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Why Did Jung leave typology behind?

entropie

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Really? I see Ti throughout PT very heavily. He points out Te dom thinking and goes into much detail about Te versus Ti, and how Te was considered the 'real way to think' and he said there was a whole 'nuther way to think, in an introverted fashion, and is indeed a bit biased toward Ti, imo, throughout his entire book. In fact, he defines Ti better than any other function in his book. His whole way of defining things exactly, to a 'T,' and taking paragraphs to explain his thought process, without ever dumbing anything down (in fact I have a hard time reading the whole first half) is very Ti. INTJs want and need people to understand them, to follow them, so they tend to lose some of their insight in just trying to make the subject matter comprehensible. (solitarywalker speaks to this in depth in his INTJ profile on here). Not so with Jung. There is no doubt in my mind he's INTP, although I wouldn't be surprised if he came into his Ni in later years, and sought answers or reasons out more, instead of just making his theory.

haha. It's not that we set out to ask the right question, it's that we're always asking why, and wanting the right answer and nothing less will do. :) It's our drive, just as I suppose it's Ne's drive to find lots of answers, not just settling for one.

Dont get me wrong but yes, tp thinking is none of your bizness :)

Its about freedom, not about listeni9ng
 

entropie

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No it's about desire, not about sex. :headphne:

You know, between nerds, with that attitude, you would be the one to make nerds angry.

I dont know nerds, only sociopaths, but you my dear are the queen of J-World

p.p.s. I am basing that on nothing concrete, so never take that personal. I am just drunk and looking for a fight :)
 

AphroditeGoneAwry

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You know, between nerds, with that attitude, you would be the one to make nerds angry.

I dont know nerds, only sociopaths, but you my dear are the queen of J-World

p.p.s. I am basing that on nothing concrete, so never take that personal. I am just drunk and looking for a fight :)

You were doing good until the third line. I was all hot and bothered with all that German anger seething forth, then you had to go and get squishy. Now I'm all cold again, too bad. Think I'll go take a Jog or something J-ish..........
 

Eric B

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How can she not believe in nature vs nurture?
OK, don't quote me on that one. I'll have to find the e-mail where she mentioned that (if I can), and it was a year ago. What I had asked was something like "do you believe in blank slate?", and then she said something about nature vs nurture, which I understood as a denial, but I'd have to see again how it went. I might have misunderstood blank slate, or assumed it was the same thing as not having any preference at birth; which was what she was saying sounded like to me (maybe it's much more than that), so my question may have been off from the start.

I am eager to understand everything you wrote here, but since I am a slow learner :) give me some time to process and assimilate it. That abdication stuff sounds interesting.
Lack of better terms at te moment; I was trying to shorthand high wanted Control. Will Schutz used the term "abdicrat" for low eC with high wC (In APS, a "Supine in Control", which would likely be a sort of hyper-NF), but the Sanguine in Control also has high wC, though they're not really abdicrats in the same way, because the expressed Control is high. They swing back and forth, and you can even see evidences of this is SP temperament (PUM) and some SP type descriptions.
There's the mammalian side of us that harbors our animal instincts, then there is the advanced side of us that perhaps lies in the parietal lobe (I'm not very learned on the brain yet, but I know there is an older brain in the back and a newer brain up front). When I read Jung's PT about nursing a baby, and siblings being different yet cared for by the same mother, he definitely made it sound like he was a believer in biology and innate behavior for people developing their preferences.........More so than the environment. So I was a bit confused that Thompson arrived at more of an opinion that Jung was interested in how our conditioning promoted our preferences, unless that interest of his happened after PT was written, because my feeling was he was more of a nature over nurture kind of guy. But I'm no Jungian scholar by any means.
I had meant to add this quote to further clarify:

I asked:
"Are you suggesting type is not inborn like temperament?"

She replied:
Are you serious? I'm doing more than suggesting this. I'm shouting it from the rooftops. Type is a psychological orientation. It's the OUTCOME of our life choices, not their innate source.

Research shows definitively that infants have a temperament,
[note: not "the four temperaments", but again, the generic one temperament of limbic reaction] but they don't yet have a psychological orientation. You need experience to think about the past and plan for the future. These neurological connections are made on the basis of what actually happens to you and what options you have in your specific situation. Only part of this is a matter of inborn chemistry.

