Psychological typologies

Psychological typologies are classifications used by psychologists to describe the distinctions between people. The problem of finding the essential basis for the classification of psychological types—that is, the basis determining a broader spectrum of derivative characteristics—is crucial in differential psychology.

The entire history of human studies from the system-classification position reveals itself as arena of struggle of two opposite methodological directions, the goals of which were:

1) to "catch" the central organizing link, some kind of the motor of all design, and to distribute people by the qualitative specificity of these central links;

"The typological approach consists in the global perception of the person with the following reduction of variety of individual forms to a small number of the groups uniting around the representative type" (Meily, 1960).

2) to decompose the psychic to its components in order to understand the work of parts and to create a classification on the basis of differences in the structure and quality of parts.

"It is necessary to reduce all the personality character traits to the elementary mental elements and to the elementary forms of the basic psychological laws, revealing the nature of the discovered ties" (Polan, 1894).

At present there are several thousand of various psychological classifications that point to these or other distinctions between people or mental characteristics as such.

The classifications may have different ground scales of generalizations, degree of inner strictness.

The logic of psychological classifications development demanded parallel existing of two scientific approaches: one of which was named "psychology of types", and the other—"psychology of traits". In the course of time both the approaches shifted towards each other: the psychology of types—in attempts to understand the structure of psychological traits of every type, trait psychology—in attempts to achieve more high and system generalizations.

«As soon as the fact that the observable traits do not correspond to separate essential psychic characteristics and rather are only aspects of the personality and behavior, received general recognition immediately appeared as the necessity to reveal the fundamental factors behind the traits. Haimans and Virsma as well as other scientists after them tried to solve the problem. However all these researches had a fragmentary character, their results have been caused by preliminary hypotheses, and the choice of traits as a rule was determined by the personal view of the researcher» R.Maily

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