PURPOSE: The primary purpose of this study is to provide a useful insight for developing effective teaching and student counseling methods by understanding the relationship between four preference patterns of MBTI personality types and EWHA defense mechanisms of nursing college students. METHOD: The data used in this research were collected administrating EWHA defense mechanism test and MBTI personality type instrument to 195 nursing students in the period of November 3 through September 16 in 2000. Collected data were analysed by pc-SPSS 10.0. RESULT: Three general conclusions were drawn from the study results: (1) in terms of personality type, 'Extraversion', 'Sensing', 'Thinking', and 'Judgement' types showed high frequency respectively; (2) in terms of defense mechanism, 'Identification' showed the highest score, and then 'suppression' scored next followed by 'Humor'. However, 'Acting out' showed the lowest average score, and then 'Projection' followed by 'Denial'; (3) Based on the relationship between defense mechanism and four MBTI preference patterns, it can be drawn that students with the preference of 'Extraversion' usually use defense mechanism of 'Altruism', 'Sublimation', 'Distortion', 'Controlling', and 'Humor'. In comparison, students with the preference of 'Introversion' often use the defence mechanism of 'Evasion' and 'Projection'. CONCLUSION: The study results can be utilized in both fields of education and counseling: (1) in the field of education, this study can provide a basis for developing a suitable teaching method for each personality types of nursing students; (2) for counseling practitioners, the results of this study provide the useful insights to understand nursing college students' communication skills, behavior patterns, and ability of coping with problems in the process of counseling.