Military intelligence is a personality-centric career field because of its reliance on the subjective factor, which tends to creep into every intelligence assessment regardless of how analytically rigorous it attempts to be. To help reduce bias, intelligence professionals have developed brainstorming analytic techniques so that an analytical cell can offset individual biases.
Extraverted Feeling - Fe
The feeling function has its roots with the archetypal mother. My actual mother had limited tolerance for negative emotions from me. Her outbursts frightened me, and my own feelings terrified me even more. Hillman wrote that the mother-complex, “is the permanent trap of one’s reactions and values from earliest infancy, the box and walls in every situation whichever way one turns.”
The black swan represents those aspects of the inferior function that evoke surprise, spontaneity, and freedom from control and rigidity. It is here where the interpretation of the black swan requires an open mind, not to play the role merely, but to embody what seems foreign and necessary to us from a more authentic and personal place.
“Once upon a time, there was a quiet little village in the French countryside whose people believed in tranquillité.” This opening indicates that the psychological orientation of the village is one of peace and calmness, agreeability and order, suggesting that the village has certain values through which it judges situations—in other words a feeling function is at work.
With his unique thundering velvet hand approach, a Texan rarely says, “Shut up!” or “Don’t do that!” Instead, we hear, “Hush,” or “That would be ill-advised,” with a long drawl and a grin. The result is effective and charming, binding the man to his community. He easily compensates in robust, creative, and powerful ways to ensure full balance in his personality expression.
My Feeling is definitely not a matter of determining whether simply I like or dislike something, as Hillman suggested an undifferentiated Feeling function might do. For example, I feel a hundred different aspects of a rose—smell, vibration, gentleness, tone, harmony, et cetera, and all of these come into play when I evaluate its suitability for a certain spot in the garden.
The image of the ugly duckling growing into a beautiful swan is a powerful and transformative symbol of hope and fulfillment for INFJs. As a metaphor for differentiation and the individuation process, the Ugly Duckling tale illuminates the struggle to separate from the demands of others in order to recognize the value and beauty of one’s essential self.
The way an autistic individual perceives the world is of significant interest to researchers, for neurological differences have been found to impact the autistic individual’s perception and information-processing tremendously. Because Jung’s typology frames investigation of the psyche in terms of such mental processes, it can provide a new perspective on this very complex condition.
Facing death is an event that challenges how the various functions in the psyche work together in everyone—cooperating, compensating, decompensating, or even in integrating with each other. Since most people in their conscious lives are more familiar with the adaptations of life, not of death, facing death often forces us to face our inferior function.
Kowalsky’s self-sacrifice can be seen as the Animus acting as “the door through which all the figures of the unconscious come into consciousness.” His extraverted feeling is giving Stone a much-needed lesson: She must stop holding on to a situation that is no longer life-giving. It is time to let go of her debilitating prison of pain—and of her former self—so she can move forward.