Comparing Jung and Myers
The common modern practice of considering all ‘Js,’ including the ‘I—Js,’ to be ‘Judging types’ and ‘I—Ps’ ‘Perceiving types’ diverges from Jung’s use of the terms to refer to the dominant and may be contributing to a tendency to interpret the fourth letter of the type code in a misleading way. This oversimplification does a disservice to both Jung and Myers: It overrides Jung’s definition of these concepts, and it obscures both the underlying concept of Extraversion in Myers’ J—P dichotomy and the originality of Myers’ and Briggs’ contribution to Jung’s theory.
Jung focused on the types as defined by the dominant function. Although he noted that such types are not likely to be found “in such pure form in actual life” (1971, para. 666), observing that the other less conscious functions would modify the caricatured personalities of his examples, his section on the auxiliary function seems almost an afterthought. Myers filled that gap by designing a way to identify the auxiliary function, thus extrapolating sixteen types by adding the auxiliaries to Jung’s eight dominant-function types.