How it works

Your type is one of your four selves.

Here is where the other three come from, in plain words. It takes two minutes to read, and you don’t need it to take the quiz.

Four habits, in order.

Your four letters stand for four mental habits. Two are ways of taking things in and two are ways of deciding, and each one is turned inward or outward. They come in a fixed order. The first is the one you trust most, and the fourth is your weakest. Together they make your type, the everyday you.

Two turns make three more selves.

Reverse the order, so your weakest habit leads, and you have your Subconscious, the you that you aspire to and feel measured against. Turn each habit the other way, inward to outward and outward to inward, and you have your Unconscious, the you under stress and the one you can’t stand in other people. Do both, and you have your Superego, the you that you perform when the room is watching.

Each self is a type of its own.

An INFJ’s four selves are INFJ, ESTP, ENFP, and ISTJ. Those four types share one set of selves, which makes them a family, and every one of the sixteen types belongs to one of four families. That is why your other three are the same as every other INFJ’s, and why they can be compared with anyone’s.

It’s not four people.

It’s a map of one person’s range. Where you live, where you’re growing, what guards you, and what you give.

Where it comes fromThe names Ego, Subconscious, Unconscious, and Superego are borrowed from depth psychology, and the meanings here are the model’s own. The four-letter codes and the eight habits come from the public tradition that grew out of C. G. Jung’s Psychological Types (1921), Isabel Briggs Myers’ Gifts Differing (1980), and John Beebe’s eight-function model; the four-part framing is our own presentation of a structure that appears, under other names, in several typology traditions.

Take the free quiz Compare two types

one type, four selves:

Pick a type

INFJEgo

ESTPSubconscious

ENFPUnconscious

ISTJSuperego

across = reversed · down = turned

an INFJ’s four, for example