Professional Profile – Psychologists and Psychology Students

Hello friends!

I have received many questions and comments regarding the suitable professional profile for a career in psychology. In this text, I will try to answer this question by defining what a professional profile is, defining the psychological types for Jung, and also describing my opinion on whether or not there is a unique profile for psychology, according to my experience, thinking also in my professional colleagues.

The idea of ​​the professional profile

Many people don’t know, but industrial psychology – later called organizational psychology or Human Resources – began with the selection of people to work in factories, this at the beginning of the 20th century. It was one of the first areas of work for psychology professionals and it also helped in the creation, consolidation and dissemination of psychological tests, with our famous IQ (Intelligence Questionnaire).

The idea behind the profile is very simple and can be summed up in one sentence: “For every vacancy there is a suitable personality type”. A simple example can help us. Imagine that you are in line at a supermarket. In front of you are 5 people with their purchases. At the register, a slow and sluggish employee passes one item at a time every 30 seconds. You and everyone in line start to get impatient and wonder why the cashier isn’t faster.

So to fulfill that professional function, we expect a professional profile. To be a supermarket cashier you have to be agile. This is a simple feature, however, it will make all the difference in the flow of people who will go shopping throughout the day. And it will be a reason for the satisfaction or dissatisfaction (in case the function is not well fulfilled) of the clients.

Likewise, the idea of ​​the profile appears in every other job and every profession possible, from the employee who pushes a button all day in a factory to the manager of a large company. Profiles can be more complete and complex or simpler, it doesn’t matter. The central idea is always the same: “A vacancy, a profile, a type of personality”.

Jung’s professional profile and psychological types

In psychology, there are several theories about personality. One of the most widely used is CG Jung’s theory of analytical psychology, which was first elaborated and published in 1920. Explaining in detail all the more than 800 pages of this book would obviously go far beyond this text. So I’ll summarize:

For Jung, we find distinct psychological types that are easily recognizable (if we think about the people around us).

At the beginning of writing the book, Jung saw two basic types:

– The extraverted type, which he initially linked to the feeling function.

– The introverted type, which he initially linked to the thinking function.

After reconsidering the link between the attitudes (introvert and extrovert), he separated and inserted two more psychic functions: intuition and sensation.

So let’s explain.

For him, there are two attitudes – the introverted attitude and the extroverted attitude. And, in addition to these two attitudes, there are four functions (say, activities of the psyche) that are fundamental: thinking, feeling, intuition and sensation. As attitudes are not necessarily linked to functions, we have 8 types:

1) Introverted type – thinking function

2) Introverted type – feeling function

3) Introverted type – intuition function

4) Extraverted type – sensation function

5) Extroverted type – thinking function

6) Extraverted type – feeling function

7) Extroverted type – intuition function

8) Extraverted type – sensation function

The introverted or extroverted attitude can be understood as follows. Thinking about the subject-object relationship, we will see that there are people who turn more towards themselves (introverts) and people who turn more towards the object (extroverts).

With regard to functions, we can think of it this way:

thought function: it is the logical, rational, abstract function that organizes the world from the evaluation of thought.

feeling function: contrary to what it may seem, in principle, it does not mean being an emotional person. The feeling function for Jung (the word got a little bad in the translation from German to Portuguese) means the evaluation we have from value judgments. Saying whether something is good or bad, beautiful or ugly, interesting or uninteresting, important or unimportant, moral or immoral, ethical or unethical, are sentiment evaluations.

sensation function: is the ability to organize the stimuli of the 5 senses and the ability to observe and memorize details.

intuition function: it is the function that takes place from the capacity of perception via the unconscious. It has a certain relationship with what we say is the 6th sense, although it is a little different. Unlike the sensation function, the intuition function organizes stimuli coming from the unconscious through a global and general order and not by details.

In summary, as Jung says: “Sensation (that is, sensory perception) tells us that something exists; thought shows us what this thing is; the feeling reveals whether it is pleasant or not; and intuition will tell us where it comes from and where it goes”.

