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.
Is differentiation of an ego-syntonic function-attitude somehow different from differentiation of an ego-dystonic FA? Or maybe differentiation works the same for all function-attitudes and it’s just in the subsequent integration process that the distinction between ego-syntonic and ego-dystonic comes into play. Do we need a more refined understanding of typological development?
“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.
Igniting the spark of opposites produced during conflict can provide an opportunity for holding the tensions between the one-sided attitudes. The process requires confronting and embracing the forces of unconscious qualities, along with holding the tension and uniting of opposing forces, in order for the full expression of an individual’s potential to be revealed.
Jonas’ position as Receiver of Memory provides us with a vivid way to understand what is meant by introverted sensing per se as it draws out the sensory aspect of memory. It is in the way the community has found it necessary to contain these memories in an individual that we can begin to see how the archetypal role of Si plays out for the community as a whole.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Is it INTJ or INTP? Sometimes the MBTI code’s judging/perceiving (J/P) dichotomy is extremely difficult to nail down—showing a low preference clarity on the report and proving elusive to verify. INTJ vs. INTP seems especially problematic. Why is J/P so difficult? Do you have any tips for verification?
Which functions do we use when we engage in Jung’s favorite form of internal reflection? Jung conceived of this unique form of meditation as a vehicle for building a bridge between consciousness and unconsciousness, and for connecting our personal unconscious with the collective unconscious. Introverted intuitives seem to embrace this exercise …
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.
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 …
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?’
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.
