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Jung on Ni-doms: "y'all a bunch of crazies."

valaki

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He offers alternatives and, as I said, leaves it at that unless my ideas threaten to inconvenience him in some concrete way. He doesn't consider it his job to fix me and I don't consider it my job to fix him.

Alright. Curiosity, is he ISTP or INTP?
 

Siúil a Rúin

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Through this realization he feels bound to transform his vision into his own life. But, since he tends to rely exclusively upon his vision, his moral effort becomes one-sided; he makes himself and his life symbolic, adapted, it is true, to the inner and eternal meaning of events, but unadapted to the actual present-day reality. Therewith he also deprives himself of any influence upon it, because he remains unintelligible. His language is not that which is commonly spoken -- it becomes too subjective. His argument lacks convincing reason. He can only confess or pronounce. His is the 'voice of one crying in the wilderness'.
It is reassuring to know that I alone do not cry in the wilderness. Neither do my tears and snot be the only thing wherewith watereth the earth. Heretofrom and henceforth the transformation of the world is within me, and within you alone, so cry not in the wilderness, but when you reacheth the end of your vision quest from within, cry when the universe turns to a void of blackness in the grasp of your gaunt and ghostly hand.

Oh what the hell, go cry in the wilderness you big freak.
 

OrangeAppled

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Both I and (as Myers acknowledged) the vast majority of Jung scholars believe that Jung thought the auxiliary function would have the same attitude as the dominant function, not the opposite attitude, and you can (in case you're interested) read more about that in this PerC post and the posts it links to.

I haven't come across this. I have seen the majority to think that the tertiary is the same attitude as the auxiliary, or in other words, all the other functions have the opposite attitude of the dominant. I've never seen the idea
In the one passage Jung discusses the aux much at all in Psychological Types, he seems to imply it is opposite in every way from the dominant, so this suggests an opposite attitude also. If there are any other passages, perhaps in other works, where he implies something different, then I'd be interested in seeing it.

Although Jung didn't exactly describe a separate J/P dimension of personality, he did make a strong distinction between the "rational types" (the J-doms) and the "irrational types" (the P-doms) and, if you read through Psychological Types looking for two-kinds-of-people-in-the-world descriptions that seem to line up reasonably well with the MBTI J/P dimension, you'll mostly find them in Jung's descriptions of the J-doms and P-doms. Jung said P-doms "find fulfilment in ... the flux of events" and are "attuned to the absolutely contingent," while J-doms seek to "coerce the untidiness and fortuitousness of life into a definite pattern." He said a J-dom tends to view a P-dom as "a hodge-podge of accidentals," while a P-dom "ripostes with an equally contemptuous opinion of his opposite number: he sees him as something only half alive, whose sole aim is to fasten the fetters of reason on everything living and strangle it with judgments."

Jung spent most of Psychological Types talking about the things he saw as common to all introverts and all extraverts.

Indeed, his primary division of personality is extroversion & introversion - which is why he also notes when describing Introverted Rationals that they do not appear rational like the Extroverted Rationals. This is because their "judgement" is turned inward - they order their inner world into reasoned concepts, they do not order the external world as Extroverted Judging types do. This is in-line with Myers' idea, which is that with judging being turned inward, the external "face" is Pe.

Jung makes many comments to defend the rationality of the Ji types because they do not appear to be rationals or "judgers" in the way most people understand it. He makes many comments that their judgments may rarely surface at all, but are perhaps only implied with indifference or a chip on the shoulder as means of defense.

Myers is not contradicting those other statements...but they need to be applied to the proper realm. The Ji type does try to fetter everything with reason; a reason focused on internal concepts they hold more than structure in the outer world.
The Pi type is a hodge-podge - their perceptions are idiosyncratic with no apparent rhyme or reason on what they choose to "see". But these are not outward pursuits like the Pe type; they tend to remain reflections or visions pursued mentally.

So that leaves open how they process the other "world", the one not their focus.

The J/P behavioral patterns are still not so clear cut for introverts, true, but it's noted by MBTI & other Jungian typologists who use the MBTI letter codes. And it's natural an introvert would be harder to define with such outward patterns anyway.

So... the people who Jung considered "Ni-doms" were more likely people who would have tested IN_P on the MBTI than people who would have tested IN_J on the MBTI.

