PY & AP: Differences

This article was first written on 24th of April 2022 and published on this website on 14th of May 2022, with further refinement. (Check: Website's Updates).

To start, if you see no differences between Attitudinal Psyche and Psychosophy it means Rob Zeke (the creator of AP) plagiarized Afanasyev's (the general theory, aspects, positions, attitudes, parts from type relations) & Russian PY theorists' unofficial original works (blocks, clubs, subtypes, sextas, Model E, "Volition = goals"-esque descriptions) and makes money off of it, which doesn't sound fair to me.

He did mention his work only two times on the AP website & his introduction video on YT, but only to say that his theory is somehow different from PY. Otherwise he barely mentions the original source. If he wanted to make PY more accessible to others he could just translate the original book, make an overview and call it "Psychosophy". Anyway...

There are still some differences between the systems, though, at least as I see it, even if Attitudinal Psyche looks like an oversimplification of the original theory (Psychosophy). You can draw parallels between PY being Naranjo/Jung and AP being Riso-Hudson/MBTI.

By the way! Some people say that PY's type descriptions are bad and violent in many ways in comparison to AP (the same way some Naranjo's Enneagram descriptions are, like E8 being a rapist), but there are actually absolutely 100% normal type descriptions on the official PY website (that's being managed by Afanasyev's wife). I compiled all the links here for conveniences, since I noticed Google translating the names in a very weird way, lol.

Psychosophy (PY) is the original system on which Attitudinal Psyche (AP) is based.

There is a common misconception that PY and AP is the same system, but it's simply not true. In fact, Psychosophy is the first and original system on which Attitudinal Psyche was based, as mentioned by the creator.

AP's theory also has a lot of common with concepts (I mentioned which before) that were created by various Psychosophy theorists, including people from Russian Socionics/Psychosophy forums, long before AP was created.

While aspects in the both systems seem to be fundamentally similar, there are still some light differences between them.

Descriptions in PY contain more details and you can think of Psychosophy as Jung and Attitudinal Psyche as MBTI. Psychosophy itself is more detailed and deep overall in my opinion, I definitely recommend reading "Syntax of Love" to understand it better.

Another example - while in PY Emotions are (shortly, because the book is long) mostly about how you direct your emotions into environment and interact with others, your inner depth & confidence in them, your attitude towards emotions, etc., in AP Emotions also include factors such as "opinions about what is beautiful, ugly, right, wrong, good or bad" i.e. some kind of concern with morals & etc. Similar trivial differences can be found in other aspects too.

Now, the differences above might be trivial, I don't disagree, but the next thing I'm going to mention definitely is. How AP messed up Volition and its EXTREMELY important part in typing.

In AP - volition is more about your goals, and confidence towards stuff like "work ethics" and conscientiousness. But in PY - Will (Volition) is the core of your personality, the driving force that influences other functions in your type, your sense of self, your self-esteem, strength of your character, how you place yourself in a social hierarchy and how you treat others based on it, and not much about work ethics & etc.

One of the most important parts in it that your V placement can affect confidence of your other functions and how they can manifest. I already wrote about it here.

While aspects in both theories seem to interact with each other, there seem to be more interactions in Psychosophy's theory. Except the way Volition can influence your functions, Afanasyev also often mentioned how people tend to make up for insecurities of the 3rd function through the 1st function. (This particular feature seems to be absent in AP).

As one example, Goethe (FVLE) denied importance of logics (3L) through praising the importance of experiencing life (1F).

Other aspects tend to be interactive with each other as well, and we can see another example in Akhmatova's (VELF) description, i.e. how criticism on her insecure aspect (3L) affected her physics (4F) in a negative way.

I also noticed a difference in the 3rd aspect between the two theories. The 3rd function in PY can be secretly empathetic despite being insecure, sensitive and avoidant (i.e. 3F can't stand looking at other people's physical struggles), + "superprocess" oriented rather than just "process", while in AP the descriptions seem to be more aggressive and self-centered and not that empathetic as they are in Afanasyev's Psychosophy.

The creators characterise the structures low-key differently.

AP says that it's focused more on simple attitudes towards the aspects (others-negative, i.e. negative towards how other use the aspect, self-positive, etc.), and while it's also a pattern in PY, your psychotype (PY type) in PY is more about your psyche's subjective hierarchy of values - by the creator's words (he said that in the official book and one of his interviews).

The focus on the self/other-negative attitudes can explain why the 3rd function in AP seems to be more self-centered.

To give clear examples how aspects work in real life, Afanasyev chose notable people for each psychotype and later assigned their names as the official namesakes for the types. For example: in PY "FLEV" is actually called "Epicurus", not "FLEV". And in his type descriptions, Afanasyev explained how the psychotypes manifested in these people.

In AP, the descriptions are much more theoretical and you can see the difference between the two systems (including these "trivial" differences between the aspects I wrote about before) by reading PY's FLEV description and comparing it to AP's FLEV description.

(Edit: someone told me that you can make your type similar to the PY's 25th type in AP, but since I don't know where this information is exactly from, I'm hesitant deleting this point yet.)

In PY, your type can change towards the 25th type as a form of self-improvement, while in AP the only thing that can change is your subtypes. I recall someone saying that Rob Zeke said that your type is inborn and can't change, but your subtypes can.

That's it for now. If I'll notice more differences, I'll update this page.