SOME BASICS ABOUT PSYCHOLOGICAL TYPES
1) WHAT IS WRONG WITH THE MBTI AND THE “FUNCTIONS”
1.1) ALL THE “FUNCTIONS” FOR THE INTROVERTS ARE WRONG
It seems nobody can spot the difference between the introverted “functions” that Jung described and the current absurd mythologies that get attached to them. Because everything that you can read online about those “functions” (and most of the extraverted too) is wrong. And it seems nobody can recognize the actual correspondence between the introverted types in real life, the people that we supposedly know, and the ones that appear in Psychological Types.
I don’t know what’s the cause of this, but it might be that somebody read the descriptions and didn’t like what Jung had to say about some types, probably the introverted rational ones. Some people started thinking about themselves and/or talking about those types as if they were some of the perceivers, because of their less threatening nature, perhaps. Introverted feelers say, for instance, that they are “dreamy”, or “misunderstood”, or something like that. Introverted thinkers may say they “love history”, lament that others don’t take their advice, etc. They are all “attuned to their senses” or “their intuition”, etc. I’m sorry, but that’s only the self-marketing language speaking, not a pscyhological analysis. It’s all costumes and masks, in some kind of parade where everybody wants to be “special” (that is: marketable). At this point the language is so twisted up, that those words, and the types themselves, can mean anything.
Now, just for the sake of trying once more:
Do you really think INTJs/INFJs are the kind of people that a serious psychologist (not a Shakespeare) would describe as the artistic dreamers, misfits or cranks of society? Are they the “great men gone wrong”, whose arguments tend to lack conviction and nobody understands, among all others? Are ISTJs/ISFJs indifferent to their surroundings, or have some kind of mythical screen between the real things and their own perception? Do you really think their inner essence could be described as “calm”? Would a psychologist say ISFPs/INFPs’ reactions to the object have a negative character? Is it really so that they don’t join others’ emotions, but instead try to cool them down? Do you really see those types as driven, and sometimes a bit paranoid? Are INTPs/ISTPs really the most “scrupulous”? Do they show a tendency to complicate themselves, and do they actually pay that much attention to detail? Do they give the impression of believing in some kind of superstition?
No. Jung wasn’t writing his first impressions about a bunch of random people. He wasn’t doing a “first thing that comes to your mind” exercise. His depictions were the result of years of professional practice on all kinds of people, and the evaluations he used were placed in their right positions along a wide spectrum. So it’s the most scrupulous that gets called that, not the one that might be a little bit scrupulous from time to time, or someone that’s trying to market himself as scrupulous in a job interview.
It’s the INTPs/INFPs (Ni1) that get lost in useless fantasies. They are the weird ones. But not the weird ones on television or the media. That’s not a faithful reflection of the spectrum of real people. They are the real weird ones, not the famous [extraverted] “lunatics”. This is so obvious that I don’t know how anybody can read Jung and think otherwise. It’s almost as if nobody actually reads what he wrote. It’s the ISFJs/INFJs (Fi1) that have unreachable visions, the ones that develop hidden intense feelings and sometimes imagine what others are thinking. They are the ones with a “mysterious power”, the ones of sudden and heroic gestures. The scrupulous ones are the ISTJs/INTJs (Ti1), the ones that complicate themselves, and often others. They are the ones with the uneasy amiability, the ones that really seem to be worried about any lack of control. And the calm ones are the ISTPs/ISFPs (Si1), the ones that take their time to tinker and get lost in their own perception of things.
1.2) THE AUXILIARY IS WRONG FOR EVERYBODY
Myers measured J/P just as Jung would think about rational/irrational types, but she thought she was doing something different. No, Liz, dear. You can’t be “rational inside and irrational outside”, that’s not how it works. You are always one of those, everywhere, as a default state or “natural essence”, and you seek the assistance of the other only in particular moments/things/tasks/ideas, to help your true foundation, which is at all times “running in the background”. You can also picture this as one inside the other.
