FAQs

Who was Walter Lowen, the developer of the Systems Science Model of the Mind

and Personality Types?

Prof. Lowen was the Founding Dean of the School of Advanced Technology at SUNY Binghamton and a professor in the school’s

Systems Science department. He received his doctorate at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. While there,

he met Walter Bauman, Jung’s grandson and a Jungian Analyst. Prof. Lowen developed a lifelong passion for both Systems

Science and Jungian psychology, culminating in his Model of the MInd and Personality Types published in two books with

Lawrence Miike: Dichotomies of the Mind: A Systems Science Model of the Mind and Personality, published by Wiley, 1982, and

Personality Types: A Systems Science Explanation, published by the coauthor after Lowen’s death in 2006.

Is the Systems Science Model a Map of Areas of the Brain?

No, the Model is a conceptual map, an ordering of information about mind particularly focused on cognitive skills. As Prof. Lowen

explains, it is “a combination of Jung’s concepts, miscellaneous theories about the the mind, principles of information theory and

systems engineering, and my efforts to comprehend the diversity of personalities in which I’ve found myself immersed. It is

written in the language of mathematics, computers, and psychology [including Piaget’s stages of development]  to construct a

model of the organization underlying intelligence, and it uses that derived organization to explain human behavioral

patterns.”

We need a model to be able to organize a vast amount of information, to make sense of it. Just one of the recent books about

Personality Type has about 250,000 words. Just a short shelf of the most important books in the field would be in the millions of

words. It takes an immense amount of time and effort to read all that, and honestly, little of that mass of information will be

recalled.

The Model makes it easier to make sense of the mountains of words about Personality Type. We need a model.