Taking over identity-conferring messages from different others invariably creates a jigsaw puzzle whose pieces don’t quite match up. That’s why we are perfectly capable of having a dialogue with ‘ourselves’. I can be angry, pleased, or disappointed with ‘myself’, because the ‘I’ that is judging ‘me’ is based on a different identification from the

we all behave differently depending on the situation. But if we’re capable of such flexibility, does it even make sense to chart the differences between introverts and extroverts? Is the very notion of introversion-extroversion too pat a dichotomy: the introvert as sage philosopher, the extrovert as fearless leader? The introvert as poet or science