seeing time

Imagine you are a high school principal. A teacher bursts breathlessly into your office. "There’s a fist fight in the dining-room, "she gasps. The responsibility is yours to stop the fight. How do you meet it?
(1) Perhaps you, as a youngster, took part in fights and your present-day ties with students are warm and strong. You can stop the fight because your prestige is high among them.
(2) You have a plan prepared. Other schools have been disrupted so you have already planned a way to stop any fight.
(3) You are totally confident of your ability in a crisis. You are ready to stride into the lunchroom and take charge without a single qualm. Stopping the fight will be easy.
(4) You fervently wish that you could delegate the job since you know that you’re not a talented peacemaker. You wish you could return to the job of planning for the school’s need ten years hence.
    One of these four reactions would be the first you’d feel, but only one—not two or three of them, say three psychologists. These psychologists—Dr. Harriet Mann, Dr. Humphrey Osmond and Miriam Siegler—have come up with a scheme for sorting people regardless of their education, age or situation.
    The concept is based on the premise that all people have a basic way of seeing time. Each of us is predisposed to see all events from time vantage point. Either it reminds you of the past (past-oriented) , how the event fits into today, yesterday, and tomorrow (time line) , what it is today ( present) , or how it will develop (future).
    The three began working in 1968 when Dr. Mann and Mrs. Siegler were assistants to Dr. Osmond, director, at the Bureau of Research, New Jersey Neuro-Psychiatric Institute in Princeton. Dr. Osmond is currently devising ways to make empirical studies of the theory and Dr. Mann is in Cambridge , Massachusetts, writing a book on the Worlds of Time. Their take-off point was an interest in observations made by Swiss psychologist Carl Gustay Jung, who described in the 1920s the temperamental differences of four psychological types. Jung is known as the founder of analytic psychology. Since Jung’s work in 1921, however, no one had conceived of a theoretical framework that would account for the four types. Without such a framework, there was no possibility of substantiating that people of different types experience the world very differently.
    Time and space are the touchstones in the system. Each person, after all, uses his time somehow and exists within and acts upon the space around him. Dr. Mann, and company propose that certain traits are shared by persons falling in each of the four categories.
    The first type, the past type, sees time as being circular. For him, the past crops up in the present and then returns to the past as a memory. He enjoys collecting souvenirs and keeping diaries. He tells stories about Great Aunt Hattie and always remembers your birthday.
    Past types are pegged by this system as emotional people who see the world in a highly subjective way. For instance, School Principal I (past type) could identify with the fight and know how to handle it because of some past experience—whether it be similar fights as a child himself or ones previously dealt with as the school principal. In addition, past types usually follow strict moral codes and often are valued more for what they are than for what they do. This quality itself—because it lends authoritarian strength to one who possesses it—might cause the students to quit fighting. Past types often have been found to be skillful at assessing the exact emotional tenor of an event and are adept at influencing others’ emotions, according to the Mann group.
    Research reveals that many past-oriented people are flexible in early years when they do not have much of a personal past to draw upon. However, the dash of youth is often replaced by a need for stability and usually is rooted by age thirty-five or so. From this age onward, they are
conservatives.
    "They need to see things in the ways which were popular, fashionable and appropriate in their youth days, " explains Dr. Mann. This applies, with exceptions of course, to personal taste in clothing fashions, music appreciation, and other social and environmental factors. In short, the past type often clings to the well-established way with nostalgic fervor. Also, the past type finds it difficult to be punctual since the on-going feeling is more important than his next task.
    The goal of these people is to " develop a language of the heart, rather than of the mind. To develop those techniques which make memories live, and to dignify any act of remembrance; those are the essential concerns of past-oriented types, "explain the authors in Journal of Analytical Psychology.