ahhh......!!!
Nice, I had been puzzling over that for awhile but hadn't quite come to conclusions on it. I've noticed it, though, too. There's at least a social sensibility that mirrors Fe and they can play by the rules... the thing is I could tell realistically that it was all just in order to follow established protocol in order to keep everything functioning efficiently and things clarified, but not because the Fe stuff was the preferred style. If you get the same INTJs alone, I had found them as blunt and crass as any typical NT; the Fe thing was just a costume. That's different from the primary/secondary Fe'ers, who actually seem to think in terms of Fe first as far as what behavior should be followed in a social setting.
As Highlander says, it's not a "costume". There's no "faking". Rather, it's how Te deals with "Fe matters". Fe has a similar means of dealing with "Te matters." At the extreme, the Fe user will note that the Te user, while quite polite, occasionally makes really obvious mistakes w/r to dealing with people. The Te user will note that the while the Fe user appears to be very reasonable and competent, occasionally makes serious errors in logical/logistical matters.
The key is that these are cognitive functions: the Te user looks at a people situation and analyzes it logistically, as objective factors that might be manipulated. In so doing, the Te user can trod over people's feelings, leaving them very upset, especially if their being upset doesn't get in the way of the Te user's objectives. The Fe user can make the reverse error, and manage a logistical situation as if it were a people problem, e.g., when told that the order cannot be filled because there aren't enough widgets, the Fe user, rather than figuring out how to get more widgets, will tell employees to not have such a negative attitude.
In both cases, the functions are managing very similar areas of life, often with similar results. The approach of each function is from rather different perspectives.
Hmmm - this is an interesting perspective and one that I did not think you would have. I apologize in advance for the novel here...
The first time I heard about the shadow, I was in an AMA management development program. The instructor asked us to list the top 10 characteristics of people we can't stand. He then asked us to list the top 10 characteristics of people we greatly admire. We each then read out the lists.
He then explained this concept of the shadow and how we should carefully consider how many of those top 10 negative characteristics were attributes that we ourselves actually had but did not want to admit. He then suggested that the top 10 positive characteristics were the "gold" in the shadow - qualities we may not realize in ourselves that we had or could have. He then went onto explain the connection with MBTI - look at your opposite type and that your reaction would likely be "who is that!? yuk!".
Having considered this concept over the years, my belief is that the way Cascadeco describes the shadow is absolutely dead on. It is real. There is absolutely no question in my mind that this thing exists.
I'm not exactly saying it doesn't exist. MBTI/Jung make two very different kinds of assertions. One assertion is that you can take your type as a self-description, and use it to identify your strengths and weaknesses and improve yourself. The other assertion is that there's this "internal wiring" of Jungian functions that work a particular way, with tertiaries and inferiors and shadows, and all that. It is typical on this forum for people to assert that thus and such a function is operating, and draw conclusions. I find that people tend to do this in such a way as to derive the conclusions that they want to derive, that they have already concluded.
If you want to say "negative aspects of personality", or "weaker aspects of personality that could bear improvement," and call that a "shadow," I really don't have any beef with that. If you want to say Ni-Te has a shadow of Ne-Ti or Se-Fi or Fi-Se, and therefore these are weak/dark/improvement-needing aspects of personality, I'll reply that you're putting the cart before the horse. In general, for an INTJ, all the aspects of personality that our outside of Ni-Te are "weak" or "shadows" or "bear improvement." Not just particular aspects in particular ways.
When it comes to MBTI/Functions and this shadow concept, I guess I had no opinion until I read Beside Ourselves. It made more impact on me than any book I'd read on MBTI. At first, I saw how what was being described resonated with me personally. Then I sought evidence as to how other types behaved when "in the grip of the inferior". I found numerous examples supporting the theory/concepts.
Let's look at one example - what an eruption of the inferior looks like for an Introverted Intuitive type (e.g. INTJ and INFJ). From "Beside Ourselves":
Typical provocations or triggers - "dealing with details, especially in an unfamiliar environment. " It is described, how at times, we feel "overwhelmed with details". Another trigger is "too much extraverting."
What happens to the Introverted Intuitive? A few examples:
"Obsessive Focus on External Data" - "experienced as a state of intensity and drivenness", "obsessing about facts and details", "i stew about what is going on...am mentally fatigued and find myself putting things in order and trying to control everything around me", "i nitpick about things in the environment. i bombard people verbally and obsess out loud", "i get hung up on some false fact and distort it"
"Overindulgence in Sensual Pleasures" - "takes the form of sensual excess rather than sensual pleasure"
"Aversarial attitude towards the outer world" - "I feel anxious, exposed and childish", "I become dogmatic and blast people with facts", "I am angry, unreasonable, totally irrational, close minded, and impatient"
And one can read a horoscope and say, "Yeah, that's really me." I'm not seeing the cause and effect here. A typical tactic of an astrological description is to assert both positive and negative things in an interpretation. The natural inclination of the reader/listener is to listen to both, and choose the one that seems to fit best.
My main point here is not that MBTI is false. I definitely see a lot of value in it. However, I see patterns of thinking here that look like patterns of thinking that lead to self-delusion. There are certainly truthful conclusions that one derives by so doing, but rather one is fooling oneself into thinking that the means of deriving those conclusions is valid.
There's a scam that has been used to sell stock brokerage services. The people doing the scam will start with a very large pool of people. It will then send out a simple market prediction to all of them, half of the people are told the market will go down this week, the other half are told it will go up. Then the next week, the half to which the correct prediction was sent are sent another prediction, half of those people being told it will go up, and the other half down. Repeat a few times, but stopping well before you run out of people. You have a much smaller pool of people, but ALL of them now think you're a wiz at predicting the stock market ... after all you were right 6 out of 6 times, for example, and thus you are very likely to do business with them. Astrology and other mystical investigations of personality are like this scam, with very good techniques to sound correct and predictive, even though they're nothing of the sort. I don't put MBTI into this category, but I do put the various extensions of MBTI there.