Few movies have the power to move the sheer number of eyeballs away from technology, family and daily 201x life into another world like Star Wars can. The newest addition to the saga doesn’t disappoint. Highly received both critically and popularly, the movie skews towards crowd-pleasing and is refreshingly modern, making a candid point to debunk dusty expectations throughout. The aim of this piece is not to present a film critic’s analysis but instead look specifically at the cast of Star Wars through the lens of personality.

Human psychology is a vast field but one particular spoke, called analytical psychology, theorizes about the human condition through archetypes. Highly vague, and veering into mythology, archetypes are what Carl Jung called the recurring characters and events in the collective human unconscious that appear across seemingly isolated cultures and civilizations. For example the trickster fox, or sage owl. Later on, the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator was developed to simplify Jung’s research into four binary variables, of which 16 different shorthand combinations could be assembled into personality types.

When George Lucas was writing the original Star Wars, he developed an affinity to this concept of archetypes. He first read about monomyth and the “Hero’s Journey” in the book The Hero With A Thousand Faces, when he was still a student in college. The theory is that every story ever told is simply a retelling of the same general arc, a narrative that every human on Earth can relate to and understand. A New Hope follows this archetypal storyline and it reached resonance with the 70’s and 80’s moviegoers, eventually becoming the classic we know today. Personality types serve to describe the archetypal characters in monomyth through a modern framework. In the world of Myers-Briggs, everybody has a personality type, however, it can be thought to manifest itself uniquely in each individual. And as far as people can tell, it is immutable and you can only have one. Now as of this writing, by the grace of modern technology, more people will have seen, heard and talked about The Force Awakens than any other movie, play, or concert, ever. Let’s take a closer look at the personalities of a few key characters in Episode VII of the greatest story ever told.

INFJ

The Princess

“There are stories about what happened”

What makes personality types so intriguing is the amount of depth that can be demonstrated with so little. The MBTI test and the letters in its personality types are, again, simply shorthand for decades of research and should be considered as such. For example, our main character Rey is an INFJ, which expands to Introversion, iNtuition, Feeling and Judging. These qualities denote Rey’s psychological preferences in each of the four aforementioned binary variables, the other ends being Extraversion, Sensing, Thinking and Perceiving.

The INFJ is the absolute rarest of all the personality types, and is associated with the “princess” archetype. In the first installment of the trilogy, we see Rey nascent in the Force and eventually become quite adept as she learns to trust herself. Once subdued, twice hidden, the INFJ princess takes on the transformation into hero of the story so many people silently wish for. This black duckling storyline is found wrapping other INFJ’s in Hollywood, such as Audrey Hepburn in My Fair Lady or Emilia Clarke in Game of Thrones. (Clarke coincidentally also played Holly Golightly in a 2013 stage adaptation of the famous novella)

INFJ’s are archetypically quiet, cool, calculated and piercing in both actions and words. At the same time, the INFJ can be loud, wild and passionate due to Extraverted Sensing. But isn’t Introversion one of the letters in Rey’s type? Yes, but every personality has both Introverted and Extraverted sides, and what a person shows or withholds, either out of fear, guilt, responsibility or humility is all part of what makes us unique and human. Along with the previously mentioned binary variables, the four letter shorthand also unfolds into a cognitive function “stack”, of which Extraverted Sensing is one part. The depth at which one can pursue and argue personality types is currently endless, so I’ll leave curiosity to its own devices and just provide a surface understanding of personality types in this article.

Another day, another line on the wall. For years Rey has lived and learned to take and give what she can, and the only thing she has ever known is waiting for something to come. But the moments when she dons the helmet of a dead Rebel pilot, that far-off world she sees is hers alone. On a day like any other, the call to adventure comes. It takes on the form of a friendly, curious droid.

On a day like any other, the call to adventure comes.

Like anybody else, Rey is just fine with the status quo. Every day passing is another day closer to seeing her family again. She refuses the call until unnatural circumstances force her hand. The princess must leave everything behind and cross the threshold to accept this new adventure. Rey and her knight enter the belly of the whale, as her new ship, the Millennium Falcon, is swallowed whole.