A hypothesis about an author’s psychological type is based not on biography, self-report, or observable behaviour, but on an analysis of how the contents generated by the psychological functions are distributed across the author’s texts.
This differs fundamentally from most existing approaches. For example:
- Jung relied primarily on clinical observation, interviews, and word-association experiments.
- MBTI relies to a large extent on self-report.
- Socionics often relies on observations of behaviour, appearance, communication style, and sometimes even photographs.
In the present approach, the object of analysis is different:
not the person directly, but the product of the person’s consciousness — the text.
Method of Text Analysis
This method is based on several fairly strict principles:
- only the content of the text is analysed;
- the analysis concerns the contents of the psychological functions expressed in the text, rather than the plot, literary style, or the author’s biography;
- conclusions are drawn first about the text itself;
- only after analysing several texts can a hypothesis about the author’s psychological type be formulated.
The analysis considers not only the contents of the psychological functions, but also the frequency of occurrence and the distribution of the content units associated with the different psychological functions throughout the text. A detailed description of these characteristics is provided in a separate article.