The most important thing in Jung’s work is the opposition between introversion and extraversion. If you really want to understand what he was trying to say here is another picture for you: those two attitudes as opposed points of attraction, and the contents of the mind starting at the center and then sliding and placing themselves more to one side than to the other, in pairs of interrelated but opposing elements. The first things to move from the center are the conscious of the person, that goes to one side, and the unconscious, that goes to the other. If the conscious goes to the extraverted end we have an extraverted person, if it went to the introverted one, we’d had an introvert.
The degree of self-clarity between the contents and workings of the mind (along this imaginary line between those two points of attraction) is what Jung called “differentiation”. At this moment the main form of the conscious/unconscious are two “functions”. These can be Thinking/Feeling or Sensation/Intuition, either in that order or backwards. The conscious one (let’s say it’s Feeling) is indistinguishable from the way the subject “experiences” life/himself, making it harder to be identified than what’s usually thought. This is what’s called the “dominant function”. The unconscious one, in this particular case, would be Thinking, and it could be called “unconscious dominant” (Jung called it “inferior”). One is introverted and the other extraverted. Always.
In some people this is the final stage (the ones Jung mostly described in his book), but in others a second element gets caught in the attraction of one side, sending its opposite to the other. These are two more “functions”, called “auxiliary” because they help the dominant ones. In order to be helpful they must be the pair that didn’t move in the previous stage. In the case of our Feeling type they are Sensation and Intuition: one would go help the conscious Feeling and the other the unconscious Thinking (two possible combinations, then). The “poles of gravity” in the mind are introversion/extraversion, not conscious/unconscious, so the second “function” appears with the same attitude as the one that’s already in place on each side. This means that if you are an introvert everything that slides to your conscious mind will be introverted, and if you are an extravert it will be extraverted. Your unconscious gets the other part.
This is actually one of the most amazing things that Jung discovered. Introversion and extraversion are basically two different worlds, and we live consciously in one and unconsciously in the other.
The extraverted types have always had two rightly defined “functions” whenever people talk about those MBTI types through them: the dominant ones (conscious and unconscious). But their auxiliaries are wrong in the minds of lots of people. So, in comparison with the introverts, they have been only half-mistreated. This means that the extraverted “functions” should be slightly better understood, but nobody is getting the introverted ones right at all, so I think their extraverted counterparts might be getting some backlash from all that misunderstanding.
1.3) ALL DESCRIPTIONS BASED ON THOSE “FUNCTIONS” ARE WRONG
I have to leave here a big thank you to reckful (aka reddshoes) for his great explanations about MBTI and typology (especially this one) (he doesn’t like anything “functional” at all, to be clear). It was reading those lines when something made click and I finally understood what was wrong with the usual “stack model” that everybody seems to repeat over and over. It’s all wrong, people. It’s aaaaaaaaall wrong. Those who took the “stack” and started making sites, and descriptions of the types, and selling books, and typing people only with that (saying the “functions” were “cool” and “advanced”), only made the “types” even more meaningless, mixing people with all kinds of real types together. Then you have those absurd ideas about “grips” and “loops”, that only magnify the seal of ignorance. Now there are so many contradictory and plainly imaginary things mixed up together in each type that currently those four-letter combinations amount to little more than amorphous collections of made-up “facts”, clichés and misunderstandings.
There are patterns of mistakes in lots of typology-related texts out there. This one, for example, is one of the most common:
Their descriptions of “Te” are actually about TJs, not about “Te” as a “function” (because, for example, ITJs are Ti1).
Their descriptions of “Ti” are actually about TPs, not about “Ti” as a “function” (because, for example, ETPs are Te2).
Their descriptions of “Fe” are actually about FJs, not about “Fe” as a “function” (because, for example, IFJs are Fi1).
Their descriptions of “Fi” are actually about FPs, not about “Fi” as a “function” (because, for example, EFPs are Fe2).
Their descriptions of “Se” are actually about SPs, not about “Se” as a “function” (because, for example, ISPs are Si1).
Their descriptions of “Si” are actually about SJs, not about “Si” as a “function” (because, for example, ESJs are Se2).
