About
Depth Typology
A psychodynamic approach to personality — grounded in psychoanalysis, existential philosophy, and the conviction that understanding yourself begins in the unconscious.
What It Is
A New Kind of Typology
Depth Typology is a psychodynamic approach to personality — one grounded not in questionnaires or trait inventories, but in the deep structure of the unconscious mind. It draws on the tradition of modern psychoanalysis and existential philosophy to ask a different kind of question: not simply what type of person you are, but why you are that way, and what that means for how you live.
Where conventional personality systems tend to categorise behaviour and preference, Depth Typology reaches underneath — into the unconscious patterns, early phantasy formations, and psychic structures that give rise to personality in the first place. It is the first framework to unify foundational typological theory with modern psychoanalysis.
The Foundations
Jung, Klein, Lacan — Synthesised
Depth Typology begins with Carl Jung's theory of psychological types and archetypes — universal patterns embedded in the collective unconscious, shared across cultures and expressed differently in each individual. To this foundation it adds the work of Melanie Klein, whose object relations theory revealed how the core structure of personality forms within the first year and a half of life.
Lacanian psychoanalysis contributes the concept of lack — the fundamental incompleteness that drives desire and gives personality its particular texture and direction. In Depth Typology, lack is not a wound to be healed but the very engine of a person's unique expression. Drawing also on Heidegger's existential philosophy, the framework situates personality within the question of Being itself: how we exist, how we dwell, and what it means to become more fully ourselves.
How It Works
Phantasy, Formation, Expression
At the heart of Depth Typology is the concept of phantasy — not fantasy in the ordinary sense, but the innate, unconscious desires that colour every person's experience of the world. Each person's core phantasy is unique, shaped by biology, temperament, and the earliest relational experiences of life. It might be primarily organised around nourishment, vision, containment, omnipotence, or recreation — but whatever form it takes, it is the deepest layer of who someone is.
These core phantasies are elaborated through childhood and beyond, as the ego, superego, and instinctual life add layers of nuance and complexity. Unlike fixed trait models, Depth Typology recognises that the expression of personality changes across a lifetime — while its underlying structure remains.
The Goal
Toward Self-Actualisation
Depth Typology is not primarily a system for self-knowledge, though self-knowledge is part of what it offers. Its deeper aim is self-actualisation — in the sense of a life that resonates, more and more fully, with one's own unconscious structure.
A life actualised in this way does not need to look remarkable from the outside. It simply needs to be genuinely one's own — lived from the inside out, shaped by an honest relationship with the drives, desires, and depths that constitute a person's nature. Depth Typology exists to make that relationship possible, so that the person can authentically thrive in their everyday life.