I don't think so. Even in the "pure types" there are hints of an auxiliary that Myers fully fleshes out. Both Pi types are described as being much more inclined to CONTROL their environment. The Ni type can be tyrannical & the Si type rigid.
Both Ji types are described as not seeking to affect their environment much at all & having inferiority complexes which hold them back from expressing, or doing so passive-aggressively. I think this easily connects to Myer's portraits of the introverted types paired with auxiliaries of opposite attitudes.

Let's say Jung did not MEAN to imply this - well, perhaps he was wrong. All indicators since point to a "natural" development of Pe to complement Ji & Je to complement Pi and so on... These make sense as complements, which is what the auxiliary is, but the same attitude does not complement as it would not broaden the ego. In order to be in service of it but not compete with it nor be antagonistic, it has to be opposite in every way. This leaves only 2 other functions possible.

One of the canards I periodically encounter in internet forum posts is the one that says that Jung's type descriptions in Chapter 10 of Psychological Types were extreme or "unhealthy" portraits that wouldn't much resemble typical people of the applicable type. And really, when you think about it, WTF sense would that have made? Jung spent most of Psychological Types talking about the things he saw as common to all introverts and all extraverts. Chapter 10 is the only place where he gave us anything like in-depth descriptions of his eight functions. Why on earth would he not have described what he viewed as the more or less typical characteristics of his types?

And he did. There's certainly some inconsistency among the portraits in terms of the ratio of the more ordinary stuff and the here's-what-happens-when-they-get-neurotic stuff. But his general approach in the eight type portraits is to first describe the more-or-less ordinary version of the type, which means what the type is like when the unconscious is supplying enough ordinary day-to-day "compensation" to prevent the person from becoming too "one-sided" — and then to go on to describe the neurotic version of the type that results if the unconscious functions are overly suppressed and end up wreaking more havoc.

In my experience, the notion that Chapter 10 only described extreme or psychologically disordered versions of the types is most often encountered in the posts of Jung defenders who don't want to own up to the fact that Jung actually got quite a bit wrong in coming up with his typological concepts — and who therefore brush off some of the more cartoonish stuff in Chapter 10 by saying, oh, well, you know, Chapter 10 isn't really about what the functions are like in normal people.

The Jung passage that such defenders most often point to is this one:



What Jung is saying in this passage is that his eight portraits are artifically "pure" portraits in the sense of leaving out the "individual features" that tend to distinguish, say, one Ni-dom from another Ni-dom —and, most notably, an Ni-dom with a T-aux from an Ni-dom with an F-aux. But when it comes to the characteristics that derive from Ni, and will therefore tend to found in all Ni-doms, Jung says that his portraits concentrate on "the common and therefore typical features" of the type. So it makes no sense to claim that the features Jung described as "common" and "typical" were features he thought would only show up in extreme or "unhealthy" cases.

I haven't come across people who make that claim.
I see it pretty openly acknowledged that he is describing "pure types", not unhealthy types.
But you leave out the point that Jung himself notes that few people are "pure types" and that there is an auxiliary.

If people call this "unhealthy" then it's the idea that a "pure type" would be lacking a differentiated auxiliary & this would make them less developed as people (but Jung seems to imply some people don't even have dominant functions which are differentiated much).
But I agree that he was attempting to simply note the common factors between each basic type, trying to sift out the rest.

In doing so, I think there is still implication of the auxiliary's attitude. This is because Jung next divides types, after I/E, into rationals & irrationals. He notes how it's hard for Ji types to grasp that Pi types don't relate their inner world to themselves to understand it - in other words, they don't order it into their own reasoned concepts. If a Ji type was Pi-aux and a Pi type Ji-aux, then neither would find the other's mentality so foreign. The reason the Pi type doesn't relate the inner world to the self is what implies Je - they order it with objective classifications/valuations unlike the subjective "systems" Ji types create.

And what separates an I from an E is where the thought returns to. So Ji types would be considering external things sometimes, but it would always be related to the inner world to be ordered. This means that they are mainly perceiving when dealing with the object. This is an obvious complement; it creates a symmetry of sorts, which we often see in nature. It rings true because it makes sense to how we experience ourselves & others.

