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Loops

Kalach

Filthy Apes!
Joined
Dec 3, 2008
Messages
4,310
MBTI Type
INTJ
They don't exist.

And that's surprising given the number of people who use the idea. I wonder what psychological phenomenon they're really describing. Because, aside from pathological cases, those times in your head where a judgment function and its perception mate of the same orientation are full steaming ahead, damning other orientations into non-consciousness, are their periods of highest and best functioning. They're doing what they do most constructively.

What people most often seem to mean by "loops" is some condition where you get too much of a good thing. You over-subscribe to some one orientation. Well, newsflash, and send this one to the red phones of all the nations, everyone always does. Any obvious introversion is you manifesting some interesting in the inner world at the expense of the outer. And likewise, if you're being extroverted at all, you're stabbing the inner world in its barely beating heart for giggles.

Of course there genuinely are people who're leaning so hard on one orientation that they literally can't consciously access the other. As well there are people who lean not that hard but heavily enough that when they do attend to the opposite orientation, they do it inadequately. Now, the former is probably pathological. Certainly it sounds sufficiently unbalanced that the personality will be at least half made up of reactive or even dangerous elements. I'm just making this up, though, I wouldn't know. The point I'm more interested in though is that the latter is presumably what people really mean when talking of loops. But the thing is, it's automatic that any function lower in the order than the one you prefer is attended to inadequately. A lot of the time you don't attend to it at all, it just chugs along by itself, sometimes feeding off the scraps you send down to it in its unconscious hole. You just do over-subscribe to dominant functioning at the expense of lesser functioning.

The real "loops" condition is when you've passed through some vaguely determined border area from healthy imbalance into the degenerating. There is healthy imbalance, btw. It's where functions of the same orientation are drawn together, doing their best work, and this is at least partly available because other orientations and contents are positively excluded. However, there is also unhealthy imbalance. Where functions of the same orientation are having at it over and over but there is at the same time no contribution made to or from other-oriented content pools in some timely or appropriate fashion, then the standard of that best work slips over time. It becomes "best available" thought rather than best thought for realz.

Yo.
 

Kalach

Filthy Apes!
Joined
Dec 3, 2008
Messages
4,310
MBTI Type
INTJ
I want to say too this ought to be the end of functions as we know them. It kind of does make sense to speak of your dominant cognitive activity as being a "function", some kind of machinery you naturally apply to inputs and you pop out results of the kind you're built for. But the further down the function order, the less sense this makes, somewhat especially so when talking about things like loops.

The neurotic component that enters into cognition when you're looping just makes no kind of sense as the product of some ignored function. You have to start talking about partial functions or partial functioning of a function. Or worse, you have to start trying somehow to qualitatively rate the functioning of the function, and how is that even possible?!

I currently like the idea of complexes as collections of cognitive content, and also as typed. The complexes are bundles and the more you attend to their content, the more obviously the bundles acquire function qualities, like, say, a preponderance of built up intuitive layers. And more importantly, they'll also contain (somehow, through the mysteries of whatever it is that bundles bundles together) neglected content that hangs around and sets off shadow alarms from time to time.

On that sort of view, looping is being inclined too completely to just one side of a complex.

I'm assuming of course that everything in your head is a complex of some sort.

I wonder if that's too strange. It'd mean that even your most conscious and beloved bits have elements you don't often know are there.
 
G

Ginkgo

Guest
It's not weird at all, if we all have a shadow and it vacillates as we collect new contents... or should I say... as our contents are newly impressed by the world. Paraphrasing, there is little therapeutic benefit from moving past those beloved bits into fuller consciousness, yet I believe this is a hidden strength in that it requires little effort to recognize a shadow pocket when you love the process of consciousness and not just... I don't know. Shit. And that's the weirdness of the functions in that they're typically viewed as sorts of processes when that's the only way to make sense of them from a behaviorism POV. Oddly, the work becomes much simpler when we're open to vast complexes because the process depends on pretty much anything your mind can seize. Those things aren't as arbitrarily broken down as functions would have to be in order to understand a neurosis.

Qualitatively rate the functioning of a function? It's possible, but we might consider it a subjective sort of metafunctioning. Then things get fun. And complex.
 

Impact Calculus

Permabanned
Joined
Jun 14, 2012
Messages
44
MBTI Type
INFJ
Enneagram
6w5
Agreed. It's not like the auxillary is losing its influence. You're just subconsciously choosing to focus less on it - or "the ego is defending against it" since the ego prefers the attitude of the dominant.
 

Kalach

Filthy Apes!
Joined
Dec 3, 2008
Messages
4,310
MBTI Type
INTJ
Neurosis though...

It's really interesting that type seems to keep working whether we want it to or not. Or at least given the language we have so far that's what we have to say: functions that you ignore fall into the shadow...

It's hard work knowing quite what that means though.

I, for instance, am not entirely sure we should say there is a shadow that produces effects on consciousness or if we should identify the shadow with those effects. We know, I presume, that the unconscious is, partly at least, some structure or influence on consciousness that you're not aware of or at least don't attend to. Shadow effects, in other words. You warp conscious cognition around these blackholes without deigning to become aware the holes are there, so in fact consciousness does a lot of the work....

Hmmm... that doesn't quite sound like the right way to say it.

Looping, I guess, amounts to steering clear of particular kinds of inputs, stuff from the other orientation. But that stuff is present anyway, just not worked over by some conscious process. It'd be present in the form of memories or impressions or eschewed judgments that you avoid accessing...

But that's not the same as avoiding the use of a function. It is an act of...

...some other damn thing.

:dry:
 
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