Question of the Day II
Mark & Carol The Editors, January 5, 2011


Editors Carol Shumate, Ph.D., ENFP, and Mark Hunziker, INTJ, founded Personality Type in Depth as a forum to bridge psychological type and depth psychology. Both editors are themselves writers and they work together virtually, from North Carolina and Vermont respectively. Shumate's career has been in journalism, publishing, and higher education, while Hunziker's has been primarily in organization development consulting. Shumate's current project is a book on the Trickster archetype in leadership, and Hunziker's is about depth typology, a term he has coined for the interface of the two fields.
When you are taking care of others, what function-attitude do you tend to use the most? Where is it in your typology? Have there been times when it has not been effective? Why? How do you, yourself prefer to be taken care of? How does that differ from how you do it for others?
Like the water that surrounds their country, the Greeks are very fluid and go with the flow. They are passionate and capable. However, their heroic use of extraverted sensing has contributed to the current economic crisis. The Greek hero must ease his extraverted sensing grip and use puer extraverted thinking energy to build analytical and efficient systems.
Type as a problem needs to be rediscovered. Although from Jung’s point of view moderate one-sidedness does not usually cause major difficulties and is a stage of development to go through, ultimately being a type is a problem whereas contemporary type theory generally views it as a virtue. This has resulted in the transcendent function being overlooked.
I concluded that I simply did not have the requisite attributes to lead. I now realize that a number of other members of my section were also introverted, and that the majority of people in the unit, Green Berets or otherwise, were not necessarily extraverted; but the organization itself wore a collective persona that was extraverted in appearance.
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.
Do you use your dominant function-attitude confidently? Heroically? Do you know when to trust it, even if no one else does? Many people grow up in families and/or cultures that don’t support their preferred ways of seeing the world and operating in it. So underdevelopment of our naturally preferred functions is probably a common type-development issue …
Which do you trust more to give you reliable information about type: observation or introspection? And what is your type preference? Of course, all type users rely upon both the observation of others and internal self-reflection to expand and confirm their understanding of personality type. But it seems as though we differ in which we prefer.
A marriage is not only a dynamic story of two but also a mirror of the innermost soul workings of one, a journey of the disparate parts of one’s self seeking integration, finding their way home. If I have learned anything about marriage it is this: the greatest legacy I can offer my outer marriage is soulful, abiding attention to my inner union.
“Ambiversion” —the equal development of extraversion and introversion in an individual— has become a popular notion of late but it has led to some misinterpretations of Jung’s typology, specifically, to an idealization of this in-between state…
Delivering education that gets today’s students ready for the modern world must incorporate flexibility, diversification, and individualization. Students have moved past the structure of traditional classrooms. They have different problems, different gifts, and dramatically different brains. Educators need to refocus their efforts on teaching individuals.
The typical debate, –’Profiling is bad!’ vs. ‘We’re not profiling!’&ndsh; has not been particularly productive. Racial and ethnic stereotyping continues despite decades of public condemnation. It seems to me that the questions we really need to be considering are more along the lines of: ‘What is profiling?’ ‘How and when does it lead to bad outcomes?’
“What do you want?” asked one of the boys, his crossed arms over his chest authoritatively. “I want a drink of water,” I told him, but as I made a move to go around him, he stepped in front of me again. Before I could say anything or react in any way, he told me, “You can’t drink here. This fountain is for people. No monkeys allowed.”
How might type development affect judgment lapses that result in plagiarism? Can we use our understanding of type to address this problem? Two high-profile journalists were recently removed from their posts for reasons of plagiarism—New Yorker staff writer Jonah Lehrer, and Time editor-at-large and CNN host Fareed Zakaria. On July 30, Lehrer …
Giannini’s model differs importantly from Myers’ in that it does not restrict us to just one predominant function pair associated with one’s preferred perceiving and judging processes. His model provides a greater degree of flexibility in the developmental expression of type-related behaviors as well as enhanced adaptive power for engaging and responding to our various environments.
Academic personality research likes to consider trait psychology to be the scientific revolution that overtook and replaced Jung’s type psychology. However, it may be more accurate to view type and trait models as complementary because the conceptual divide has been shifting, and many trends in academic personality research now reflect the fundamental principles of Jung’s type system.