I may not be explaining why the idea the aux is the same attitude as the dom doesn't make sense in terms of the rest of the theory (there would be too many contradictions that can't be brushed off as mere oversights), but well, it just doesn't make sense <---- See, there I am being Ji-dom :p.
 

chubber

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How can a Ji type have Pi-aux... that wouldn't jell right me thinks. Would that be a Ji with Pe-aux?
 

reckful

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I haven't come across this. I have seen the majority to think that the tertiary is the same attitude as the auxiliary, or in other words, all the other functions have the opposite attitude of the dominant. I've never seen the idea
In the one passage Jung discusses the aux much at all in Psychological Types, he seems to imply it is opposite in every way from the dominant, so this suggests an opposite attitude also. If there are any other passages, perhaps in other works, where he implies something different, then I'd be interested in seeing it.

I've been meaning to plant a more longform post at TC about the attitude of the auxiliary, so, since you asked... :alttongue:

According to Myers, Jung's function model called for the auxiliary function to have the opposite attitude to the dominant (e.g., Ni-Te for INTJs). But Myers acknowledged that the great majority of Jung scholars — all but one, she said — disagreed with that interpretation. I think she was mistaken — assuming she wasn't being disingenuous — although it wasn't a very significant "mistake" from Myers' perspective since, although she gave the functions quite a lot of lip service in the first half of Gifts Differing, she then essentially left them behind in favor of the dichotomies (to her credit, IMHO).

I think the only interpretation that's really consistent with Psychological Types as a whole — as distinguished from Myers' very selective cherry-picking — is that Jung's function model for an Ti-dom with an N auxiliary was really Ti-Ni-Se-Fe, and I think that's how he viewed himself at the time he wrote Psychological Types.

Jung said more people were essentially in the middle on E/I than were significantly extraverted or introverted and, because he viewed his eight function-types as four varieties of extravert and four varieties of introvert, that may mean Jung thought that a plurality of people really didn't have a well-differentiated dominant function. But, setting the typeless folks aside, Jung thought that what you might call the default state of affairs for someone who did have a dominant function was that their dominant (substantially differentiated) function would have what Jung called their "conscious attitude" (i.e., introverted for an introvert), and all three of the other functions would have the opposite attitude and would basically be "fused" with the other undifferentiated functions in the unconscious.

Describing the F, S and N functions of a Ti-dom, Jung explained:

Jung said:
The counterbalancing functions of feeling, intuition, and sensation are comparatively unconscious and inferior, and therefore have a primitive extraverted character that accounts for all the troublesome influences from outside to which the introverted thinker is prone.
But... notwithstanding that I just referred to that as the "default" state of affairs, Jung also said that, in the typical case, a person would also have an auxiliary function that, although it was less differentiated than the dominant, would be sufficiently differentiated to "exert a co-determining influence" in their "consciousness."

I believe Jung's view was that, although the default attitude of the second function was in the opposite direction from the dominant function, that corresponded with the default place for the second function being the unconscious — in an "archaic" state and fused with the other unconscious functions. If and to the extent that the second function was brought up into consciousness and developed ("differentiated") as the auxiliary function (serving the dominant), I think Jung envisioned that it would also, to that extent, take on the same conscious attitude (e.g., introversion for an introvert) as the dominant function.

In the brief section of Psychological Types devoted to the auxiliary function, Jung specifically refers to the tertiary and inferior functions as the "unconscious functions" and the dominant and auxiliary functions as the "conscious ones"; and he notes that "the unconscious functions ... group themselves in patterns correlated with the conscious ones. Thus, the correlative of conscious, practical thinking [— i.e., a T-dom with an S-aux—] may be an unconscious, intuitive-feeling attitude, with feeling under a stronger inhibition than intuition." Thirty years later, in Individual Dream Symbolism in Relation to Alchemy, Jung's model hadn't changed. As he explained:

If we think of the psychological function [sic] as arranged in a circle, then the most differentiated function is usually the carrier of the ego and, equally regularly, has an auxiliary function attached to it. The "inferior" function, on the other hand, is unconscious and for that reason is projected into a non-ego. It too has an auxiliary function. ...

In the psychology of the functions there are two conscious and therefore masculine functions, the differentiated function and its auxiliary, which are represented in dreams by, say, father and son, whereas the unconscious functions appear as mother and daughter. Since the conflict between the two auxiliary functions is not nearly as great as that between the differentiated and the inferior function, it is possible for the third function — that is, the unconscious auxiliary one — to be raised to consciousness and thus made masculine. It will, however, bring with it traces of its contamination with the inferior function, thus acting as a kind of link with the darkness of the unconscious.

