The same map, drawn deeper
Anwyn uses the same four-letter type system almost everyone already knows — the sixteen types, the four dichotomies, the familiar codes like INFJ or ESTP. Nothing about your letters is reinvented. What we add is depth: the cognitive machinery beneath the code, an optional fifth dimension for identity, and original writing for every type.
A short lineage
It begins with Carl Gustav Jung. In his 1921 work Psychological Types, the Swiss psychiatrist proposed that much of the apparent randomness in human behaviour is in fact orderly — that people take in the world and reach decisions through distinct, describable mental functions, each turned either inward or outward. This is the root system: the eight cognitive functions the whole tradition still rests on.
Jung's ideas were dense and clinical. It was two Americans, Katharine Cook Briggs and her daughter Isabel Briggs Myers, who spent decades translating them into something ordinary people could use. Working through the mid-twentieth century, they built the four-letter framework — pairing Jung's functions into four either/or preferences and combining them into sixteen recognisable types. Their instrument put a vocabulary for temperament into millions of hands.
Anwyn stands on that lineage rather than replacing it. We keep the four dichotomies and the sixteen codes exactly as they are, because they work and because they are the language people share. Then we go back to Jung's original insight — the functions — and bring them to the surface, alongside a modern identity axis drawn from contemporary trait psychology. Every portrait, name, and line of description here is our own.
The five dimensions
Four dimensions form your four-letter type. A fifth, optional dimension refines it without ever changing the letters.
Mind
How you engage with the world and where you draw energy.
Outward-turned. You recharge in company, think out loud, and reach for the world to make sense of it.
Inward-turned. You recharge in solitude, think before speaking, and reach inward to make sense of the world.
Identical to the Myers-Briggs Extraversion / Introversion dichotomy. Contributes one letter to your code.
Energy
How you take in information and what you trust.
Grounded in the concrete. You trust experience, detail, and what is tangibly, presently real.
Drawn to the abstract. You trust patterns, possibility, and the meaning humming beneath the surface.
Identical to the Myers-Briggs Sensing / Intuition dichotomy. Contributes one letter to your code.
Nature
How you weigh decisions and what you optimise for.
Head-first. You decide by logic, consistency, and the cool arithmetic of what is true.
Heart-first. You decide by values, harmony, and the human weight of what is kind.
Identical to the Myers-Briggs Thinking / Feeling dichotomy. Contributes one letter to your code.
Tactics
How you approach structure, plans, and the open road.
Structured. You like decisions made, plans set, and the satisfying click of a closed loop.
Open. You like options alive, plans loose, and the freedom to follow the moment where it leads.
Identical to the Myers-Briggs Judging / Perceiving dichotomy. Contributes one letter to your code.
Identity
An optional fifth dimension — how confident and steady you feel. It refines your type but never changes the four letters.
Assured. You are even-keeled, resistant to stress, and rarely second-guess the road you have chosen.
Striving. You are self-aware, success-driven, and sensitive — perfectionism is both your engine and your friction.
An optional identity axis (Assertive / Turbulent). It is notpart of the classic Myers-Briggs system — it is drawn from the Big Five's emotional-stability trait — and it never changes your four letters.
The eight cognitive functions
Beneath every type sits an ordered stack of four of these eight functions — Jung's original insight, and the part most quizzes quietly drop. They explain why two types that share three letters can feel worlds apart.
Converges scattered signals into a single, unfolding vision of where things are heading. Ni feels like knowing without quite knowing why.
Explodes any point into a fan of possibilities and hidden connections. Ne is the delight of 'what if' and the leap between distant ideas.
Anchors the present against a rich internal library of past experience. Si is the guardian of how things have reliably been done.
Reads the physical moment in high fidelity and moves with it. Se is total immersion in the vivid, tactile now.
Builds a private, internally consistent model of how things truly work. Ti asks whether an idea holds together, not whether it is popular.
Marshals people, steps, and resources toward measurable outcomes. Te is the drive to make the external world efficient and effective.
Weighs everything against a deeply held, personal sense of right. Fi is a quiet, unshakeable compass of what matters.
Tunes to the emotional weather of a room and moves to warm it. Fe seeks connection, consensus, and collective wellbeing.
How we differ from official MBTI®
- Anwyn's assessment is our own original instrument. It is not the proprietary MBTI® questionnaire and is not scored by it.
- Every type name, portrait, and description on this site is written from scratch by Anwyn.
- We reference the Jung and Briggs-Myers lineage descriptively, to explain where the four-letter model comes from — not to imply any endorsement.
- Anwyn is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to The Myers & Briggs Foundation. MBTI and Myers-Briggs Type Indicator are trademarks of their respective owner.
See where you land
The theory is only half of it. Take the assessment and read the framework mapped onto you.
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