Latest Articles
Finding the Way Home to the Body
Karishma Sharma
September 1, 2024
Intuitives must engage with and deepen into the body’s knowing, enter into conversation with the body and be open to its revelations. Coming into relationship with the body has opened channels to the depths of my being, making me conscious of the guidance within, informing me of my innermost needs, and allowing me to accept the paradoxes of the inner world.
Trading the American Dream for Real Life
Sofia Taboada
June 11, 2024
The competent, professional, independent persona that I had painstakingly crafted over my entire adolescence and adulthood was taken from me. The woman who had climbed the ranks to become a successful executive at the pinnacle of the corporate world, with her glamorous jet-setting lifestyle, was gone. I had experienced an enormous personal defeat and, having no recourse left, I realized I had reached rock bottom.
The Rhetoric of Paranoia in an ESTJ Culture
Erika Raney
March 6, 2024
In this patriarchal and heavily capitalistic culture that privileges the thinking functions, feeling seems to dominate the unconscious collective psyche. In the rise of cults of personality in their contemporary manifestation, the inflated extraverted thinking function establishes a goal; then anything that does not adhere to that universal aim is excised. In this crusade-like paradigm, connection to the genuine feelings and needs of a diverse community is lost as unhealthy extraverted thinking tightens its grip on power.
From the Archives
Exploring Function Coupling Interactions
Robert McAlpine
July 6, 2017
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.
Mine, Yours, and Ours
Khrystine Kelsey
October 16, 2019
Being married is easily the hardest thing I have ever done. Marriage is an all-consuming project that requires energy, commitment, and sustained effort. Unlike my other projects, I can’t just ignore my marriage until inspiration strikes. Mostly, there’s no faking it. As an introvert in an extraverted world, faking it is a lot of how I survive.
What Type Is Your Pet?
Mark Hunziker
April 1, 2015
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.
Type, Psychoanalysis & Meditation
Polly Young-Eisendrath
November 15, 2010
…how do we get a “spaciousness” in our own responses so that we can experience our feelings, our thoughts, our motivations without acting on them directly—but without denying them either. This is not a matter of suppressing, dissociating, trying to override one’s negative experience; it’s not a matter of controlling; it’s not a matter of pushing anything aside. It’s a matter of being able to watch what is going on in our own experience…
Unraveling Tragedy
Shirl Hughes Terrell
January 22, 2019
My sister’s life illustrates the impact of a lack of positive parental guidance on the development of personality and what happens if the inner parent fails to develop. Family tragedy deprived Christin of a compass with which to navigate psychic turbulence during midlife. While few people succumb to such crises, many lack the tenacity to face them.
Type and Other Biases
Laurie B. Lippin
February 1, 2012
In the MBTI® I found the self-understanding that I had been lacking; I saw myself finally as less of a dilettante than an adaptive explorer, and a powerful implementer of all I had learned. I had been collecting knowledge and skills but had continued to be unclear about my “use of self.” I finally saw my journey as self-actualization.
Trump, Clinton, and Authenticity
Carol Shumate
October 4, 2018
Often extraverted sensing leaders are considered more authentic than other types. Trump’s supporters viewed him as trustworthy (“honest,” “outside of the political corruption,” and “not a liar”) while they viewed Clinton as untrustworthy (“belongs behind bars,” “cannot be trusted,” and “nothing but lies”). Even Clinton’s own supporters expressed concern about her trustworthiness.
Defusing Cultural Polarization
Marlowe Embree
April 6, 2016
People of different types are prone to think about religion and spirituality in different ways. While type obviously does not determine a person’s religious beliefs, type is a lens through which one views the world of religion and spirituality, and as a result, contentious religious differences are often, in part, typological differences in disguise.