Socionics · MBTI · Enneagram
Socionics, MBTI and the Enneagram explained with diagrams, short animated reels and the original sources, so you can compare them.
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Rorschach inkblot, plate VIII (1921)
C. G. Jung, whose 1921 Psychological Types is the root of Socionics.
Jung's eight functions rebuilt as a machine: information flows through Model A, and every type is a different wiring of the same eight channels.
Enter Socionics
Katharine Briggs and Isabel Briggs Myers, who built the indicator in the 1940s.
Katharine Briggs and her daughter Isabel turned Jung into a questionnaire. Sixteen codes, each a stack of four ranked cognitive functions.
Enter MBTI
G. I. Gurdjieff, who brought the enneagram symbol to the West.
Not what you think with, but what you want and fear. Nine core motivations, linked by lines of stress and growth.
Enter Enneagram1909
Freud and Jung lecture at Clark University. Within a few years their split pushes Jung toward his own account of psychological types.
1921
Jung publishes his book on introversion, extraversion and four functions: thinking, feeling, sensation, intuition. Every system on this site descends from it.
1921
Hermann Rorschach publishes Psychodiagnostik. Typology learns to read perception, not only self-report.
1920s
G. I. Gurdjieff teaches the enneagram figure in Europe. Later teachers attach nine personality types to it.
1962
After two decades of work, Katharine Briggs and Isabel Briggs Myers see the MBTI published, turning Jung's functions into a questionnaire anyone can take.
1970s
In Lithuania, Aushra Augustinavichiute combines Jung's types with Antoni Kępiński's idea of information metabolism and builds Socionics and Model A.
No public-domain photograph available.
None of these systems is validated as science. They are useful vocabularies for describing differences, and this site presents them as theory.