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Do Personality Mean Anything?

Obfuscate

Permabanned
Joined
Aug 20, 2016
Messages
1,907
MBTI Type
iNtP
Enneagram
954
Instinctual Variant
sx/sp
this is a thread in which participants can either discuss their response to a short video, or explain how little or much faith they have in typology... there have been threads like this in the past, but i would like a clean start...

so lets start with that video:


there is a second (on topic) video in which she talking about the enneagram in the spoiler below...


i am not a huge fan of structure, but here are some potential things to focus on if you wish:

are there claims in either video that you agree or disagree with? if so, what are they?

do you have any personal experiences or other anecdotal stories about how typology has been practically applied? if so, what were your results?

around how certain are you of your type?

do you believe your type has changed over time? if so, why do you think that is?

are there other (on subject) thoughts you would like to share?

 
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Obfuscate

Permabanned
Joined
Aug 20, 2016
Messages
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MBTI Type
iNtP
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Instinctual Variant
sx/sp
also, if a mod could fix the title to that of the video, it would be appreciated... apparently i have too short of an attention span to take the time to type it out properly myself...
 

Zhaylin

New member
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Jan 2, 2019
Messages
468
MBTI Type
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sp/so
Ooooh. I will definitely spend more time here. My own attention span is total crap ATM though (I'm sick, which has made my span even shorter rofl).

I love the different systems, but they are friggin confusing as heck sometimes. I don't know how I feel about changing types. "Everyone" says that's impossible, but I'd swear I was a different type in my youth. But, then again, my life sucked and I was suicidally depressed throughout most of it.
I've been trying to study types at their worst and that's actually helped me accept the 2 in my Enneagram tritype.

Similarly, with age, the MBTI has become a bit muddled. My N used to be significantly higher. The way my scores are now, I might as well be an IxFP.
But did my type actually change or have I simply strengthened my weaknesses?
 

Tengri

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Joined
Mar 19, 2016
Messages
558
are there claims in either video that you agree or disagree with? if so, what are they?
I tend to agree with the general points she's making here. They're valid criticisms and point out major flaws of typology such as self-testing inaccuracy i.e. the overly cited Forer's effect is a biggie and the questionable nature of personality psychology, like a mirror turned against itself. Jung's alchemical fleshing-out of Hippocrates' four temperaments is unique for its combination of medievalist cosmology, psychoanalysis, and anthropological observations of deranged, healthy, and dreaming people of different backgrounds. Also important in this critique: Jung's reliance on the perceived duality of ego vs id, the waking self vs the unconscious, the eidolon vs the daemon. His theories explore the fantastical archetypes that all humans purportedly share in and similarly express repressed dream-states (collective unconscious) and the generalized archetypes of individual personalities. My chief complaint with Myers-Briggs and Kiersey's interpretations of Jung's personalities is that they create a static system. Similarly, Socionics, which I now view as an East-West cultural anagram of MBTI, develops the Jungian archetypes of the 'ego-persona' of individual as part of society. When viewed from a distance, the 'finger pointing to the moon' metaphor immediately comes to mind, and neither systems truly continues Jung's organic assertions about human temperaments, the importance of the unconscious mind (read: the hazy focus on shadow functions), but instead objectively categorizes fluid personality boundaries into schematized roles of a citizen. Personality development all the way through the various stages of identity formation into adulthood does not stem from or rely on the Freud dude's concepts of ego, id, and superego - these are metaphysical, some might say spiritual analogies, like iconography colored in by the stained glass of varying cognitive processes. Given this, I view MBTI as general, almost democratic, and easily accessible for popular culture; while Socionics is intensive, totalitarian in scope, and somewhat abstruse (maybe even bordering on bullshit); but both are closed systems. Given the eras when Jung and his later admirers developed their theories, some typologies do not measure for neuroses, account for mental illness (consider the extrovert with social anxiety), and most importantly, does not predict psychological growth and development (ages and stages for tykes). While I readily admit my near-total ignorance of Enneagram, I am at least aware that it contains directions of growth and disintegration.

do you have any personal experiences or other anecdotal stories about how typology has been practically applied? if so, what were your results?
I like the DiSC assessment, Big Five, and Holland Codes. They indicate exactly what they purport to: potential roles and productivity. I have had to take and retake my employer's personality test and productivity assessment annually, and while I never viewed my results, I still have my job. The connection between mental illness and personality type is often cited, but increasingly overlooked, and I think that the general nature of MBTI is again unintentionally pointing to important biological or medical predispositions in the form of rigid patterns of unhealthy behavior. Another interesting outgrowth of typology is the connection between personality preference and hormone/neurotransmitter centers of the brain: estrogen and testosterone and serotonin and dopamine.

do you believe your type has changed over time? if so, why do you think that is?
Yes, I think that every healthy person changes over time. The more I continue to learn in my own field of study, the harder it becomes to identify with archetype and sociotype - but that might actually be the point. Some recent studies Sixteen Going on Sixty-Six and Personality Trait Change in Adulthood explore this trend and the emerging science of neural plasticity is shedding light on how malleable human mental organs are, even in the short-term. Emotional maturation, settling into societal roles and responsibilities and sexual identity, as well as continuing self-development and a healthy, multi-level homeostasis in all aspects of life are key factors in psychosocial growth. Life is, uh, dynamic homeostasis.

are there other (on subject) thoughts you would like to share?
Jung's esoteric intellectualism is definitely on to something, and I intend to find it.
 
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