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
Are Type Preferences Balanced?
Mark & Carol The Editors
May 2, 2012
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.
Type for Non-Normal Populations
Ann Holm
April 6, 2016
When does “normal” end and “not normal” begin? Sometimes it isn’t obvious, especially when individuals are just outside of the boundaries of normal. Consider mild Asperger’s Syndrome or attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Can these individuals benefit from the Jungian principles that underpin the MBTI® or other type tools and instruments?
Managing Bias in Military Intelligence
Kiley Laughlin
January 10, 2018
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.
The End is a New Beginning
Sam Allevato III
October 16, 2019
The world of Rilke’s tale is one besieged by the Dragon. This is the world of the wasteland, where people are living inauthentic lives. In most fairy tales, a successful hero is the answer to the wasteland. Rilke, however, presents the tale not as a deliverance from the Dragon but rather as a slow descent into the shadowy realm of the Dragon.
Shadow Boxing with Fight Club
Carol Shumate
December 1, 2011
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.
Nietzsche on “Self-Overcoming”
James Kennard
July 1, 2015
Rather than truly being able to move down to embrace the inferior function, to achieve “integrity in depth,” Nietzsche tries to “overcome” the problem of the personality. His fantastic intuitions are not wholly thought through, and so he is not able to deal with the real task of individuation, which asks us to ground consciousness in the reality of body and mind.
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.
Changing My Mind
Robert McAlpine
September 5, 2012
The type code had another unintended effect, which was to elevate the E-I and the J-P dichotomies to the same level as the functions. I had always thought of myself as an Introvert and nothing else. I had also been taught that I was a Judging type and I had been told that “J’s decide quickly,” but that was not true for me. So there were holes in my preference framework where my experience did not fit what I was taught.