Do you agree with Jungian analyst John Giannini (and others) that ESTJ is “the dominant typology of western culture?” Do you think this may be changing? Do you see major, typologically distinct subcultures? What do you see as the dominant typology of other cultures or countries?
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.
I see very clear portrayals of the function-attitudes in my canine friends. They often manifest in such simple and “pure” form that I feel I’ve been given a glimpse of how our human typologies may have evolved, and at what the function-attitudes “look like” without the complex dynamics and conscious obfuscation of human personalities.
Jung observed that, “The developing personality obeys … only brute necessity; it needs the motivation force of inner and outer fatalities.” Are “outer fatalities” a requisite for growth? Are “inner fatalities” necessarily traumatic and potentially catastrophic? Are there gentler, more positive ways of facilitating development of personality?
In the type table in the accompanying article on the type-diverse classroom, almost 60% of the ‘at risk’ and drop-out students are reported to have dominant extraverted perception, while almost half of the teachers are dominant introverted perceivers. Is extraverted perception misdiagnosed as a learning disability? Or, is that preference actually problematic …
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 …
“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.”
Some of the most difficult people to deal with are extraordinarily competent but refuse to share power or flex to consider other perspectives. Thus, they become obstructionists in contemporary society; and numerous studies of modern corporations have found “a disproportional number of narcissistic individuals [in] executive leadership positions.”
In Douglass Wilde’s article about his method of calculating the function-attitudes from MBTI® scores, he adds his voice to the persistent minority who challenge the conventional wisdom about the sequence of function-attitude preferences. … By downloading the Wilde Worksheet for Computing Function-Attitudes, you can test these formulations for yourself.
Fight Club’s accomplishment is to elicit in us the instinctive fear, resistance, and embarrassment we all experience around the domain of our inferior function, whichever function that may be for us. The reward for sticking with the movie until the end is a catharsis that feels as if we have integrated our own inferior function.
Individuation (which, within the conceptual framework of the type model, is essentially synonymous with ‘type development’) is usually unpleasant, and a positive outcome is far from guaranteed. So why do so many regard it as the psychic purpose of human existence? Why do we do it? What drives us to it? What has been your experience?
You can assert yourself … with an introverted function. You can take care of others … with an introverted function. You’re just not likely to do both these things with an introverted function, any more than one would do both with an extraverted function; our alternation of attitudes between the dominant and auxiliary takes care of that.
To have to spend a year in one’s inferior function is like a yearlong time-out for a toddler. I got so bored and desperate with my inferior introverted sensing (Si) function, required to gather and document the data, that I spent many hours asleep in the library. I could have asked Dr. Goldsmith for help, or maybe a mercy killing, but I was too proud to admit difficulty.
Many clients enter treatment because their psyche is “failing” to accommodate itself to their one-sided will. They are cut off from the self-regulating functions of their unconscious and the resulting symptoms have induced so much suffering that they are forced to stop their plans, enter therapy, and work through the blockage. The power complex wants a better hold on the psyche.
“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.
The modern emphasis on self-awareness seems to have taken our psychological development about as far as it can for now; further progress requires the pendulum to swing towards attending to our interrelatedness, toward Self-awareness. The two most active and influential sociopolitical worldviews of our time, conservatism and progressivism, are both demonstrably collective in orientation.
The schizoid nature of western civilization gives credence to our emphasis on the necessity of using all of the functions (S, N, T, F), in both attitudes of Introversion (I) and Extraversion (E) … When civilizations emphasize only one part of psychological type, they diminish themselves and set themselves up to see the world through distorted lenses.