Are you a Carrie, Miranda, Charlotte, or Samantha? Hard to say, right? Well, according to Jeff Guenther of the popular TikTok account @TherapyJeff, there’s a reason why you have trouble picking just one SATC character you relate to the most, and the reason is that Carrie, Miranda, Charlotte, and Samantha are based on psychologist Carl Jung’s interpretation of the personality.
(For any non-psych nerds in the chat, Carl Jung was a Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who founded analytic psychology. He’s most well known for his work in developing theories related to personality, archetypes, and the collective unconscious.)
Recently, Jeff was on an episode of the This Changes Everything Podcast. In a now-viral clip, Jeff explained exactly how Carrie, Miranda, Charlotte, and Samantha all represent one of the four personality parts proposed by Jung: anima, animus, shadow, and persona.
“So, Carl Jung was like, alright there are four parts of the personality,” Jeff explained in the podcast episode. “There’s the ‘anima,’ which is like the female part. And then there’s the ‘animus,’ which is the male part.” Jeff stated how Charlotte represented the anima, the exaggerated feminine side while Miranda is the masculine animus part of the personality.
In addition to the masculine and feminine components of the personality, Jung also posited there is a shadow part and a persona part. “And then there’s the shadow part, right? Who is Samantha, the sort of like id, hedonistic, ‘I’ll do what I want.’ And then there’s the persona, what we want to show to the world, how we want to be seen, which is Carrie.”
From there, Jeff went on to explain how each part of Jung’s personality theory is essential to being a complete person. “In that show, they can’t operate on their own,” Jeff said. “They sort of fall apart into their own exaggerated miseries. But when they come back and have cocktails together, they’re operating and like perfect symmetry. And that’s why we can all relate to one of those because we’re like, all of those are inside of us.”
Of course, you probably do see more of yourself in one character versus the others. For example, I definitely see myself as mostly a Miranda. However, in some scenes, I deeply relate to Charlotte, Carrie, and Samantha. This is what makes the show so iconic in the first place.
