About

Why Historical Figures?

I choose to focus on historical figures for a few reasons. First, it's a matter of consent and respect. Typing someone who is alive and didn't ask for it — or worse, who identifies as a different type — feels invasive. Historical figures, by contrast, are mostly neutral ground. Their lives are already public, already interpreted, already part of the collective conversation.

But honestly? I also just love them. As a kid, I was always reading stories about historical figures, hearing about their lives, feeling inspired by their choices and their struggles. They represent some of humanity's finest — not because they were perfect, but because they were real, flawed, and deeply human in ways that still resonate centuries later.

That said, I do occasionally type contemporary figures when their cognitive patterns are public and visible enough to work with. Ben Shapiro is one example. For now, though, my primary focus remains historical figures — the distance of time makes the exercise cleaner, and there is no shortage of lives worth reading carefully. But I want to be clear: my attempts are not definitive. Typing anyone — especially someone you've never met, someone who lived centuries ago — is inherently speculative. It's interpretation, not diagnosis.

I offer my interpretations anyway — not as diagnoses, but as a form of close reading. Typing a historical figure is less like clinical assessment and more like literary interpretation: reading the available record of a life and asking what cognitive orientation best explains the pattern of choices, relationships, and failures visible there. Sometimes the answer feels clear. Other times it's genuinely uncertain, and I try to say so. Either way, the goal is to ask how someone thought, not just what they did — and to sit with that question carefully rather than answering it too quickly.

On Personality Psychology

Carl Jung's original insight — the one that started all of this — was not that people are different. It was that people are oriented differently. They are not biased or wrong when they see the same situation in completely different ways. They are working from a different fundamental relationship to experience. That distinction matters more than it might first appear.

The four-letter MBTI codes are useful shorthand, but what I find more interesting — and more honest — is the layer beneath them: cognitive functions. Two people can both be deeply compassionate and yet express it in completely different ways: one attuned to the emotional temperature of the room (Fe), one maintaining a quiet inner compass of personal loyalty (Fi). Two people can both value truth and yet pursue it differently: one through external logic and measurable outcomes (Te), one through internal consistency and self-contained systems (Ti). The letters tell you the shape. The functions tell you something about the texture.

Jung also identified what he called the inferior function — the one at the bottom of the stack, largely unconscious, underdeveloped, and prone to becoming a point of vulnerability when life forces you to rely on it. I find this the most honest part of the whole framework. It isn't a weakness to fix. It is a part of you that insists on existing.

I think Jung would have had complicated feelings about this archive. He was deeply suspicious of systematization for its own sake — he wrote that "every human being is a new experiment of life and an exception to the rule." He was more interested in individuation, the lifelong project of becoming more fully and honestly yourself, than in sorting people into categories. I try to hold both of those things at once. The boxes are useful. They are not the point.

If you want to go deeper into where these ideas come from and how this archive uses them, I wrote a longer essay: On Carl Jung & Personality Types →

Image Sourcing

The portraits in this archive are AI-generated, inspired by historical records and artworks where available. These visuals are intended to bring a consistent, lifelike presence to each figure, serving as artistic approximations rather than historical documents.