So while I was greatly helped by all of her correspondance (particularly with functions and archetypes); on this point, I'll stick with what we already believe about it being inborn. I don't know enough of Jung to know if her interpretation of him on that is right, but then I have not committed myself to Jung. I think Berens has the best model in blending functions with type, temperament and Interaction Styles (the latter two as dead ringers for Control and Inclusion), though Lenore does have some excellent points about Berens' concepts of the "processes", and making the Keirseyan groups the "core needs".

What we're looking for is the prime personality factors. Like primary colors, or prime numbers; those facets of personality that are basic and cannot be broken down or described by any other means other than themselves. Some of these words flung around could be described by the I/E/N/S/T/F/J/P descriptions, imo, like reactivity (j/p), adaptability (j/p), mood(t/f), sensory sensitivity(s/n), (and to draw from your FIRO model), Inclusion(?), Control(?) and Affection(f/t), etc.

That's really the sort of thinking I'm getting away from. Tying those behaviors to functions or type dichotimies. Like sensory sensibility is S/N. I guess the sensitive ones are S, and the N's aren't; unless they "use" S; perhaps in "shadow" mode or something. But that's just not true. Hence, undifferentiated function, and anyone can see, hear, smell, taste, react, adapt, etc.
This is why the functions are better understood as perspectives. Anyone can have a mood, but the Feeler might have that as his main perspective, while the Thinker goes by logic. They both use both, but it's the perspective that is different.

Also, I, C and A aren't themselves factors, but rather the three "areas of need", which are basically separate 2 dimensional matrices of expressed and wanted. So the primary factors would be eI, wI, eC, wC, etc. I believe they do correspond to I/E, and loosely, T/F and J/P.

I extracted the idea of them being primary from reading the APS manuals and picking up the common "needs" in the matrices. (Like Melancholies and Supines are both driven by fear of rejection and they both have in common low expressed behavior, so low e is likely driven by fear of rejection, which sounded like it could be a primary factor, and I was even able to connect them to Horney's coping strategies.

I could imagine this being reconstrued so that low e is simply a product of having a dominant internal function (i.e. "introversion"), so that's why I can't be too sure.
I don't think we need worry about the chicken/egg scenario because I think both Type theory and Temperament Theory are trying to say the same thing, or at least I see them being the same thing; that some basic personality traits are inherent in us as humans.
That's how I see it also.

Where they convolute and travel in the brain is another story. Animals, for example, would be basically be all S's. We've evolved the N ability. Depending on our environment, some preferences might be turned off or turned on, based upon internal and external conditioning. Humans are much more susceptible to conditioning than animals in this regard, and have many more choices. So, I might have been meant to be an Ni dom from birth, but if my environment resulted in being raised by wolves, then I might have very well become Se dom in that process.
Animals aren't S's, because they do not have any "Se" or "Si" cognitive perspective. They do not "prefer" any functions like we do. So their "sensory" skills are just natural, limbic and undifferentated, and functional perspective is from the frontal cortex and unique to humans.

I guess in dogs there is some differentiation in the limbic system; enough to give them enough of a combination of expressed and wanted behavior to form at least one matrix they can be grouped into the four temperaments in; but it's not as developed as us, with the cortical functions.
Even the Big 5 basically say the same thing Jung already pointed out/discovered. And even if we find other prime personality factors, they are all basically arguably important, and would be on the same level as the others already discovered.

What is interesting are those which remain undifferentiated or unconscious, that which causes them to remain so, and how our environment plays a roll in this. I disagree with Thompson (if I understood her correctly) that to individuate you must bridge the gap into the unconscious functions via dreams and subconscious work. I've heard that Jung, and I believe, that it is through healthy living that we can begin to, over our lifetime, encounter those scenarios such that we will become more intimate with our less-preferred functions and in that process eventually individuate, with ego being key for this process to occur. If the ego is unhealthy, and one remains stagnatically (haha made that up sorry) attached to his dominant preferences, then it is unlikely, no matter how much he dreams or ponders his dreams, to individuate.

What do you think?
Again; I'm slowly coming to understand more of Jung through her. She sees dreams and such as the vehicles the larger Self uses to get our attention. The Self (containing the unconscious) is the true center of the psyche, and the ego (the conscious area) falsely believes it is. That sounds like it makes sense.
Since differentiation is a process where we choose one thing and suppress the others (into the unsconscious), then individuation brings those things back out of the unconscious. We have come to call this process "developing the functions", and that was another thing Lenore pointed out a lot.
Oh!! Also, why do we always just say NF, NT, SJ, and SP? I think the archetypes of NJ (logicians), NP (mediators), ST (fixers), and SF (homemakers) are equally valid and valuable.