As already noted, the majority of Jung scholars believe that Jung viewed the auxiliary function as providing balance between judging and perceiving, but not between introversion and extraversion. Myers largely rested her case on the sentence where Jung says the auxiliary function is "in every respect different" from the dominant function. And I'd agree that her interpretation would appear to be the best one if all you do is look at that one sentence in isolation. But the trouble is, that interpretation seems inconsistent with way too much else in Psychological Types. When Jung wrote about how an introvert's introversion gets balanced (or "compensated," as he more often put it) by extraversion (and vice versa) — and he actually devoted a great deal of Psychological Types to that issue — he consistently envisioned the I/E balance happening by way of the unconscious, and never by way of a differentiated conscious function oriented in the opposite direction.

Jung spent substantially more of Psychological Types talking about extraversion and introversion than he spent talking about all eight of the functions put together. In the Foreword to a 1934 edition of the book, Jung explained that he'd put the eight specific "function-type" descriptions at the end of the book for a reason. He said, "I would therefore recommend the reader who really wants to understand my book to immerse himself first of all in chapters II and V."

Chapter II is Jung's detailed discussion of Schiller's Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man, and centers around Schiller's insight, as a Ti-dom, into the specific kinds of "barbarism" found in the dominant Christian culture as the result of its one-sidedly extraverted orientation. Jung, as a fellow Ti-dom, concurred with much of Schiller's analysis, and noted that the extraverted one-sidedness of the culture (and its consequential barbarism) had only gotten worse since 1795 (when Schiller wrote).

At 110 pages, Chapter V is the longest chapter in the book, and it centers around a detailed analysis of Spitteler's Prometheus and Epimetheus — which, as Jung notes, very much parallels his interpretation of Schiller. Jung calls Prometheus & Epimetheus "a poetic work based almost entirely on the type problem," and explains that the conflict at the heart of it "is essentially a struggle between the introverted and extraverted lines of development in one and the same individual, though the poet has embodied it in two independent figures and their typical destinies." Epimetheus (embodying the extraverted attitude) represents the established, traditional Church and the (by Spitteler's time, as both he and Jung saw it) barbaric influence of its one-sidedly extraverted attitude on Western culture, while Prometheus tries to bring about a religious reformation/renewal as a result of the introverted orientation that causes him to represent the view that God is to be found within each man rather than outside him.

And the central focus on extraversion/introversion, and the things Jung thought all extraverts and all introverts tend to have in common, runs through every chapter of Psychological Types other than Chapter X — the only part of the book with any substantial description of the eight functions.

As Jung saw it, the dynamics of the human psyche revolved first and foremost around a single great divide, and that divide involved two all-important components — namely, introversion/extraversion and conscious/unconscious.

And for Jung, to a much greater degree than Myers, a person's unconscious played a large role in motivating and influencing their ordinary thoughts, feelings and behavior. Jung thought that, for a typical person on a typical day, something like half of their speech and behavior might well be the product of their unconscious functions, and Jung said it was sometimes hard to tell the consciously-sourced stuff from the unconsciously-sourced stuff. He said one way to figure out which was which was to be on the lookout for the "archaic" (or "primitive") aspects that tended to be charactistic of unconscious-based stuff. So, under ordinary circumstances, the one-sidedness of an introvert's conscious side would be "compensated" on a daily basis by extraversion from the unconscious. But Jung noted that, as time passed, there could be a tendency for the one-sidedness to increase — possibly by greater development of the dominant function (potentially a positive thing for some purposes) — which in turn would mean that the unconscious stuff got repressed to a greater degree and failed to provide adequate "compensation," resulting in a build-up of dammed libido in the unconscious. (Jung's break with Freud was, alas, far from total.) This could lead to neurotic symptoms, and maybe things would end up being resolved in a relatively undramatic way or maybe the person would end up needing Jung's professional services.

Jung viewed the conflicting aspects of extraversion and introversion as so fundamentally opposed that it was ultimately impossible to truly reconcile them in terms of anything in the nature of conscious reasoning. Instead, Jung said extraversion and introversion could only be reconciled in a kind of inchoate and fragile way, by a process he referred to as the "transcendent function," through which a "symbol" would arise from the unconscious that would allow the repressed unconscious libido to surface in a constructive way and unite with the conscious — but only temporarily, because "after a while the opposites recover their strength." Jung explains that "the creation of a symbol is not a rational process, for a rational process could never produce an image that represents a content which is at bottom incomprehensible."

