COVID-19 Lockdowns and Jung’s Personality Types

ABSTRACT

This essay proposes a return to C. G. Jung’s personality theories and argues in favor of their relevancies in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic and the unprecedented changes it produced to forms of socialization. Through a narratological analysis of survey data gathered by the author, this paper maintains that the adaptability, malleability, and complexity of Jung’s psychic paradigms is what makes his theories of the personality current in the 2020s. The survey, distributed globally in the summer of 2021, consisted of open essay-style questions that encouraged participants’ narrative orientation. Results are mixed and do not always follow type expectations (not all introverted participants thrived, nor did all extraverts struggle). Mixed results point to human variability, which Jung acknowledges even within types, and to the existence of multiple stories about the lived experience of COVID-19 lockdowns. Ultimately, I propose a post-Jungian, post-pandemic approach to the personality, which takes contextual factors into account, and I advocate a humanistic approach to Jung, which will result in a better understanding of human psychology.

KEY WORDS:

• Covid-19
• extraversion
• introversion
• Jung
• narratives
• pandemic
• personality types

NOTE

References to The Collected Works of C. G. Jung are cited in the text as CW, volume number, and paragraph number. The Collected Works are published in English by Routledge (UK) and Princeton University Press (USA).

Notes

1. Dana A. Glei and Maxine Weinstein (2023) go as far as to argue that mortality rates among extroverts notably increased during the pandemic. Before the crisis, this group had a slight advantage, which was lost in early 2020. Increased mortality rates among extroverts become particularly noticeable when compared to those of their introverted counterparts and to general pre-pandemic rates.

^2. For other recent work that brings into conversation Jung, the arts, and the literary, see Roula-Maria Dib (2019, 2021) and Jesse Russell (2022).

^3. The survey had another key stream: gender and the coronavirus lockdowns. Other questions were, therefore, orientated toward unveiling women’s lived experiences of the pandemic. The results of that part of the investigation have appeared in my essay “Every Covid Has a Silver Lining: Women’s Lived Experiences and Potential Feminist Futures beyond the Pandemic” (Cano 2022).

^4. Some of these groups and social media platforms included The Professor Is In, Women in Academia Support Network, The Gender Hub, The Melbourne Recruitment Meetup, Lancashire Walking Meetup Group, Vegan Date Romance, Seattle Witches Meetup Group, and Spinsters Auxiliary Needlework and Havoc Wreaking Society—to name a few.

^5. The field of critical university studies is now thriving; see, for example, Ahmed (2021, 2023), Cano (2022, 603–606), and Fleming (2021)—to name a few. At the time of writing, I am in the process of co-editing a volume on the subject, provisionally titled Women, “Failure” and Academia Post–2020: A Kickass Project, which will further explore the situation of women in the academy.

^6. Jung himself observes that neither introversion nor extraversion is better, but that the world at large tends to regard extraversion as the more desirable of the two (2017, CW 6, p. 320).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Marina Cano

Marina Cano is an independent researcher and former associate professor of English. She is the author of Jane Austen and Performance (Palgrave 2017), and the coeditor of Jane Austen and William Shakespeare: A Love Affair in Literature, Film and Performance (Palgrave 2019). Within the area of psychoanalysis, she has published on Jane Austen and Julia Kristeva’s psycho-linguistic feminist theories (open access at https://doi.org/10.1080/10436928.2022.2100669), and Jacques Lacan and film. She holds a PhD in English from the University of St Andrews (Scotland).