The Short Answer
“Personality No. 1” was Carl Jung’s name for the ordinary, everyday side of himself. This was the schoolboy who was the son of his parents, went to class and had to find his way in the practical world. He contrasted it with “Personality No. 2,” a quieter, inner self that felt older, timeless, and close to nature and to God.
Jung describes both in his late-life autobiography Memories, Dreams, Reflections, published in 1962 after his death. The book was compiled with his secretary Aniela Jaffé. The terms describe his own inner experience as a boy. They aren’t personality types, and they aren’t part of his typology.
Some people asking this question actually want to know what personality type Jung was. That has a different answer: he described himself as an introverted thinking type. Both readings are covered below.
Personality No. 1 and No. 2 in Jung’s Own Words
Jung recalls that during his school years, roughly around the age of twelve, he became aware of being “two persons”:
- No. 1 was the boy his classmates and teachers saw. He was somewhat awkward and not always a strong student, worried about schoolwork and money, and conscious of where he stood in the world. This side wanted to get ahead, pass exams and make a career.
- No. 2 felt like an old, authoritative figure from an earlier century, unconcerned with everyday affairs. This side lived in a world of nature, dreams and religious feeling. Jung associated it with a sense of meaning that ordinary life didn’t seem to reach.
Jung describes moving back and forth between the two throughout his youth. He sometimes felt that No. 2 was more real, even though No. 1 was the one he had to live as.
Why the Two Personalities Mattered to Jung
Choosing a career
The tension between No. 1 and No. 2 runs through Jung’s account of choosing a profession. No. 1 pushed toward a practical, respectable career. No. 2 was drawn to philosophy, religion and the mysteries of the psyche. Jung went on to study medicine.
He writes that when he came across psychiatry near the end of his studies, it struck him as a field where the two sides could meet. It dealt with both the hard facts of medicine and the inner life of the mind. Readers often see this as the moment No. 1 and No. 2 found a shared direction.
A forerunner of ego and Self
Many commentators see Nos. 1 and 2 as an early, personal version of ideas Jung developed later. No. 1 resembles what he would call the ego and the persona: the conscious “I” and the face it shows to the world. No. 2 resembles his idea of the Self, the deeper, more complete centre of the personality that the ego doesn’t fully grasp. Jung himself made no simple equation, and the parallel is an interpretation, but it’s a widely shared one.
Not a Split Personality
Jung was explicit that the interplay between No. 1 and No. 2 had nothing to do with a “split” or dissociation in the medical sense. He believed this kind of inner counterpoint is played out in every individual, though most people never notice it as clearly as he did. Today it might be described as the difference between your social, everyday self and a more private sense of who you are.
If You Meant Jung’s Personality Type
If the question is “what was Jung’s number one personality type,” meaning his own dominant type, the answer comes from his typology, not his autobiography. Jung described himself as an introverted thinking type, with intuition as his strongest supporting function.
People who translate this into Myers-Briggs letters usually suggest INTP: introverted thinking dominant with intuition as auxiliary. Some argue for INTJ. Jung never took the MBTI, which was developed after his main work, so any four-letter label is an informed guess. For the eight types Jung described, see what are the 8 personality types according to Carl Jung.
How No. 1 and No. 2 Relate to Typology
The two ideas are separate, but there’s a loose connection. Jung’s typology is about which attitude and function a person consciously relies on. He also believed every person has an undeveloped, less conscious side that compensates for it. His boyhood sense of an outward No. 1 and an inward No. 2 is one personal example of the theme of opposites that runs through all his work. For how that theme became a full theory, read our overview of Carl Jung’s psychological types.