Introvert / Extrovert – In Two Minds

Origin Story

Podmasters

Society & Culture, History, News, News Commentary

4.7 • 811 Ratings

🗓️ 25 March 2026

⏱️ 55 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The terms introvert and extrovert have never been more popular. People seem to increasingly latch onto them as a core element of their personality, clinging to the personal definition they offer with ever-greater enthusiasm. Humans love to categorise things and there is nothing they like categorising more than themselves. We trace the weird story of these terms back to Vienna, on March 3rd 1907, when the Swiss psychiatrist and psychotherapist Carl Jung first met the Austrian neurologist Sigmund Freud. What follows is a hysterical, combative and sexually charged relationship which left both men in a state of social disarray. But in his efforts to later work out what happened, Jung settled on a personality binary which proved extremely intuitive to the public at large. Are these terms meaningful? Do they have scientific validity? And what are the dangers and advantages of defining ourselves in this way? Let's find out, as we delve into the world of personality types, psychoanalysis and what might genuinely be the single most preposterous intellectual dispute in the history of ideas. • Support Origin Story on Patreon • Buy the Origin Stories books on Centrism, Fascism and Conspiracy Theory • Subscribe to Origin Story on YouTube Reading list • Peter Geyer – Extraversion – Introversion: what C.G. Jung meant and how contemporaries responded, AusAPT Biennial Conference Melbourne, Australia – October 25–27, 2012 • Carl Gustav Jung – "The Association Method", The American Journal of Psychology 1910-04: Vol 21 Iss 2 • Carl Gustav Jung – Psychological Types, Princeton University Press, 1971 • D. L. Johnson, J. S. Wiebe, S. M. Gold, N. C. Andreasen – Cerebral blood flow and personality: A positron emission tomography study, American Journal of Psychiatry, 156, 252–257 (1999). • Florencio (Jun) Kabigting, Jr - The Discovery and Evolution of the Big Five of Personality, GNOSI: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Human Theory and Praxis, Volume 4, Issue 3, June 2021 • Frank McLynn – Carl Gustav Jung: A Biography, St Martin's Press 1996. • The Invention of 'Introvert', Words Matter podcast, episode 51 Written and presented by Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey. Producer: Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	The
0:07.0	The Hello, welcome to Origin Story. It is a between-season bonus episode where we talk about some of the ideas that influence our world today. I'm Doreenlinsky.
0:38.3	And I'm Ian Dunn.
0:39.6	Ian, this is one of your topics.
0:42.0	Just tell us what it is.
0:43.7	Introvert, extrovert.
0:44.8	I'm startled by the regularity with which this comes up.
0:49.9	More than it ever used to.
0:51.3	Yeah.
0:51.7	And I think it's sort of part and parcel for me with this current obsession with self-categorization.
0:58.0	Am I a type A or a type B personality?
1:00.6	Or like the Myers-Briggs stuff.
1:02.0	So I say, oh, are you an I-N-T-J or an ESFP?
1:05.5	Or there's this sort of sense of almost relief that you can hear in people about being able to apply
1:12.5	these sort of scientific kind of terms to themselves, but it's just not clear how valid any of
1:16.9	these terms actually are.
1:17.8	Because it's different from, you know, like neurodivergence that you can, you know, you
1:23.2	could be screened for autism or ADHD and then that really gives you a better understanding of
1:29.3	yourself, and it can give you a toolkit and maybe, you know, maybe medication, or then
1:33.9	you understand which situations you should avoid, you know, what works for you. These are really
1:39.2	kind of useful, like, medical interventions. And I'm just fascinated by where, you know,
1:47.0	personality and neurodivergence overlap. And it seems to me that with introvert,
	...

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