Dichotomies of the Mind: A Systems Science Model of the Mind and Personality

By Lawrence H. Miike and Walter Lowen

Book Overview

Offers an original conceptual model of the functioning of the brain and mind to help explain and understand human behavioral patterns. Draws on Jugian psychology, miscellaneous theories of the mind, and principles of information theory and systems engineering. Written in the language of mathematics, computers, and psychology to construct a model of the organization underlying intelligence.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0471083313
• ISBN13: 9780471083313
• Release Date: August 1982
• Publisher: Wiley
• Length: 314 Pages
• Weight: 1.78 lbs.

Customer Reviews

A Justification for the MBTI

Dichotomies of the Mind has been updated in that Drs. Lowen and Miike have added their current thinking. With a logic of individual development on Piagetan lines, added to functional divisions of thought originated by Dr. Carl Jung, Dichotomies of the Mind and this new book provide the compelling logic of Systems Thinking to support the intuitive rationales of the MBTI -- which to a sceptical mind makes vast difference. The followup edition is PERSONALITY TPES: A SYSTEMS SCIENCE EXPLANATION. -- Harland T. Hermann Sr. M.D., Emeritus Professor of Psychiatry, Sanford Medical School, S.D.

extremely useful to me

If you are at all interested in Myers-Briggs style personality theory you need to get a copy of this book. Lowen breaks down the ideas of conventional personality type and expands on them in a very logical, sophisticated and elegant way. This book provides a more complex and accurate model for understanding people's different styles and personalities. Highly creative and powerful!!!

A Model of Cognitive Skills, Not Brain Research

While out-of-print, it continues to be a useful model of human thought processes for people from many disciplines. "A Totally Misguided Explanation" missed the purpose of the book by focusing on the brain. This was a systems science model of cognitive skills. The reviewer uses extraversion, perceptual, conceptual, etc. in ways not used in the book. For example, we made it clear that "perceiving" is not the same as right-brain cognitive processes. It is a Jungian term, and its "location" in the model is in both hemispheres (We used "detailed" versus "contextual" to loosely correspond to left- and right-hemispheres). And we have no connection to the MBTI.We have been working in the past few months on an update, the principal new things being identifying and explaining memories and a brain map (!) as a guide to the mind map.