Contrast all that with Myers' notion that everyone's conscious side includes both an introverted and an extraverted function that, in a reasonably well developed person, work together to keep the person balanced both in terms of judgment/perception and extraversion/introversion.

Again, the psychodynamics of the conflict between extraversion and introversion was really Jung's great theme in Psychological Types — as he emphasized in that 1934 foreword. If you asked someone trying to defend Myers' interpretation how an opposite-attitude auxiliary function could have been missing in action through all those chapters where the E/I battles raged, they might point to the fact that the section of Chapter X devoted to the auxiliary function was extremely brief — an afterthought, really — and so the E-vs.-I aspect of the auxiliary's role was just something Jung didn't happen to mention. But I'd argue that, if Jung thought the auxiliary function played any substantial role in terms of a person's E/I psychodynamics, (1) there's no way the auxiliary function would have ended up being a brief afterthought at the end of Chapter X, and (2) there's no way all the many passages in the first nine chapters where extraversion and introversion repress each other and fight each other and compensate each other would have been written in the way they were — i.e., with the E/I psychodyamics consistently and exclusively framed as parallelling the conscious/unconscious divide.

[continued in next post...]
 

reckful

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Want more? In 1923 — two years after Psychological Types was published — Jung gave a lecture (separately published in 1925) that's included in the Collected Works edition of Psychological Types. After some opening remarks on the shortcomings of past approaches to typology, here's how he began his discussion of extraverts and introverts:

f we wish to define the psychological peculiarity of a man in terms that will satisfy not only our own subjective judgment but also the object judged, we must take as our criterion that state or attitude which is felt by the object to be the conscious, normal condition. Accordingly, we shall make his conscious motives our first concern, while eliminating as far as possible our own arbitrary interpretations.

Proceeding thus we shall discover, after a time, that in spite of the great variety of conscious motives and tendencies, certain groups of individuals can be distinguished who are characterized by a striking conformity of motivation. For example, we shall come upon individuals who in all their judgments, perceptions, feelings, affects, and actions feel external factors to be the predominant motivating force, or who at least give weight to them no matter whether causal or final motives are in question. I will give some examples of what I mean. St. Augustine: "I would not believe the Gospel if the authority of the Catholic Church did not compel it." ... One man finds a piece of modern music beautiful because everybody else pretends it is beautiful. Another marries in order to please his parents but very much against his own interests. ... There are not a few who in everything they do or don't do have but one motive in mind: what will others think of them? "One need not be ashamed of a thing if nobody knows about it."

[The previous examples] point to a psychological peculiarity that can be sharply distinguished from another attitude which, by contrast, is motivated chiefly by internal or subjective factors. A person of this type might say: "I know I could give my father the greatest pleasure if I did so and so, but I don't happen to think that way." Or: "I see that the weather has turned out bad, but in spite of it I shall carry out my plan." This type does not travel for pleasure but to execute a preconceived idea. ... There are some who feel happy only when they are quite sure nobody knows about it, and to them a thing is disagreeable just because it is pleasing to everyone else. They seek the good where no one would think of finding it. ... Such a person would have replied to St. Augustine: "I would believe the Gospel if the authority of the Catholic Church did not compel it." Always he has to prove that everything he does rests on his own decisions and convictions, and never because he is influenced by anyone, or desires to please or conciliate some person or opinion.

This attitude characterizes a group of individuals whose motivations are derived chiefly from the subject, from inner necessity.


The first thing to note here is that, in the second sentence of that second paragraph, he characterizes extraverts as people "who in all their judgments, perceptions, feelings, affects, and actions feel external factors to be the predominant motivating force." Judgments and perceptions both. This is clearly inconsistent with the idea that a typical extravert would either be extraverted in their judgments and introverted in their perceptions or vice versa.

And in case you think, well, maybe Jung just slipped up in terms of how he worded that one sentence — although I'd say that would have been a pretty huge slip-up — the second thing to focus on here is the substance of the second and third paragraphs as a whole. They're pretty much all about judgments, right? The second paragraph describes a series of extraverted judgments and the third paragraph describes a series of introverted judgments. And Jung doesn't say those extraverted judgments are characteristic of Je-doms and Pi-doms; he says they're characteristic of all extraverts (Je-doms and Pe-doms alike). And likewise he says the introverted judgments in the third paragraph are characteristic of all introverts (Ji-doms and Pi-doms alike.). And again, there is no way that is how he would have described things if his model said that half of extraverted judgers were introverts (the Pi-doms) and half of introverted judgers were extraverts (the Pe-doms).

