This is something people who favor MBTI or similar systems debate often. Some even sense what I’m getting at intuitively. But few embody the distinction.

Spend any time on a site like Personality Database and you’ll see teens and twenty-somethings (and the occasional forty-year-old) insisting that “type is not identity” and that “one shouldn’t be defined by their MBTI type.” Ironically, this often happens alongside a rigid attachment to typological labels. It’s a strange thing to witness once you begin to understand what Jung was actually doing when he described psychological types, archetypes, and functions.

In Jung’s work, a function is not a trait, a behavior, or a pathology. It is a mode of orientation—a primary way consciousness relates to the world. One function typically organizes conscious life more than the others. We might say we live through it, though we are not possessed by it, even if Jung’s language can sometimes sound that way.

Problems arise when this distinction is taken too literally or too shallowly. Many MBTI enthusiasts treat functions as concrete attributes that can be diagnosed, exaggerated, or pathologized. People will self-identify as a “Ti-user,” then conflate that preference with specific psychological conditions. It’s not uncommon to see introverted thinking casually—and incorrectly—associated with autism, as though a cognitive orientation and a neurological profile were interchangeable.

As of this writing, there is very little serious Jungian scholarship addressing how neurodivergent individuals might present their dominant psychological orientation. What we can say with confidence is that there is a meaningful distinction between neurology and psychology—between sensorimotor or cognitive thresholds and interpretive preference. They interact, but they are not the same thing.

This is a distinction beginners often miss. Some end up overidentifying with a DSM label, others with an MBTI type, and some blend the two—selectively borrowing language from each until they’ve created something that no longer corresponds to lived reality as it is actually experienced.

So let’s slow down.

In clinical contexts, mental health diagnoses are concerned primarily with how a person’s subjective life is being lived—where it breaks down, causes distress, or limits functioning. Clinicians rely on standardized criteria (the DSM) to decide how to intervene. But mental health is not the same as neurology, and neither is personality. Even when these domains overlap, they are not interchangeable.

A useful way to think about this is as a set of lenses. A lens shapes what is seen, but it is not the eye itself, nor the world being viewed. Psychological type describes a lens—an attitude toward experience—not the totality of the person.

This is where the confusion with traits often enters. Traits describe relatively stable patterns of behavior or temperament. Preferences describe orientations. You can say, “I prefer this lens over that one,” but you can’t meaningfully say, “I prefer to be more stubborn today.” Traits constrain expression; preferences shape interpretation. They work together, but they are not the same thing.

And we are not reducible to either.

If there is one idea worth taking away from Jung’s work, it’s this: we are more than the sum of our parts. Individuation, shadow work, dream interpretation—all of it points back to this central insight. Jung was not trying to pin people down; he was trying to help them become whole.

Modern therapists might call these components “parts.” Jung spoke of the ego, the unconscious, the shadow, the persona. Whatever language you prefer, human beings are psychologically multiple. We are always in dialogue with different aspects of ourselves, whether we acknowledge it or not. Reducing this complexity to a single typological label flattens what Jung was trying to illuminate.

Jung himself wrestled openly with uncertainty. Like any serious thinker, he built on the work of philosophers, mystics, and scientists who came before him. That his ideas have since been distilled into internet quizzes says more about modern culture than about the man’s intent.

What’s frustrating isn’t casual engagement—it’s conflation. It’s mistaking a model for a diagnosis, a preference for a trait, a lens for an identity. Understanding something at a basic level, but accurately, is more valuable than juggling many concepts without seeing how they connect. Jung’s functions exist in axes for a reason: they compensate one another. Consciousness is dynamic, not static.

MBTI is not the DSM. It does not measure generosity, gregariousness, or virtue. It describes orientation, not worth or capability.

You are more than a letter combination—or even your favorite pair of rose-colored glasses.

Life is attitude; attitude is life.

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Featured image by Fares Hamouche + video created with Google Gemini’s Claymation Explainer.