The Orphan

The Orphan, called in the brand-strategy version the Everyman or Regular Guy, belongs with the Jester and the Lover under the motivation toward belonging and enjoyment. Its aim is to connect with others and to be one of the group; its fear is of being left out or standing out; its strategy is to develop ordinary solid virtues and to be down to earth; its shadow is the loss of self in the effort to blend in, and, in the darker reading Pearson gives it, the sense of being a victim. The shift of name between the two books is worth noting, because it marks the change of purpose: Pearson in 1991 calls the figure the Orphan and treats it developmentally, as the stage at which innocence is lost and disillusion sets in, whereas Mark and Pearson in 2001 rename it for a commercial audience and read it as the everyday consumer.

The Orphan's disillusioned everyman has an older literary parallel in the picaresque tradition, the roguish, socially marginal protagonist of works like the anonymous Lazarillo de Tormes (1554), who survives a corrupt world through wit and ordinary cunning rather than heroic virtue, a figure literary historians treat as an ancestor of the modern realist novel's everyman narrator. The twelve-archetype literature does not draw this connection explicitly; it is offered here as the kind of older, better-documented material the modern scheme gestures toward without citing. Mark and Pearson's brand-strategy renaming of the figure to Everyman or Regular Guy is aimed at mass-market, value-oriented products whose appeal rests on approachability rather than aspiration.

Sources Awakening the Heroes Within: Twelve Archetypes to Help Us Find Ourselves and Transform Our WorldCarol S. Pearson with The Hero and the Outlaw: Building Extraordinary Brands Through the Power of ArchetypesMargaret Mark and Carol S. Pearson

Any scheme of a fixed number of human types invites the objection that it produces stereotypes, and it is a fair objection to raise here. Pearson's own answer is that the twelve are not personality types: a person is not one of them but moves through all of them, with different ones active at different periods, and the scheme is offered as a developmental map rather than a classification of people. In practice, and especially in the branding and workshop literature derived from it, the twelve are constantly used as fixed types, and popular online tests assign people to one. That use should be distinguished from what the framework claims. It should also be said plainly that the twelve archetypes have no established psychometric standing: they are not a validated instrument, and there is no body of evidence supporting the twelvefold division as an empirical finding about persons.

The Myers-Briggs comparison is worth pressing further, since it is the closest analogue to what happened with Pearson's twelve. Both trace a lineage back to Jung's 1921 Psychological Types, both were developed by writers working outside academic psychology, and both achieved mass commercial reach, corporate training programmes and online self-assessment tests, far exceeding anything their originating theory or evidentiary base supports; the science journalist Annie Murphy Paul's The Cult of Personality (2004) documents the Myers-Briggs case in detail, and much of her critique, unvalidated categories treated by users as fixed and diagnostic despite their originators' own more modest claims, applies with little modification to the twelve-archetype scheme's popular reception.