Carl Alfred Meier was Jung's longtime assistant and the first president of the Jung Institute in Zürich and, as James Reynierse notes in the article linked to in the last spoiler, Meier's interpretation of Jung (as reflected in his book, Personality: The individation process in light of C.G. Jung's typology) was that the auxiliary function would have the same attitude as the dominant — as a result of which, as Meier wrote, "cooperation with the main function is made easier."

And that's hopefully more than enough for most readers but, for hardcore Jung/MBTI dweebs, I've put a little more ponder-fodder (involving a BBC-TV interview) in the spoiler.



As an (almost) final note, Jung said that the auxiliary function, because it "served" the dominant function, wasn't "autonomous" or true "to its own principle" to the same extent as when it was the dominant function and, as I understand it, some theorists have suggested that Jung's view of the functions of a Ti-dom with auxiliary N (assuming the S remained in the unconscious) are better viewed as Ti-N-Se-Fe. I'm maybe very mildly open to that idea, but I think it's more likely Jung would have said (if he'd ever spelled it out clearly) Ti-Ni-Se-Fe.

And I put my final note in the next spoiler.

 

Julius_Van_Der_Beak

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So... the people who Jung considered "Ni-doms" were more likely people who would have tested IN_P on the MBTI than people who would have tested IN_J on the MBTI.

No. INTPs have dominant Introverted Thinking. Introverted Thinking is not going to manifest itself as being outwardly orderly or anything like that, because it is introverted. But the internal understanding is very much ordered Jung's description of rational and irrational types does not really correlate to MBTI J/P for introverts.

Introverted Thinking dominant types are Rational types according to Jung, but according to MBTI, they are perceiving types. This fits in with Jung's description of Introverted Thinkers frequently neglecting external surroundings.

The P/J of MBTI refers to what you extravert, thus, for introverts, it refers to the auxiliary function.
 

Evo

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So, Ni-doms, can you give examples from your experience that reflects or contradicts Jung's analysis? Do you think you see things very deeply, but in ways that feel impossible to express, and maybe make no practical sense once they're out in the open?

I am Ni aux, but a lot of what comes out of my mouth is way too abstact for others. It's too 1,5,7,10, then bam, conclusion....Where most people need to go through 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9 to get to 10 and then the conclusion.

I can see something finished before anyone else can. If they have not had the real life experience to prove that it will work, they don't believe me. It's a matter of preference in the end though.

Cause I am willing to sacrifice the now, for the later. Big time. Where others prefer not to do that. That's where most of my goals sound unmanageable to others. But not to me, cause the long term vision is so much stronger than short term.

I think even on here, at TypoC, my posts are misconstrued. (Mostly cause I'm always in a rush but...)

I do try to clarify my ideas with examples though. That is the most practical way that I can explain anything, so that everyone's on the same page.
 

prplchknz

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I am Ni aux, but a lot of what comes out of my mouth is way too abstact for others. It's too 1,5,7,10, then bam, conclusion....Where most people need to go through 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9 to get to 10 and then the conclusion.

I can see something finished before anyone else can. If they have not had the real life experience to prove that it will work, they don't believe me. It's a matter of preference in the end though.

Cause I am willing to sacrifice the now, for the later. Big time. Where others prefer not to do that. That's where most of my goals sound unmanageable to others. But not to me, cause the long term vision is so much stronger than short term.

I think even on here, at TypoC, my posts are miscontrued. (Mostly cause I'm always in a rush but...)

I do try to clarify my ideas with examples though. That is the most practical way that I can explain anything so that everyone's on the same page.

same things happens to me an NI is pretty far down on functions I use. so I'm not sure if that's an ni thing
 

Alea_iacta_est

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I feel like Ni doms and auxs are good at doing math unconsciously and that might be what might make the difference between Ni and Ne. For instance, if someone tells me to add 17 + 28 I immediately have 45 pop into my head without having to do the math consciously. Of course, sometimes the unconscious can be wrong, and that sucks sometimes, but it's fairly efficient.
 

reckful

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Jung's description of rational and irrational types does not really correlate to MBTI J/P for introverts.

I understand that's the official MBTI position, which was Myers' position because it went hand in hand with her minority view that Jung believed introverts' auxiliary function would be extraverted (and vice versa). For more from me on that issue, see this follow-up post.

