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
Dreams of Grief and Growth
Alexa Gallo
September 16, 2020
My ongoing experience with grief in relation to my inferior function has brought forth dysfunctional behavior as well as an increase in consciousness and differentiation. It has enhanced my awareness of the healing capacity and vulnerability of the inferior function. I have come to see that the vulnerability is necessary.
The Map vs. the Territory of Type
Kartik Subbarao
November 1, 2012
The problem was that I wanted it to be as reliable as a road map. … I wanted the type map to conclusively show me the routes that, say, ESTPs took in their thinking and behavior. When it didn’t ‘work,’ I was disappointed. How could something so useful to me internally be so unreliable in external application, even after extensive study?
Plagiarism and Personality?
Mark & Carol The Editors
September 5, 2012
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 …
Soldier and Seeker
Elizabeth and Katherine W. Hirsh
February 1, 2012
Becoming a warrior requires you to shed some aspects of your identity and to take on new ones to fit your new role. Allegiances can be strained as new, family-like bonds are forged with fellow warriors. Individuals on the type development/individuation journey can also experience feelings of isolation from significant others and community.
The Polytheistic Organization
Bernard Neville
October 8, 2010
Organizational behavior, even more than individual, is shaped by myth and unconscious dynamics, rather than by rationality. I have noticed parallels between Jung’s observations of personality type and the gods who were at the centre of the classical Greeks’ understanding of motivation and behavior. The Greek pantheon can provide ways of talking about a wide range of value systems, energies, feeling states, behavior habits…
Individuation in the Dark
Byron Almén
September 3, 2013
To the degree that the type community has engendered awareness of alternative ways of encountering the world, one another, and oneself, it is engaged in a critically important service. Lest we forget, however, that the process of growth is often perilous, it is occasionally useful to remind ourselves of these perils.
Is Trauma the Mother of Growth?
Mark Hunziker
July 9, 2014
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?
The Integrity of Carl Jung
Jennifer Soper
October 1, 2014
First comes the development of the Hero; next is the “fall,” which brings awareness that something is missing, leading to the rejection of the heroic inflation and the longing for more. Then comes the real “journey,” holding the tension between our highly conscious dominant/superior function and our much less conscious inferior function.