When you are taking care of others, what function-attitude do you tend to use the most? Where is it in your typology? Have there been times when it has not been effective? Why? How do you, yourself prefer to be taken care of? How does that differ from how you do it for others?
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.
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.
I allowed myself to take a little vacation from my single-mindedness and felt a shift in attitude and awareness almost immediately. My linear, tunnel-vision mindset relaxed, and I began to notice and embrace information, insights, and opportunities that came along unexpectedly and felt important despite having no logical connection with the task at hand.
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?
Both articles in this issue discuss type distortion and the legacy of a prevailing cultural typology—one within a family and the other, on a national scale. Have you personally experienced or witnessed type falsification? What do you think caused it? Did your family, hometown, or nationality have a cultural type? How did this type legacy affect you and others?
Do you use your dominant function-attitude confidently? Heroically? Do you know when to trust it, even if no one else does? Many people grow up in families and/or cultures that don’t support their preferred ways of seeing the world and operating in it. So underdevelopment of our naturally preferred functions is probably a common type-development issue …
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.
Jung considered all of the types that the MBTI® code identifies as I—J to be Perceiving types, and all I—Ps to be Judging types, because his use of the terms focuses on the dominant. Myers, however, focused on the extraverted function. So, are I—Js really ‘organized, scheduled, and decisive’ and I—Ps ‘spontaneous, casual, and flexible?’
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.
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?
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 …
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.
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?
“Ambiversion” —the equal development of extraversion and introversion in an individual— has become a popular notion of late but it has led to some misinterpretations of Jung’s typology, specifically, to an idealization of this in-between state…
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.
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.