As I said, it's my view, based partly on Jung's descriptions of rational and irrational types, that when Jung met the kind of people who would test J on the MBTI, he viewed them as rational types regardless of whether they were introverts or extraverts. So, if he was dealing with an introverted woman with N and F preferences who came across as a "rational type," (i.e., J-ish), Jung would have said, aha, her F (judging) preference is her dominant one and N is her auxiliary (and her functions are Fi-Ni-Se-Te).
 

Julius_Van_Der_Beak

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I understand that's the official MBTI position, which was Myers' position because it went hand in hand with her minority view that Jung believed introverts' auxiliary function would be extraverted (and vice versa). For more from me on that issue, see this follow-up post.

As I said, it's my view, based partly on Jung's descriptions of rational and irrational types, that when Jung met the kind of people who would test J on the MBTI, he viewed them as rational types regardless of whether they were introverts or extroverts. So, if he was dealing with an introverted woman with N and F preferences who came across as a "rational type," (i.e., J-ish), Jung would have said, aha, her F (judging) preference is her dominant one and N is her auxiliary (and her functions are Fi-Ni-Se-Te).

Unfortunately, I can only find chapter 8 online, and Psychological Types seems surprisingly hard for me to come by. Nevertheless, I find your reasoning hard to follow.

You seem to be arguing that the auxiliary function changes orientation as it becomes more conscious (and note that Jung states that this is a "relatively unconscious" function), and thus the intuition becomes introverted, so the intuition of an INTP is really introverted intuition. This cannot be reconciled with your earlier insinuation that INTPs are Ni dominants, since what you speak of refers to the attitude of an auxiliary function, and the method you used to claim that INTPs have introverted intution was regarding intuiton as an axuillary function. This implies that Thinking is the dominant function.


Answer this: Would an Introverted Thinker be display the same standards of rationality towards the object, or the external world as an Extraverted Thinker? The only chapter from Jung on this I have been able to read suggests that this would not be the case. Apparently, everything else Jung wrote is in contradiction to the one chapter where he tried to actually articulate this, but I basically have to take your word for it since this book is really hard to find in its entirety.
 

valaki

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[MENTION=18736]reckful[/MENTION]

Interesting post, some of it does make sense. A few comments though... and some questions. As below.


Jung viewed the conflicting aspects of extraversion and introversion as so fundamentally opposed that it was ultimately impossible to truly reconcile them in terms of anything in the nature of conscious reasoning

Bull-shit. Why on earth no one ever seems to consider the alternative: one moment you are like this, another moment you are like that. The two moments do not have to be connected to each other. They can be completely disconnected, relating to completely different circumstances, situations, attitudes. Thus, one can be introverted in one moment and extraverted in another. (I don't imply that these two moments are directly after each other, of course)

What do you know of that would make this switching impossible? I do not see anything that would make it impossible.

I will give some examples of what I mean. St. Augustine: "I would not believe the Gospel if the authority of the Catholic Church did not compel it."

Oh lol according to that I am an introvert. Yet according to other criteria I am an extravert.



So... as a final note, and to avoid any misunderstanding, Ti-Ni-Se-Fe is not the functions model I subscribe to, because I don't subscribe to any functions model. As I noted at the start of this post, I think Myers was correct to essentially abandon the functions in favor of the dichotomies

Did she really? Show me evidence?! I can show you evidence of the opposite: http://myersbriggs.org/my-mbti-personality-type/understanding-mbti-type-dynamics/

This, on the official MBTI site, explicitly and clearly deals with functions. How is that "abandoned"? Maybe more focus on the dichotomies, sure, but "abandoned" is a strong word. No?

Note I did check the intjforum link but it's just guesses of yours, not hard evidence like the link above.


Jung has said that the hardest thing to understand is not your opposite type — if you have introverted feeling it is very difficult to understand an extraverted thinking type — but the same functional type with the other attitude! It would be most difficult for an introverted feeling type to understand an extraverted feeling type. There one feels that one does not know how the wheels go round in that person's head.

As for the bolded, that's an argument that could be applied to any other function. After all, every function is different from the other one. What substantiates this claim then that the opposite attitude of the same function is the hardest to understand? I don't see any basis to this claim.


