I was certainly not the first psychologist to discover that we divide into two groups, those people who turn outward to the world around them and who have as their first priority their relationships with other people, and those people who turn inward and who have as their first priority a need for organization and a sense of personal development. Freud saw this difference and labelled the two groups ‘hysterics’ and ‘obsessionals’. Jung saw the difference and similarly called the two groups ‘extraverts’ and ‘introverts’. The arch-critic of psychoanalysis Hans Eysenck worked in an entirely different way, using questionnaires with large groups of people, and found what he called the traits of ‘extroversion’ and ‘introversion’. He was interested in the physiology of the brain which underlies these traits. His research team found that the two groups of people could be distinguished by the habitual arousal level of the cortex. Introverts, they found, had higher levels of arousal than extraverts. Thus introverts need an environment which is relatively calm, peaceful and organised while extraverts, in Hans Eysenck’s words, are ‘stimulus seeking’ and enjoy an environment where there is much going on and which contains a great deal of what introverts would call ‘clutter’ and extraverts would describe as comforting and reassuring objects.22
While the majority of his fellow psychiatrists in the USA saw depression as a purely physical disease, Aaron Beck became aware in the 1960s that his depressed patients had a particular way of thinking, or what he called ‘a depressive cognitive style’. He developed a way of investigating this style, and out of this initial work has come a vast body of theory, research and practice called Cognitive Therapy.23,24
A depressive cognitive style was made up of ‘schemas’ or structures which were stable and enduring and developed from early life experience.25 By 1983 Beck and his colleagues had discovered that each depressed person’s schemas had one of two distinctive superordinate schemas. They named these superordinate schemas sociotropy and autonomy. The person who used a sociotropy schema placed high value on a positive interchange with other people and was extremely concerned with being accepted, being intimate and being supported and guided by others. The person who used the autonomy schema placed high value on and was extremely concerned with achieving their goals, maintaining their high standards, being independent and maintaining what has been called ‘the integrity of one’s domain’.26 A later statistical study using factor analysis found further evidence for the existence of these two distinctive cognitive styles.27
Some years ago, when I was running a seminar for an international group of managers, the Japanese managers in the group told me that in Japan there was a series of popular psychology books which divided people into two groups in the same way as I had described dividing people into extraverts and introverts. They could not supply me with an English translation of these books but they were totally unsurprised by what I had said.
No matter how diverse the theories and the jargon these different psychologists used, it does seem that they were all commenting on an enduring feature of all human beings - namely that, individual though our interpretations of events might be, they all seem to fall into one of two groups, one where the person is turned outward to external reality, and one where the person is turned inward to internal reality.
Over the years that I have been writing about extraverts and introverts, quite a number of people have told me that, though they have read my books or listened to me lecture, they cannot work out whether they are an introvert or an extravert, or they insist to me that ‘I’m a bit of both’. I have found that such people are invariably extraverts. Introverts find what I have to say mildly interesting, but I am not telling them anything they have not always known about themselves. One of my introvert friends told me that in his teens and twenties he had wanted to think of himself as an extravert and had tried to act as such, but somehow he never got the knack of it. He resigned himself to recognizing himself as an introvert who enjoys good company. Some extraverts admire what they see as the superior qualities of an introvert, and either persuade themselves that they are an introvert or that they feel inferior to introverts. Neither attitude is wise because there is nothing to choose between being one or the other. Extraverts and introverts both enjoy certain advantages and labour under certain disadvantages.
It is not surprising that introverts usually know that they are introverts. Introverts introspect. They know that they need a peaceful environment, that chaos upsets them, and that every day they have to feel that they have achieved something, however small. Knowing that they have tidied a kitchen cupboard will allow them to feel that the day has not been wasted. They work out theories about anything that attracts their interest. (This is not to say that all such theories are clever. Some are stupid, some bizarre.) Just working out a theory about why something is so can seem to them an achievement which gives them satisfaction. Extraverts are more interested in doing than in working out why. Their thoughts are not so much concerned with theories as with fantasies that involve much activity. Extraverts can be keen and observant critics of what goes on around them, but they are not impelled to work out in any detail why such things happen.
Some extraverts, busy focusing on what they do, find the question of why they do what they do impossible to answer. A friend of mine, a delightful extravert and the author of a number of highly successful romantic novels, asked my advice about a story she was developing. When I asked her why her heroine wanted to pursue a certain investigation my question completely flummoxed her. She knew that her heroine wanted to obtain certain information but she did not know why having this information was important to her. She knew what her heroine would do but she did not know why. Yet if we do not know why we do what we do, how can we ever understand ourselves?
Of course, we all want to achieve and to have good relationships, and when our lives go well we can usually fulfil both aims, but in the final analysis we are either an extravert or an introvert, and when, our backs are to the wall, in the extremes of danger, there is only one construction of our existence and potential annihilation that we know. In ordinary life we have to make conscious attempts to learn the skills in which we are naturally deficient, and if we are wise we do this. Many introverts learn to be highly skilled in social interactions; many extraverts learn to be highly skilled in experiencing, labelling and understanding their internal reality.28
Unless we come across a psychologist who is keen on laddering, we rarely make conscious and explicit how we experience our existence and our potential annihilation. We simply use our experience of our existence and potential annihilation as the basis of everything we do. Sometimes it is hidden. Sometimes it comes out clearly in what we say about ourselves.
Linda Evans, who was once a very famous television star, revealed herself as an extravert when she said:
My main purpose as a child, and as a young adult, was to be loved. I was passive and submissive at any cost. The idea of rejection was frightening to me.