Professional Profile of Psychologists and Psychology Students

Well, now that we understand the idea of ​​a professional profile and have seen one of the main theories regarding personality types that influenced the creation of tests such as the MBTI and the Quati that are used in companies, we can move on to the doubt that made me write: What is the profile of psychologists and psychology students?

If we walk into a psychology faculty room, at any University, we will see that the predominance of students will be female. In my class, with 35 students, there were 30 women and 5 men. These data are consistent with research on professionals who have already graduated. According to a recent survey, out of ten psychology professionals, nine are women.

The average age of psychology students is between 18 and 40 years old.

And beyond gender and age data, what can we say about the profile? Many people asked me, wanting to know if they had the right profile to be psychologists and psychologists.

I am very tempted to say that there is no specific professional profile in our area. After all, we can work in many places (completely different from each other), so that – theoretically – there are places and spaces for performance for all types of profiles.

Let’s think about introverted and extroverted attitudes.

A psychology professional can be extroverted and work with Human Resources, in hospitals and schools and deal with hundreds of people on a daily basis. But there is also room for the most introverted people, in clinics and offices. Also, introverts, of course, can work with large audiences, although this is more tiring than for extroverts.

What I want to say is that there are so many areas within psychology that these same areas include all types of professional profiles.

In my psychology faculty, for example, it was possible to find a muscular guy, next to a preppy girl, next to a Marxist, next to a socialist, next to a religious person, next to a philosopher, etc., etc. All these different personalities (a bit caricatured in this example but real) were my classmates. So the audience is really very different from other courses such as, for example, the accounting course or the theater course.

With regard to the functions described by Jung, I would say that the predominance is of the feeling type. Feeling, as he said, evaluates the world, situations and circumstances not by logic, not by detail or by intuition but by judgment of value. Questions and explanations about whether this is good or bad, better or worse, adequate or inappropriate are ways of judging and describing reality typical of feeling people.

For example, if a psychologist is going to work with Human Resources, he will have to say which candidate is best suited for the vacancy (in essence, which one is the best). To respond, he will have to make use of the sentiment function. In the clinic, we constantly have to assess which procedure, method or analysis is better, and also help the patient himself to make this assessment of what he should or shouldn’t do, what can or cannot be done, what is more convenient or inconvenient, etc.

For Jung, all functions are used. What characterizes the psychological type is the predominance of function (feeling, thinking, intuition or sensation) and attitude (introverted or extroverted).

Looking at my college colleagues and myself, I see that the feeling function is predominant for psychologists and psychology students. With regards to introversion and extroversion, I’d say it’s half-half.

Conclusion

The Faculty of Psychology is an extremely broad faculty, which has related disciplines ranging from statistics to anatomy, passing through philosophy, sociology, anthropology, pedagogy. The knowledge learned in the course can be used in practice in different areas: offices, hospitals, health institutions, driving schools, communities and groups, companies, colleges and schools.

With this breadth of knowledge and professional practices, it is extremely difficult to define a professional profile of psychology students and professionals. The fact that 90% of the people are female does not obviously prevent men from taking the course and working. If we think about the introverted or extroverted attitude, we will also see that there is a field for everyone.

Regarding the functions, he said that the predominant function is the feeling function. However, although in smaller numbers, we find several professionals and students whose predominant function is thinking (logic, abstraction, the ability to define theoretical concepts precisely). In general, these will be academic professors and researchers within psychology.

What I can conclude about the professional profile of psychologists, therefore, is that there is no single adequate or best profile for this career. Psychology is an extremely wide and rich science and profession, which allows different profiles to carry out their activity. This does not invalidate the idea of ​​a professional profile, as other faculties (more specific and closed) will have more defined and specific profiles.

If you are thinking of studying psychology at university, I suggest that you forget about this idea of ​​adapting to a professional profile. The most important thing is to know if you are willing to study college subjects (you can search the curriculum) and also if you see yourself working in one of the dozens of areas in which psychologists can work.

Doubts, questions and suggestions, please write in the comments. I’ll be happy to answer and chat!

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