Is character a diagnosis?

“You don't understand a damn thing about psychology!!!” — an acquaintance of mine splutters. “I studied it, for one! And it is all just a game to you!”

That acquaintance, by the way, trained as an opera singer. Then he churned out research of some sort at a technical university. Then he renovated flats and painted walls, made a determined attempt to emigrate to England, qualified as a quality control manager, and just before the pandemic escaped at the last moment from Lombardy, where he had been trying to settle after Brexit. In all the years I have known him he has somehow never mentioned any experience as a professional psychoanalyst. When I suggested he at least look into S-typology, he refused — in full accordance with his personality type — even to begin, calling me an idiot who cannot see the whole picture, while saying nothing of substance at all.

“And do you know, Alisa, why first-year students are not allowed to read McWilliams and authors like her?” purrs another acquaintance. He, in full accordance with his own personality type, has encyclopaedic and personally systematised knowledge of psychology and of much else besides. “That's right — so they are not tempted to hand out diagnoses. Perfectly logical, and straight out of Freud.”

“Uncle Tolya, we are not talking about clinical diagnoses here…” — “Do you even realise what you just said?” laughs Uncle Tolya. And that set me thinking.

It is the way of the world that people are eager to look for a magic pill. And more often than not, for want of anything else, that pill is a diagnosis. There, now we know the diagnosis, and we can get on with our lives. This one is an idiot, that one is a fool, and those over there are darlings. No need to ban anyone from reading anything: the diagnoses are already in place. And I do love it when people who have read their fill of pop psychology start going on the attack, and the moment you pull them up, out come the accusations-cum-diagnoses that this is all my neurotic projection onto them — which is, incidentally, a characteristic trait of certain types.

S-typology did indeed take the names of its types from something very close to psychiatry (malicious tongues say that the man who devised the theory, in accordance with his own type, simply could not be bothered to invent new names). Beyond that, though, it is not a typology of “bees in the bonnet” but a very deep conception of the personality. It brings together a whole range of different approaches, arranging them into a coherent and logical system that lets you see the personality as a combination of innate temperament with the particulars of growing up and being brought up. Those particulars, like our perception of any phenomenon or process whatsoever, are closely bound up with and based on a wonderfully simple and elegant algorithm; once you have grasped it, everything that follows becomes logical — not only the types, but the interaction between them. And the algorithm shapes not only the formation of character but the development of every person with age, the tasks each of us has to solve as we grow up, and a great deal more. But to come back to our question: can we claim that character is a diagnosis? And can we claim that certain physical features are a diagnosis?

Wikipedia, for instance, distinguishes between a medical diagnosis and a psychological one. The latter is “the end result of the work of a psychologist, directed at describing and clarifying the essence of an individual's psychological characteristics with a view to assessing their current state, predicting their further development and drawing up recommendations determined by the aim of the psychodiagnostic examination. The subject matter of psychological diagnosis is the establishment of individual psychological differences, both within the norm and in pathology”.

Character is undoubtedly one of our individual features: it shows our current state, it helps to predict behaviour, and it establishes exactly those individual psychological differences. At the same time, character can be balanced out, but it cannot be changed. Which makes it a diagnosis for life. There is only one consolation: this diagnosis is by no means always a clinical one. What is more, it gives us a description of how we function and of what we are capable. And knowing what we are capable of would spare us a great many misunderstandings in life. You do not have to look far for examples. A businessman father has a daughter who, for some reason, refuses to follow in his footsteps. He provides her with everything: an education, a start to her career, contacts and opportunities — and she does not want any of it. She sits in her financial control department, brilliantly spotting any error at a glance. For some reason she is in no hurry to build a career, and when asked whether she likes something she invariably reels off facts about it that everybody knows anyway. The only times she shows real steel are when her father tries to impose some change on her life. The father seethes, the daughter digs in. No, they have not stopped speaking to each other, but they have never come to understand one another either. Had the father known S-typology, he would probably not have demanded of his daughter what is by definition impossible for her.

Another example: a mother and a daughter. The daughter demands that her mother spend all her time with her, go shopping with her, buy her expensive clothes that the girl then never wears, and spend hours praising her for any bit of housework or for a cooked dinner. At any attempt to say no, to say that there is no money for clothes or that mother is not feeling well, the daughter responds with howls that everybody, and her mother above all, hates her and would love to see her dead. The mother is beside herself, complains to everyone around her that she has no life at home, and tries to bend to her daughter wherever she possibly can, just so long as the girl does not blame or scold her. There are scenes almost every day, and complaints to other people about each other even more often. Another generational conflict? Or simply a “perfect” combination of personality types and violated basic rights. You could put forward any number of theories about why this is so and who is to blame. To my mind the S-Theory offers one of the simplest explanations there is, describing not only the particulars of each character but exactly how its fears, neuroses and defences show themselves. Knowing how to balance all this out, you can take a great deal of heat out of the drama. By some strange turn of events, with me that same girl is calm and respectful itself. But then my personality type is an entirely different one.

And finally, that same acquaintance who “studied psychology thoroughly”. Once upon a time, four girlfriends of his ago, I was that girlfriend. What did not fit? Our notions of what a relationship is, the most common source of family disagreement; our sore spots, because we had nothing to give each other; and… my own personal preferences in personality types. Had I known then what I know now, a great deal of wasted time could have been avoided.

So it turns out you can make a diagnosis not only of a person, but of a relationship. Of course the map will never be the territory, but this particular map-diagnosis is something you can steer by quite well, in working out how to hold a relationship together, how to improve it and… whether it is needed at all. Perhaps psychology students really should not read up on typologies too early. Happily, I am not a student. I simply love the fact that what used to be written off as chaos, in the spirit of “the head is a dark place and not open to examination”, can — thanks to years of research — be put in order and explained. But then that is characteristic of my personality type.