualization, a symbol of identity that is compact but expresses a fair bit, I can just putt along or I can strike like some sort of unholy blitzkrieg when my mind is interested, and as an INTP I also do precision of reason ----> so in other words I've found a roughly analog set of descriptions that work within 2 different zodiacs and the MBTI

the jungian archetypes are somewhat of an attempt at the basic building blocks of all the others, he was trying to break them down and figure out psychology by looking at what he considered to be the "pure character traits" of individuals that drives them

to be fair to jung, he didn't know much about neurology, so a lot of his work basically presumes intent and earlier psychological distress as the reason people are different - it stems quite a bit from religious ideology in this sort of "spiritually minded" way... but of course the categorization of personalities not based on ancient mythologies was a new idea and people lept on it that's fine

it's simple, it's in line with the "fuzzy thinking" that so many people are used to, but at the same time has an underlying mechanism of categorization.... but not because I choose mine by dates, but rather I picked the one that I liked, and can emulate the most, and nowadays many people have mined through it, picked the good parts and relegated jung to history somewhat


and I do not know how I did this, this is what's known as "unleashing the inner daemon" amongst writers from what I get ---> daemon is basically a spirit of inspiration, not some christian red skinned horned guy thing in this case

ah, but then I forget, you guys probably understand what I mean already

Not sure what the op is asking.

Jung, like freud, was concerned with the software of the mind, and not so much with the hardware.

Neurosis is a software problem. As you grew up your parents programed you wrong, or you saw something nasty in the woodshed and got traumatized -or whatever. And the job of the therapist is too straighten out your software.

Autism is a hardware problem. you're just wired differently than other folks.

So I wouldnt expect to find a cause for autism in the writings of Jung, nor a cure for autism either.

It does not.

Aspergers blows that whole self-actualization thing completely up. It's like special programming to prevent it.

Apparently a lot of aspie people are INTJ, including myself. I am quite intensely INTJ. Its interesting to read of others in this forum who are not INTJ.

I wonder sometimes what proportion of the total Jungian/MBTI personality spectrum is influenced by degrees of autism vs. NT? I am wondering whether autism is actually a completely normal ... no .... essential element of the human mind and simply not well understood yet and therefore tremendously unrecognised and undiagnosed? I wonder sometimes whether autism is not 50% of the human makeup and NT is the other 50%? I guess it might be a quartile of the whole and there may be other personality dynamics other than the autism/NT continuum. I wonder too whether autism as we understand it is merely autism that is too strong i.e overpowering other mind processes? If that is correct, then average autism is simply where autism is present in balance with other mental processes i.e autism is a necessary and desirable part of the human mind. I think that the common notion that zero autism is 'normal' or desirable is very wrong. A person with zero autism would have serious challenges. I think that autism enables the mind to do many routine tasks without taking up too much mental thought capacity thereby freeing up the mind for other things. Conversely, we who are on the autism spectrum have an overly strong autism process which backfires, interfering with other mental processes.

Basically, I am thinking that autism needs to be looked at as a positive and desirable component of the human mind rather than a disorder'. Yes, like anything, it can be a disorder but not necessarily so i.e no more than any other mental process can have a disorder.

Is what I am saying a novel idea or is it well understood fact and I am merely on a learning curve about autism?

All of this is just me thinking out loud. I am probably totally off the mark so would really now what others think. Can anyone shed some light?

True, Autism is neurological and psychoanalysis is thus unadapted to deal with it. Anyway the software is affected by the hardware and you can still deal with it through PA.

For exemple I identified myself with being obsessional compulsive as far as Freudian terminology is concerned, long before i knew about Autism; And in jungian terms I'm an Introvert, or INJP, developed shadow and weak persona... in Sheldon terms I'm an ecto/Endomorph (not meso) like most Aspies (also due to hypothyroidy) .

Psychoanalysis is rather a mix of Psychology and Philosophy, it never cured anyone I think and doesn't deal with neurology, anyway it is still interesting to find out where in the spectrum of those terminologies you are.

This could be interesting:

http://possiblityever.wordpress.com/2012/08/29/aspergers-syndrome-sheldon-cooper-carl-jung-and-the-persona/