Becoming a type
People develop in relation to their parents. Some might see them primarily as role models, identifying closely with them in their early years and gradually individuating as they get older. Others might develop into the type of person they always felt their parent wanted them to be. A third dynamic, and one that I’ve been seeing in many of my clients, is development centered around opposition to something a person finds repugnant about a parent.
For example, a child at the whim of their mother’s impulsive rage might grow to be extremely measured and cautious about their emotions. Someone whose parent’s financial irresponsibility left their family in constant struggle might develop a compulsive frugality. Someone with a dogmatic religious upbringing may pride themselves on being open-minded.
This response can be thought of as a form of reaction formation, which is a psychoanalytic term for a defense that leads people to identify with the opposite of something they find threatening or unacceptable in themselves. The classic example is someone who quit smoking talking about how disgusting they find the smell of cigarettes.
Parental dynamics often play a key role in identity formation. Being able to observe something in a parent that you don’t want to repeat and carry into future generations can feel natural and empowering. But when there’s a strong defensive quality to the adaptation, the person is not simply choosing to behave differently, but unable to accept any resemblance to the thing they are opposing.
It’s a fragile position to be in, because we all possess capacities for any given trait. Ordinary and inevitable contradictions in personality can become major sources of shame, confusion, and panic, and are seen as threats to the identity that maintains a tolerable sense of self.
This can put every action under intense scrutiny, impeding a person’s ability to live freely, to enjoy, and to develop according to their own desire.
This dynamic between children and their parents is one example of how identity can organize itself around opposition. And it demonstrates something more general about identity formation. Whenever we describe a way that we are, we are also letting people know what we are not, or at least, what we wish not to be.
The function and risk of typing
A client who tells me they’re the type of person who’s considerate might be letting me into a fear of being seen as having capacity to harm. A person describing themselves as fun might worry about what would happen to their relationships if they were seen as boring.
The qualities that we experience as defining our personalities are often tied to the qualities that we want to be least associated with.
A tendency or trait having a defensive function is not inherently problematic. Most things do; part of being human is building up protections to maintain our separateness from the rest of the world. This separateness is what allows us to sustain our singularity and relate as individuals.
However, defenses can become harmful when there is so much hinging on them that they force us into a rigidity that makes it hard to let anything from the outside in.
Relation is dependent on balanced degrees of separateness and porousness.
When traits are so highly defended, even recognizing the defensiveness may be too destabilizing to tolerate, as it would validate that the opposite trait exists in the person to be defended against in the first place.
Identities are especially difficult to loosen when there is little room for human contradiction.
The thing a person wishes not to be does not disappear through opposition to it, but rather moves into the background, far enough away to ignore explicitly, while still shaping the way the person sees and relates to themselves.
Relying on labels, whether from astrology, the MBTI, the DSM, or psychoanalysis, can be clarifying and relieving, but can also create explanations for ourselves that precede and foreclose the experience they’re meant to explain.
Seeing through types
We do this not just in developing ideas about ourselves, but about other people too. We sort people into types like reliable, pretentious, cultured, and narcissistic.
Frameworks, whether they come from therapy, social media, or broader cultural norms, let us recognize patterns and make predictions we can navigate the world with.
Gestalt psychology has a concept of perception in terms of figure and ground: the figure being the thing that comes into focus, standing out against everything else in the background.
This is how interpretation works. Once we have a framework, data that supports it comes into the foreground, while what seems irrelevant or contradictory falls into the background. The more confirmation a category accumulates, the more certain it becomes, and the less likely we are to take in what doesn’t fit.
When I understand a client’s behavior as reaction formation, for example, I notice the ways they define themselves in opposition to something else. If I understand them through attachment theory, I pay more attention to patterns of closeness and distance. If I understand them diagnostically, certain behaviors become symptoms.
Everything I notice might really be there, but the interpretive system I’m using determines what’s in focus, and what it means. Psychoanalysis gives us an especially granular language, letting us describe defenses, identifications, repetitions, transference, unconscious conflict, desire, and relationships between things that might otherwise seem unrelated.
Categories can be useful, and even mostly accurate. It is valuable to have language that lets us analyze patterns, but if not open to adaptation, we can easily turn ourselves and others into caricatures.
Seeing through types
Over-certainty with any interpretive system risks making interpretation another thing to defend.
In relationships, our conceptualizations of people actively shape how people engage with us. Expectations can create a self-fulfilling prophecy. (We assume someone isn’t interested in getting to know us, so we don’t bother showing ourselves, so they don’t get to know us). Other times, especially in a therapeutic relationship, responding to someone based on a formulation can invite them to try something different from their typical way of relating.
But the therapist’s language is not inherently more valuable than the client’s. If I tell a client that their sense of responsibility is a reaction formation against their mother’s lack, I may be offering something useful, or I may be handing them another identity to organize themselves around. They may come to think of themselves as the person whose responsibility is actually a defense, and the interpretation becomes another type.
Speaking with types
People come into therapy with their own frameworks. Seeing therapy as a project of co-constructing meaning to help people create lives they want, therapists benefit from joining clients in their existing language rather than treating therapy language as necessarily superior.
Gestalt therapy has a core tenet called “dialogical relationship,” like the "I-Thou" relationship described by Martin Buber. From this lens, understanding is not something one person possesses and gives to another, but something that develops between people in the encounter. The therapist brings a way of seeing, but the client’s response can change what the therapist sees. The meaning that emerges belongs to neither person alone.
Rather than trying to find more accuracy in self-description, the goal might be to cultivate the flexibility needed to entertain different possibilities, becoming less dependent on any particular description being true. We are not only the qualities we identify with or the ones we oppose, but also the contradictions between them, and the parts of ourselves that haven’t been articulated. Different ways of speaking about ourselves may make possible understandings that none could have revealed alone. A therapist is someone who helps people find language that creates meaning and movement, and typing is inherent to language.