Keirsey got his temperaments from the ancient ones, and then traced them through Kretschmer's character styles, to the S/N division to the groups he identified.

I think all letter combinations have some merit. What you described would be called "mirror temperaments". Keirsey's Mirror Temperaments
If you take those and divide them by I/E, and then pair the directive (ST/NJ and informative (NP/SF) ones together, you have the Interaction Styles. So they are basically represented in the "Multiple Models" of Berens.
 

AOA

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I think he looked at religion, and didn't make much of it with the prejudices in his life. So, instead he viewed himself as another being as well as everyone else, and studied behavior by our functions - as if conscience doesn't really exist. He, then, carried out the study to give him some reason to accept the prejudices around him. It's a lot like Charles Darwin when he created Evolution, and a lot like many people who steadily lose faith in things (like religion) that console them from things they don't really understand. Typology is therefore a way for us to see how people think, and maybe why some things happen that are out of our knowledge.
 

Kalach

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I had meant to add this quote to cfurther clarify:

I asked:
"Are you suggesting type is not inborn like temperament?"

She replied:
Are you serious? I'm doing more than suggesting this. I'm shouting it from the rooftops. Type is a psychological orientation. It's the OUTCOME of our life choices, not their innate source.


Something like: the machinery for having any preference is available, but events and accidents (and emerging choices) are needed to promote the process of differentiation, which process is harder and harder to reverse the more the type it makes real becomes a reliable part of "you"?

Or does she suggest something even more open-ended?
 

Jaguar

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I asked:
"Are you suggesting type is not inborn like temperament?"

She replied:
Are you serious? I'm doing more than suggesting this. I'm shouting it from the rooftops. Type is a psychological orientation. It's the OUTCOME of our life choices, not their innate source.

"From a great number of existing or possible attitudes I have singled out four... Thinking, Feeling, Sensation, Intuition. When any of these attitudes is habitual... I speak of a psychological type." (p482, Psychological Types, Jung's emphasis)
 

AphroditeGoneAwry

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OK, don't quote me on that one. I'll have to find the e-mail where she mentioned that (if I can), and it was a year ago. What I had asked was something like "do you believe in blank slate?", and then she said something about nature vs nurture, which I understood as a denial, but I'd have to see again how it went. I might have misunderstood blank slate, or assumed it was the same thing as not having any preference at birth; which was what she was saying sounded like to me (maybe it's much more than that), so my question may have been off from the start.

Well, it sounds like from the quote following (down there somewhere) that she really doesn't believe in nature anyway.

I had meant to add this quote to cfurther clarify:

I asked:
"Are you suggesting type is not inborn like temperament?"

She replied:
Are you serious? I'm doing more than suggesting this. I'm shouting it from the rooftops. Type is a psychological orientation. It's the OUTCOME of our life choices, not their innate source.

Research shows definitively that infants have a temperament,
[note: not "the four temperaments", but again, the generic one temperament of limbic reaction] but they don't yet have a psychological orientation. You need experience to think about the past and plan for the future. These neurological connections are made on the basis of what actually happens to you and what options you have in your specific situation. Only part of this is a matter of inborn chemistry.

It's really a tough one. I went back to Jung, but all I found was this:
Ultimately, it must be the individual disposition which decides whether the child will belong this this or that type despite the constancy of external conditions.

In originally reading that, I took "disposition" to mean inherent nature or biology, but it could be interpreted more loosely than that, as some sort of type preference, I guess. The flavor I got in many places in his book though, was that he believed some unknown and inborn catalyst was the reason we end up the type we end up, barring severe stress, not that our type is a result of our environment. Perhaps he spoke to it somewhere else though.

Is Thompson looking at humans' limbic systems as more primitive than they are? We have instincts that tell us to suckle and tell us to cry and tell us to hang on, these are obvious in babies. These are instincts that our mammal relatives have as well. But humans have been around long enough to have evolved personality. It seems as if she's saying that we are born with a blank bundle of reflexes, and on this is imprinted choices that end up giving us our personality. I totally disagree with that. I think that human beings have evolved personalities and we receive this from the alleles we get from their parents, just like we receive alleles to code for eye color.