Ohh and as for Jung's type yeah Ti-Ni makes sense :) I can see quite some people online are Ti-Ni or Ni-Ti and I guess there is nothing that excludes that someone's auxiliary is the same as the dominant, HOWEVER, also nothing excludes that someone's auxiliary is the opposite to the dominant, so someone else can be Ti-Ne instead of Ti-Ni.
 

valaki

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You seem to be arguing that the auxiliary function changes orientation as it becomes more conscious (and note that Jung states that this is a "relatively unconscious" function), and thus the intuition becomes introverted, so the intuition of an INTP is really introverted intuition. This cannot be reconciled with your earlier insinuation that INTPs are Ni dominants, since what you speak of refers to the attitude of an auxiliary function, and the method you used to claim that INTPs have introverted intution was regarding intuiton as an axuillary function. This implies that Thinking is the dominant function.

Hmm interesting point... or INTP could be either TiNi or NiTi, just the four letters of INTP isn't going to tell you that


Answer this: Would an Introverted Thinker be display the same standards of rationality towards the object, or the external world as an Extraverted Thinker? The only chapter from Jung on this I have been able to read suggests that this would not be the case. Apparently, everything else Jung wrote is in contradiction to the one chapter where he tried to actually articulate this, but I basically have to take your word for it since this book is really hard to find in its entirety.

Wouldn't it be Fe?
 

valaki

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I feel like Ni doms and auxs are good at doing math unconsciously and that might be what might make the difference between Ni and Ne. For instance, if someone tells me to add 17 + 28 I immediately have 45 pop into my head without having to do the math consciously. Of course, sometimes the unconscious can be wrong, and that sucks sometimes, but it's fairly efficient.

I'm good at doing math intuitively yes... the 17 + 28 example, why's that Ni though?

I usually don't see my unconscious go wrong with math and logical structures in general

Because math is pure logic I always thought that this was just a well-ingrained Ti for me. Especially because this math intuition has to comply with logical rules, can't and mustn't go outside the bounds of logic.

Yes I do sometimes have trouble differentiating between Ti and Ni.

What do you think about it being possibly Ti?
 

Alea_iacta_est

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I'm good at doing math intuitively yes... the 17 + 28 example, why's that Ni though?

I usually don't see my unconscious go wrong with math and logical structures in general

Because math is pure logic I always thought that this was just a well-ingrained Ti for me. Especially because this math intuition has to comply with logical rules, can't and mustn't go outside the bounds of logic.

Yes I do sometimes have trouble differentiating between Ti and Ni.

What do you think about it being possibly Ti?

It's entirely possible for it to be Ti, I was merely adding a suggestion. Ni is generally perceived (heh) to be the most unconscious and mysterious function that sees the outcome of scenarios, so many people and myself included have hypothesized that Ni is the cause of unconsciously solving a math problem. You would perceive the problem, 17 + 28, but then instantly have the word or image (depending on your thinking style) of the number 45, completely skipping the decision making/judging function to solve the problem logically or step-by-step. It's sort of like looking at 17 + 28 and interpreting it as 45 without any forethought.

Now what would be extremely interesting would be to see how this unconscious math plays out in a type with both Ti and Ni, specifically the ISTP and the INFJ in a dom-tert loop.
 

reckful

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[MENTION=20622]valaki[/MENTION] —

A lot of the comments and questions in your post make it sound like you're under the impression that I was endorsing most or all of the Jung stuff (and von Franz stuff) I quoted, but I noted that that is decidedly not the case in the last spoiler at the end of my two-part post. I'm not really a functions guy at all.

You ask for "evidence" that Myers and the official MBTI folks have essentially centered their typology around the dichotomies while mostly just giving what I call "lip service" to the Jungian functions, and I describe a lot of "evidence" for that in that long INTJforum post I linked to. There's really no way all the stuff I describe there — all the way from Gifts Differing through the official MBTI Manuals through the more recent "Step II" personality reports — is consistent with the idea that the MBTI establishment views the cognitive functions as anything remotely approaching the main event when it comes to your MBTI personality. The incredibly sketchy descriptions of type dynamics and the eight functions that you find at the myersbriggs.org site is typical of the lip service I'm talking about. As noted in my linked post, Myers thought the most meaningful division of the 16 types into subgroups was the foursome of NF, NT, SF and ST — each of which consists of four types with four different dominant functions. Both Myers and her official MBTI successors have been actively involved in hundreds of studies over the years, almost all of which have studied and reported the relevant correlations in terms of the dichotomies — and non-function-related combinations like NT and NF — rather than in terms of the cognitive functions.
 
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