Their descriptions of “Ne” are acually about NPs, not about “Ne” as a “function” (because, for example, INPs are Ni1).
Their descriptions of “Ni” are actually about NJs, not about “Ni” as a “function” (because, for example, ENJs are Ne2).
Again: it’s all wrong. It’s such a next-level kind of wrong that it was one of the main reasons for me to start publishing here. The thousands of books, pages, forums and blogs, the most famous and linked descriptions on the internet, the millions of posts about typing celebrities and characters and the different kinds of bricks and flavours of ice-cream. All backwards and twisted and wrong. (“But what about…?” Yes, that one too). All wrong, and basically useless. Only good for making ignorance look like complexity (as if that was some kind of guarantee), and not helping people at all. Yeah. There’s a lot of things that “work” just like that.
OK. RIGHT. SO. WHAT CAN WE DO?
2) THIS TABLE COULD BE A GOOD STARTING POINT
The real Jungian “functions” of each type are those that appear in this table that I’ve made. That’s the way everything makes sense. The table includes some of the categories and terms that I’ve found to be the most meaningful in almost 10 years of reading and trying and thinking and collecting information and starting all over again, on this topic of psychological types. There are lots of things that could be there as well, but I think this selection works as a good starting point.
I tried to put words that could be used together in sentences, with a little tweaking, going from one column to another, in order to find new ways of exploring the types, their similarities and their differences. Some combinations don’t work at all, I know, but others might go “click”, and open doors. Some good examples could be: J types “want to find [perception][value] for [judgement]”, and P types “want to find [judgement][value] in [perception]”. The + sign marks the main standpoint of the type, what takes precedence over everything else. It should appear (or be understood) only as the most important source AND destination.
I find the temperament associations (taken from the links here) very meaningful because they seem to capture almost perfectly that kind of “vibe” or “air” that comes from the people of each type. They are colorful and give the types a more tangible aspect. (I made some images trying to show this, I’ll post them later).
One interesting thing is that we have a type with a “pure” temperament for each Keirsey group, intelligence, interest and myth (see 2.3 below). That’s pretty neat. And the same can be said if we look at Berens’ “interaction styles” (link), because they all match perfectly.
And we also have matching descriptions if we take a look at Jung’s Psychological Types. About the introverted feeling people he said: “not infrequently their temperament is melancholic.” Check. On the extraverted thinker he used words such as “cruel tyrant” and “his expression and tone frequently becomes sharp, pointed, aggressive“, which could easily be how someone would describe a choleric temperament. And about the introverted thinker he writes “emotivity and susceptibility“, “bitterness“, “isolation“, “feelings of inferiority” and a certain tendency to victimhood (these last two are about both rational introverts), which are a good mix of melancholy and choleric things.
2.2) JUDGEMENT AND PERCEPTION
The words “intelligence” and “interest” here are just a guide, like the rest of the words in the table. You know they are not “scientific”, “final” or “exclusive” in any sense. That’s not how I write. Ok.
We just needed to put the right “functions” in the table to discover this correlation:
Conscious Te = Practical Intelligence (ET = cTe)
Conscious Fe = Social Intelligence (EF = cFe)
Conscious Se = Interest in Objects (ES = cSe)
Conscious Ne = Interest in Patterns (EN = cNe)
Conscious Ti = Critical Intelligence (IT = cTi)
Conscious Fi = Inner Intelligence (IF = cFi)
Conscious Si = Interest in History (IS = cSi)
Conscious Ni = Interest in Unknown (IN = cNi)
So, yes, your conscious includes both combinations of your second and third letters with your first letter. If you are a J their order is reversed (X1 = 3rd+1st, X2 = 2nd+1st), but with a P you already have them in order (X1 = 2nd+1st, X2 = 3rd+1st). There’s a lot more to say about the “functions”, but those two-word descriptions are actually pretty good. We can make an experiment right now to see how the order matters a lot: ESFPs “would use their social intelligence to help their interest in objects“, whereas ESFJs “would use their interest in objects to help their social intelligence“.
