holistic viewpoint, i think she sounds INFJ.
we know from the get-go that she's IxxJ, and she seems to be more focused on personal matters than impersonal, making her an IFJ. so i definitely agree with your assessment there.
the way she discussed the leaf/avatar sounds like Ni and Fe to me. and in that order, too. she takes a bite of data - a piece of information - and looks "back" into it, to see what it could represent. from the specific torn leaf, she inducts to an archetypal "imperfect thing". then she makes the connection that imperfect things are often discarded, which engages her sense of personal connections, and thereby her emotions.
there is engagement of S when she remembers herself picking up leaves, but i have a hard time seeing her as an S-dominant (ISFJ) given that the language she uses is not particularly rich in sensory detail. my ESFJ mom, whose Si is only secondary, still tends to explain things and situations in great detail. she does create global understandings, of course, all humans do, but her language is notably rich in concrete information when she finds a certain thing important. i also do not see that the memory is necessarily Si - Si is a recognition of how sensory situations differ (akin to how Ni isolates similar concepts from context), and i don't see that in her description of the situation. it was more about what the leaves symbolized than about the actual situation itself.
i think it was just a poignant memory, and Ni linked the patterns of:
"
pretty-leaf-admire" and "
torn-leaf-____"
then isolated them from the leaf context to see:
"
pretty-admire / torn-____"
then moved further back into archetype to get:
"
perfect-admire / imperfect-____"
then pulled memories (Se) of multiple instances of humans being discarded to fill in the full pattern:
"
perfect-admire / imperfect-discard"
and then, knowing that humans can fill the "imperfect" role, she substituted in:
"
human-discard"
she reapplied that pattern to herself, the avatar's user and other humans, recognizing that perhaps all of them have been "discarded", and thereby engaging her Fe empathy.
feel welcome to run that by her, i obviously am not privy to the internal workings of her mind! the problem with Ni is that it's largely subconscious, this process of archetype/pattern creation and application. i'm not even 100% sure that i'm describing it correctly!
and Noon is right - it could be FiNe with tert Si - but i'm hard-pressed to see her as an INFP given everything else you've both written. she seems like a strong J. she also seemed to move from specific to general - which Ne does too, but in a different direction. Ne works a little more like this, via association - moving "outward" to other things instead of inwards to archetypes. we can wind up at the same place, though, because of the way we run multiple linking threads /association chains), which then end up associating themselves to one another to form a big picture.
1.
torn leaf -> torn skin -> emotional tearing -> torn human -> imperfect human -> imperfect leaf
torn leaf -> tearing -> imperfection -> not good -> harmful/useless -> discard
2.
discard torn leaf -> discard torn human -> discard me/you/humanity in general
and then Fi would produce empathy for each specific situation - each individual discarding - which Ne expands outwards into the global feeling of "discarding - sad". but something about the way she's phrased it sounds more like NiFe than FiNe to me.
Noon said:
The fact that your fiance first related this to her personal feelings and experiences before relating it to humanity as a whole really makes me think about how they might work in tandem. It sounds more fueled by personally engaged empathy instead of the detached, deconstructive analysis I would imagine of NiTi, but this is only my inexpert opinion.
it does - though i think that we can probably attribute that to NiFe... it's actually in part that she didn't really focus on the
leaf itself that makes me lean Fe instead of Fi. at least with my sense of Fi, when i'm looking at a broken object, i feel empathy in a global sense for all broken things but acutely
for the object in question. Fi personalizes impersonal things and seeks the "inner core" of individual things, which i don't think she's really engaged here - she didn't personalize the leaf itself. and Fe would look to the relational - the person using the avatar, people's expectations, how people are discarded... those all seem to embody that.