A baby's personality is present from day one, and all parents witness this, especially those who have had more than one child for comparison. Stressful environment can assuredly cause a dysfunction in a child's personality, but I firmly believe that when a baby is conceived, if we knew what to measure, and could measure it, we could see what that child's personality would be from the moment of conception, assuming no major life stressors got in the way.

I don't mean to get all anecdotal, but I think it's pertinent. My baby is most definitely an ISTP. From his first week of life, he looked at people intently, checking them out in depth and seeing every movement they made. My others did not do this. I have no children with dominant Se that I know of yet either. And I doubt this baby will be dom Se because none of my kids so far, except maybe one is an extravert (infj/istp parents). Perhaps he's using Ti when he's looking at something so intently. Then, at an early age, he began to exhibit daredevil behavior, not caring if he stayed by my side or not (like the others had), slide, run, climb, fall, laugh, fall, slip, etc. He also does not like to cuddle, like my others did (except the istj--she did not like to cuddle either). I raised my children in basically the same way. I nursed them all and I reared them similarly. I think all children are very S when they are new, and I agree that you can tell introversion/extraversion from early on, but I can look back and see signs of my kids types from very very early, before their environment could really be that much of a determinant.

That's really the sort of thinking I'm getting away from. Tying those behaviors to functions or type dichotimies. Like sensory sensibility is S/N. I guess the sensitive ones are S, and the N's aren't; unless they "use" S; perhaps in "shadow" mode or something. But that's just not true. Hence, undifferentiated function, and anyone can see, hear, smell, taste, react, adapt, etc.
This is why the functions are better understood as perspectives. Anyone can have a mood, but the Feeler might have that as his main perspective, while the Thinker goes by logic. They both use both, but it's the perspective that is different.

So if we call them perspectives, what do we use to define our personality? Saying I'm a dominant irrational who extraverts feeling, will give someone who knows the lingo a pretty good idea of my personality archetype. Sure, we all have the basic mammalian limbic system underneath it all. We can all see, hear, taste, smell, feel, anticipate, react, adapt, etc., but those are primitive instincts such as animals have and as you say below, it is autonomic and instinctive. It's on top of this that we write our personality, and that we have preferences or perspectives, if you prefer, where we tend to differentiate behavior from others. There is no way I am very much S and I never have been. I have (barely) enough to survive, but even that might be debatable without someone to look out for me.

Have you heard of economic theory as it regards society? I'm new to the concept of it, but I really dig it. It makes sense that collective man evolved in a way that selected for varying skills. People skilled at making tools, passing on stories, caring for children, finding and hunting food, etc. All were important and necessary for a tribe to survive. I don't think it's a coincidence that SJs/SPs are more common now, because they would have been able to contribute more substantially to a community than Ns would have. If we have more SJs and SPs now, that means something in our past selected for this and that this was the most stable state, because it is what got passed down to us. However, there are Ns as well, though not as many. In this day and age, when it's not as apparent that we need a certain type like SJs or SPs anymore, why is there still a surplus of them? Evolutionary theory says it's because those traits got passed along in our genes. It's not that an SP dad is taking his blank-slate baby and teaching him how to forge iron. It's that this information has been passed down for generations upon generations, because that's how society survived best.

Also, I, C and A aren't themselves factors, but rather the three "areas of need", which are basically separate 2 dimensional matrices of expressed and wanted. So the primary factors would be eI, wI, eC, wC, etc. I believe they do correspond to I/E, and loosely, T/F and J/P.

I extracted the idea of them being primary from reading the APS manuals and picking up the common "needs" in the matrices. (Like Melancholies and Supines are both driven by fear of rejection and they both have in common low expressed behavior, so low e is likely driven by fear of rejection, which sounded like it could be a primary factor, and I was even able to connect them to Horney's coping strategies.

Your knowledge is too much for me here, and I cannot delve this deeply into this kind of detail, preferring to think of the bigger picture. :worthy: You are the master of personality theories! I still find myself yearning to put it all on one level and whittle it down to a simple few terms. :huh:

I guess in dogs there is some differentiation in the limbic system; enough to give them enough of a combination of expressed and wanted behavior to form at least one matrix they can be grouped into the four temperaments in; but it's not as developed as us, with the cortical functions.

Yes, in some types of animals, I think people would claim that they can feel and think. Perhaps they have some sort of primitive personality. I've seen threads on here dedicated to it.

