How would someone psychologically analyze themselves?

It’s definitely more difficult, the more limited your knowledge in psychology. If you’re interested, you can PM me and I can try to steer you in the right direction.

Sounds like a very bad idea. You can peer inside, dredge up memories from your childhood, and interpret them. But you will be working with the distortions of personal perception that are pretty much everyone’s lot in some form on another. Another person schooled, wise, and capable of maintaining an emotional distance while helping you remove the distortion is so necessary.

Even psychoanalysts are analyzed by another psychoanalyst as part of the beginning of their training.

Well, you can always learn more about yourself, if you’re open to that and honest with yourself. But it’s hard to be both of those things sometimes.

I learned – after a long time – that most often when I’m annoyed by a person it’s because they manifest a flaw that I find in myself (if I care to find it). So that’s not always so pleasant to learn, hence most people’s (and most of the time my own) blindness to that fact. (It’s always easy to see this in others. We have a guy in our office who often complains about others’ rudeness. But when he speaks – and I don’t know, but maybe he has untreated hearing loss or something – he BRAYS throughout the entire rather large office area. Having him around often reminds me that I can have that tendency, too, when I’m not careful. But he’s oblivious to the way he impinges on all of us around him.)

But I don’t think I’d have many realizations of this type without rubbing up against other people. And I think that trying to analyze yourself by peering into your own navel is a non-starter. In fact, you can go backwards doing that.

I think it’s better to learn about yourself through your accomplishments – and failures, and how you treat each of those things and how you treat yourself and others when you’ve attained those things (failure as well as accomplishment) – than by looking into a mirror too deeply.

Here is a site with several tests. I tend to be skeptical of what such tests can show. There is a test, the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory. This site claims to offer an online version, but I have seen statements on the Web that say the test must be administered by trained professionals. When I went to college, a psych major gave me the test, because he thought there was something wrong with me. He was disappointed that the test did not indicate any serious disorders.

I would leave this to a professional!

It is almost impossible to step outside of yourself and analyze yourself.

@LostInParadise I have a good story about the MMPI.

We used to be required to take that test to qualify for admission to nuclear power sites as workers and supervisors. On one of my first projects, in 1980, an entire group of 14 supervisors from my company took the test in a single session. The company rented a hotel conference room, set us up at tables and had a test administrator present while we took the test together. But it wasn’t as tightly administered as, say, a final exam at a college (and after all, there are no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ answers), so there was a lot of give and take and kidding about the questions during the session: “I feel like I have a tight band around my head. – True or False”; “I would like to hunt lions in Africa. – True or False” and about 500 or so questions, if I remember rightly, covering all kinds of situations, some of them more real than others. The proctor didn’t try to get us to shut up or stop that.

Since very few of us had had experience taking this ‘inventory’ before, none of us realized the effect of what we were doing, which somehow threw off the responses. Eventually we all finished the test and went on to other business. When the results came back, most of us had to re-test, as the results were deemed invalid.

Two of us had schedule conflicts, and couldn’t retest in the more formal (and individualized) setup, so we retested later at the jobsite. What they did was set up an office trailer (the size of a full-size mobile home) with ‘test stations’ at each end of the office. I tested at one end, and Tom H. tested at the other end, with a very serious proctor in the middle of the office. I finished first, and went outside. I made up signs that said “TRUE” and “FALSE” and went to Tom’s end of the trailer. For the next half-hour or so, until he finished the test, I would randomly put up one of the signs in the window he was facing, but out of sight of the proctor.

He finished the test later and came outside, laughing. Apparently he had used my random answers on some of the questions he waffled on, rather than saying “Not Sure” (which was a valid, but non-preferred response). Two days later he had to visit the psychologist for an hour for a formal review and approval before he could get an okay to remain at the site.

@CyanoticWasp XD