Ok, just one more thing for now: “History” in the table means [personal] history (and things related to that), so it’s not necessarily “world history” (whatever that is). Conscious Si implies a more internal aspect of things and events, essentially “the known”, in contrast to “the unknown” (which is the realm of Ni, as the two are mutually exclusive).
We can arrange the 16 psychological types in all sorts of ways. One of them is using the first and last letters: EJ / EP / IJ / IP, which result in four groups of four. To me these are incredibly meaningful groups: if you think about the types in each one you get a sense that they could be considered representations of four main archetypical roles that characters embody in legends and classic tales: the Child, the Teen (or Young), the Adult and the Elder. It’s not about the actual age of anybody, of course. It’s about the mythical qualities that their minds would probably acquire if they were characters in some kind of fairy tale.
The Child is the innocent bearer of strange and unmapped new treasures. He is the playful explorer that wanders and wonders at things, known or unknown. But the treasures he finds need somebody else to be recognized and applied, because the Child can only imply their existence, and he’s actually somehow aware that they can be abused or misused, so he usually doesn’t announce or lend them. The Child is often dependent in some important way (physical, emotional, economical, directional, etc). Sometimes they can be also suddenly original, weird, insolent or irreverent, because they don’t recognize customs or authority. IPs are the eternal Children. (Si1/Ni1). All Children have some kind of phlegmatic temperament, except ISTPs, the more “mature” among them, and probably the less likely to be dependent.
The Teen is the one who thinks he knows everything. He’s the one without restraint, daring and bold but also loud, reckless and dangerous. He “believes”, goes out there and tries to prove himself. The Teen likes competition and anything that he hasn’t done before. He likes change for change’s sake. The groups or partnerships that he might be part of are usually just fleeting gatherings of separate individuals, not actual established institutions. And he joins whatever satisfies him, without thinking about responsibility. He wants everything, and doesn’t understand the concept of incompatibility. The Teen takes games too seriously and work too leisurely. When something that should be mere routine goes amazingly well or terribly wrong is often because of them. EPs are the eternal Teenagers. (Se1/Ne1). All Teens have some kind of sanguine temperament. People that don’t really understand typology tend to think of [famous] Teens as being Child types.
The Adult is the dutiful one, running things at a private scale, usually in small groups, like a team or a family. It’s often an Adult that’s in charge of Teens and Children. He is always working, and making things right. Everything is a serious matter for him, he has responsibilities. The Adult is a little worried that things might go wrong, and sometimes puts up with too much. He doesn’t want anything to go to waste, or become a liability. The Adult might find it difficult to relax, but he is a solid foundation. He likes protection, involvement and development. He is ambitious in a common-sense kind of way. His results are localized, serving as a bridge to more work. IJs are the eternal Adults. (Ti1/Fi1). All Adults have some kind of melancholic temperament.
The Elder is the one running things in a public way, and he’s usually somewhat alone in his position. He is a known leader, often consulted regarding important decisions in all kinds of matters. The Elder tends to work at his own pace (not necessarily slower than the rest, so he can be impatient with others), and gets global results. He’s not actually worried, but more like resigned, or maybe somehow “possessed”. He knows a lot that can be useful, but tries to focus on some principle that he has found and considers more valuable than knowledge. It’s those principles that can “possess” some of them. EJs are the eternal Elders. (Te1/Fe1). All Elders have some kind of choleric temperament, except ESFJs, the more “child-like” and probably the most likely to be closer to younger people. I think there’s also a tendency in this case, for people that don’t really understand typology, to think of [famous] Elders as being Adult types.
This is something that I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. I like this kind of things :)
This would be the actual “dual” of each type, the one with the same functions in the opposite place. I don’t know anything about how they “get along”, and I’m still trying to figure out what kind of “switch” takes place between each pair, or how to explain it, but this was another problem with the usual “function stack”, another thing that didn’t make sense at all. This way it might start to do so.
Ok. I’d say that’s enough for now.
Look at the table. Then go away. And think about it.
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