I just don't see anything that improves very much on Jung for myself. I have had to conceed to myself that the J/P dichotomy is insightful, and a good addition to the three he identified.

My particular area of interest is in what happens to us when our instinctual needs do and do not get met from infancy on. I think this is where we get great variation in our personalities, and what can influence certain cognitive functions to be pulled into play, along with other less fundamental personality 'traits' like, I don't know, how belligerent we are or how emotional we are, how personally we take things, all those variables that affect our behavior but are hard to measure and define, and which don't really fall under functions or perspectives. :smile:
 

sculpting

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A baby's personality is present from day one, and all parents witness this, especially those who have had more than one child for comparison. Stressful environment can assuredly cause a dysfunction in a child's personality, but I firmly believe that when a baby is conceived, if we knew what to measure, and could measure it, we could see what that child's personality would be from the moment of conception, assuming no major life stressors got in the way.

yes, they each differ enormously from birth. You might want to check out the jungian archetypes-they appear to be attempts to capture more complex embodiments of "types" of people/"paths" of development.
 

AphroditeGoneAwry

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And hell, the baby I think is an ISTP might end up being INTP, but my point is that when you tune in, it's really not that hard to tell. And why would a baby at one week of age, select via simple life experience for Ti over Se or some random other function, or perspective. All they know is sleeping, or mom's arms, or mom's boob, or other simple things.
 

INTP

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werent jung an intp? if so he probably figured out the whole typology thing and moved on studying something new and interesting in the same area to figure out the whole human mind thing better. conscious and unconscious relate heavily on typology imo
 

Eric B

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Well, it sounds like from the quote following (down there somewhere) that she really doesn't believe in nature anyway.

It's really a tough one. I went back to Jung, but all I found was this:

In originally reading that, I took "disposition" to mean inherent nature or biology, but it could be interpreted more loosely than that, as some sort of type preference, I guess. The flavor I got in many places in his book though, was that he believed some unknown and inborn catalyst was the reason we end up the type we end up, barring severe stress, not that our type is a result of our environment. Perhaps he spoke to it somewhere else though.

Is Thompson looking at humans' limbic systems as more primitive than they are? We have instincts that tell us to suckle and tell us to cry and tell us to hang on, these are obvious in babies. These are instincts that our mammal relatives have as well. But humans have been around long enough to have evolved personality. It seems as if she's saying that we are born with a blank bundle of reflexes, and on this is imprinted choices that end up giving us our personality. I totally disagree with that. I think that human beings have evolved personalities and we receive this from the alleles we get from their parents, just like we receive alleles to code for eye color.

A baby's personality is present from day one, and all parents witness this, especially those who have had more than one child for comparison. Stressful environment can assuredly cause a dysfunction in a child's personality, but I firmly believe that when a baby is conceived, if we knew what to measure, and could measure it, we could see what that child's personality would be from the moment of conception, assuming no major life stressors got in the way.

I don't mean to get all anecdotal, but I think it's pertinent. My baby is most definitely an ISTP. From his first week of life, he looked at people intently, checking them out in depth and seeing every movement they made. My others did not do this. I have no children with dominant Se that I know of yet either. And I doubt this baby will be dom Se because none of my kids so far, except maybe one is an extravert (infj/istp parents). Perhaps he's using Ti when he's looking at something so intently. Then, at an early age, he began to exhibit daredevil behavior, not caring if he stayed by my side or not (like the others had), slide, run, climb, fall, laugh, fall, slip, etc. He also does not like to cuddle, like my others did (except the istj--she did not like to cuddle either). I raised my children in basically the same way. I nursed them all and I reared them similarly. I think all children are very S when they are new, and I agree that you can tell introversion/extraversion from early on, but I can look back and see signs of my kids types from very very early, before their environment could really be that much of a determinant.
Again, I can't comment on this too much, as I have not studied this aspect of personality (focusing more on the cognitive and archetypal aspects, again), and then the conversation ended before she could really clarify some of this more. It does sound like she's making the limbic system really primitive, and "we are born with a blank bundle of reflexes, and on this is imprinted choices that end up giving us our personality". Since it's taking me time to completely figure that, I don't want to possibly misrepresent her view.

