Stages of Development and Personality Differentiation with Type

[iauiugu]

I've often heard professionals and hobbyists talk about how cognitive type is 'undifferentiated' early in life, until type starts emerging entering the double-digits or so.

I'm the young one in the family so I most am going off of anecdotes and books when thinking on this, but as an teacher I'm p curious about how people cognitively develop in their first years

So I'm wondering if anyone has personal memories or have watched people grow up and can attest to how they see personality emerges with type, if certain aspects of type might emerge first, or when cognitive functions might seem to emerge.

Also I'm honestly confused what people mean by undifferentiated

As a kid I was called an 'old soul' and I'm told I always had a word on people's behavior and values (seems fairly INFJ), but I don't remember really being 'conscious' of these cognitive tendencies myself

 

[Hawthorne]

Also I'm honestly confused what people mean by undifferentiated

A period of function experimentation before any preferences start to solidify. According to Grant's model, this happens for the first 6 years or so.

His idea was that, from there to early pubescence, we start to distinguish which function is most reliable and become dependent on it. This defines the dominant and we remain that way until late pubescence where the auxiliary starts to develop.

Grant's model largely favors the nurture approach to type determination and most people become familiar with it through PersonalityPage's Growth section. This contrasts Jung's idea that type is inborn and that the environment only impacts the "quality" of development.

My personal perspective is that seriously typing people before a certain age is pointless since any preference they do have is likely to be immature and distorted. Exceptions exist going both ways.

 

[INTP]

Differentiation means separating parts of the whole.

Basically the idea is that the functions(and other than just functions, but ill just talk about functions here) when undeveloped are attached to other parts of the psyche in a way that makes conscious control of the function if not impossible, at least very hard and only possible in some situations. For example emotions or some complexes could run an undifferentiated function in an unconscious way, and you might not even be aware of the function processing stuff(or you might be aware of it processing sometimes, but not having control over it).
But when you learn to develop the function and thus gain more conscious control over it, it gets separated from rest of your psyche and other stuff in the back of your head leads the function less more you differentiate it.

However you should keep in mind that the differentiation is not an on/off thing, but more like a gradient where some stuff from your unconscious no longer leads the function, but other stuff might lead it sometimes.

So basically differentiated = separated from the rest so that the rest doesent affect usage of the function so much, also its sort of "accepted" as a part of yourself so that your ego can control it consciously. And undifferentiated = not separated from the rest, so the rest(other than your conscious self/ego) of the stuff in your unconscious has the control.