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 of 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 an arena of struggle of two opposite methodological directions, the goals of which were:

1. to "catch" the central organizing link, some kind of 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 psyche to its components in order to understand the work of its parts and to create a classification based on the differences in the structure and quality of the 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 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, degrees of inner strictness. The logic of psychological classifications development demanded a parallel existence of two scientific approaches: one of which was named "psychology of types", and the other—"psychology of traits". In the course of time, both 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 a higher system of generalizations.