Yeah; I think something is hardwired in us that inclines us to make those choices in response to the same circumstances others face alongside us, but on the other hand, I have always seen a question mark raised on this, and a possibility allowed that the differences start when we are really young, and this included "temperament" theories (The Christian theorists are really the only ones who insist on inborn, "God-given" temperament), so it doesn't seem 100% certain. And I don't yet have her answer to that.
So if we call them perspectives, what do we use to define our personality? Saying I'm a dominant irrational who extraverts feeling, will give someone who knows the lingo a pretty good idea of my personality archetype. Sure, we all have the basic mammalian limbic system underneath it all. We can all see, hear, taste, smell, feel, anticipate, react, adapt, etc., but those are primitive instincts such as animals have and as you say below, it is autonomic and instinctive. It's on top of this that we write our personality, and that we have preferences or perspectives, if you prefer, where we tend to differentiate behavior from others. There is no way I am very much S and I never have been. I have (barely) enough to survive, but even that might be debatable without someone to look out for me.
Well, it's as you said; personality is defined by those preferences which shape our perspectives. The primitive instincts cannot be included in that, because everybody does those, (including animals). It's when senses form a particular perspective of data gathering that it becomes a differentiated personality aspect.
Have you heard of economic theory as it regards society?
May have heard of that, but never studied it.
I'm new to the concept of it, but I really dig it. It makes sense that collective man evolved in a way that selected for varying skills. People skilled at making tools, passing on stories, caring for children, finding and hunting food, etc. All were important and necessary for a tribe to survive. I don't think it's a coincidence that SJs/SPs are more common now, because they would have been able to contribute more substantially to a community than Ns would have. If we have more SJs and SPs now, that means something in our past selected for this and that this was the most stable state, because it is what got passed down to us. However, there are Ns as well, though not as many. In this day and age, when it's not as apparent that we need a certain type like SJs or SPs anymore, why is there still a surplus of them? Evolutionary theory says it's because those traits got passed along in our genes. It's not that an SP dad is taking his blank-slate baby and teaching him how to forge iron. It's that this information has been passed down for generations upon generations, because that's how society survived best.
That would seem about right. I have suspected a biological basis of temperament, and it was first Eysenck who first suggested this.
Yes, in some types of animals, I think people would claim that they can feel and think. Perhaps they have some sort of primitive personality. I've seen threads on here dedicated to it.
Yeah, the ones closest to us such as the mammals are considered by some as "soulish", and have some emotion and such. It's still not "T/F" as we experience it.
I just don't see anything that improves very much on Jung for myself. I have had to conceed to myself that the J/P dichotomy is insightful, and a good addition to the three he identified.
Yeah, made it much helpful in eventually mapping temperament to type. The extraversion of judgment or perception is much more evident in behavior [particularly, responsive behavior], than the dominance of j or p functions. That only tells you what the ego's operating charter is. The temperament theories (called "affective", and Keirsey's variation is also "conative") are geared for personal interaction (through behavior), and that is MBTI and Keirsey's focus.
So I believe both external behavior, and internal reasons for the choices we make, are important for understanding personality. (Doesn't have to be one or the other, as some treat it). Hence Berens' overall premise being the best.
My particular area of interest is in what happens to us when our instinctual needs do and do not get met from infancy on. I think this is where we get great variation in our personalities, and what can influence certain cognitive functions to be pulled into play, along with other less fundamental personality 'traits' like, I don't know, how belligerent we are or how emotional we are, how personally we take things, all those variables that affect our behavior but are hard to measure and define, and which don't really fall under functions or perspectives. :smile:

I think that might be covered in shadow integration. You become forced to pay attention to the perspectives you were naturally inclined to suppress, so it appears that you have "developed" all of these opposing functions, and you seem different from any of the types you weigh between that prefer one or the other.
 
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Eric B

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He's making the mistake many of us have made, and that is conflating function, archetype and complex. The four shadow functions aren't what a person "doesn’t want to acknowledge them about themselves" (this confused the heck out of me when I used to hear bits and parts of this theory from one source in discussions); it's the complexes, which are the personalized version of the archetypes, which simply adopt the associated functions as their main perspectives.

Also, you can see in this the dispute over what Jung really mean by some of his concepts. Like I know Lenore as well often speaks of "the differentiated function" as the dominant. The guy in the link cites Jung as saying only the dominant is conscious. The auxiliary and tertiary have archetypes associated with them, and archetypes lie in the personal unconscious, but in these discussions (influenced by a combination of general MBTI teaching, and Berens' take on the theory, which in turn takes from Beebe), the aux and tertiary are generally considered conscious "ego-syntonic" functions. So there's some ambiguity as to what some of this means.
 

Eric B

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How can she [Lenore] not believe in nature vs nurture?
Well, it sounds like from the quote following (down there somewhere) that she really doesn't believe in nature anyway.
OK, I've found where I did save the correspondance where she addressed this. So you were right. She said:

As for blank slatism, I don't believe in the whole nature/nurture dichotomy. Infants three months old are capable of mirroring others' behaviors. How would a newborn even know he had a face, never mind know how to use it to imitate the actions of a caretaker? Some of this stuff is obviously inherent, but it's inherent for everybody.

What we have, as far as I understand this, is an overabundance of neural potential, which is what makes adaptation to many different environments possible. Experience and temperament (biologically speaking) prune some of these connections and refine others over time. And some of our frontal cortex isn't fully developed until we're well into our twenties! Which is one good reason I don't believe you can "type" children successfully.

The point, however, is that all manner of human resources are absolutely a part of our factory-installed equipment for adaptation.
I take it, "nature" means we are born with our personality, while nurture represents the "blank slate", where we are "nurtured" into our personality; right? I still don't understand why that isn't nature vs nurture. It sounds like a denial of just "nurture", if I have that correctly. I guess it's the theory of "nurture" that takes on the entire label of "nature vs nurture"?

What prompted the question about blank slatism for me was the fact that she initially dismissed "the four temperaments" and said that our type preferences weren't inborn, so then it looked to me like she was saying we start out as a blank slate, as I understand temperament and functions to make up our personal "nature". So I was confused when she seemed to deny the whole premise of blank slatism. Yet I didn't pursue that further, as blank slatism is not my interest.
But the conversation finally resumed, and in answer to my pointing out that Pavlov identified the four temperaments in dogs, who are purely limbic creatures (where we also have the frontal cortex for our cognitive functions), she seems to be allowing that we can have different temperaments, and that they are inborn.

When she first discussed temperament as general "affective" things such as mood, irritability, etc. I thought that precluded "the four temperaments" as we use them, in favor of the generic "temperament" described in mainstream psychology. But apparently she doesn't, necessarily. She just sees them as separate from cognitive preference, whereby Linda Berens theory connects them by associating Si preference with a "Stabilizer" temperament, and Se with an "Improvisor", etc. To me, that makes perfect sense, so I argued that I again see a definite connection between having a "Guardian (Stabilizer)" conative temperament (initiating less self-motivated action, hence "cooperative", and independent, hence trusting concrete "structures"), and naturally gravitating towards an "introverted Sensing" preference.

Now I'm understanding the contexts of stuff Lenore said in her earliest letters, such as "most theories privelege 'the body' as though the psyche were merely a derivative of a person's affective chemistry", where Jung wanted to focus on why we make the decisions we do ("The body" in this case, refers to limbic factors such as temperament), and that he dismissed all the temperament models he knew of as insufficient to the data of consciousness, and concluded that temperament theory operates as little more than a value judgment. (This is what really made me think she was totally dismissing four temperaments. Like she pointed out groups such as NF and NT more stereotype than anything else. But I think that's just people misusing them, and taking them further than than they can reasonably go. Like I mentioned the notion of NT's as "Spocks").

So again, she's not really discrediting temperament as I assumed; I guess you could say, just trying to create some sort of 'balance' she feels she is needed in the overall theory of personality, and not allow the theory to be enveloped back into limbic stuff such as temperament.

But it goes to confirm to me the notion that temperament is the core of personality rather than the functions. I/E, for instance, which is present in dogs (at least, of animals), and really young children (according to Personality Page, which says I/E and J/P are the first letters to develop, before the functions), is therefore independent of any "dominant function attitude". The dominant function takes on its attitude from the predetermined I/E preference when it differentiates.
 

onemoretime

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The big question I have with blank slate conceptualizations is that something has to factor for material influences on cognition. An example of this would be the influence of high levels of testosterone on male thinking compared to female thinking.
 

AphroditeGoneAwry

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The big question I have with blank slate conceptualizations is that something has to factor for material influences on cognition. An example of this would be the influence of high levels of testosterone on male thinking compared to female thinking.

Well, from the recent reading I've done, studies have shown a statistically significant difference between men and women only in empathy and assertiveness. I think this is a T/F thing. Otherwise we appear to be fairly analogous personality-wise.

Do you have some other examples?
 
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