OrangeAppled said:
Instead of avoiding pain, the instincts tend to focus on the ways we meet basic needs
This idea (as I've already mentioned), I'm really fond of. It's terrific, because the idea that the passions have something to do with 3 different
centers/imbalances suggests strongly that the ego forms around how we
respond to the way the world meets/doesn't meet our needs and even how we perceive our needs.
The basic needs might be fundamental/legitimate things, but the beliefs one forms about those needs are where rationalizations come in (and thus where talking of centers is relevant), and also where much of the pleasure-pain dynamic is set up.
I might have no clue what my enneatype is/be totally unconvinced about it, but I think this idea will help me reformulate a lot of things in acceptable terms. My idea was still reasonable/similar to yours, but it's a little vaguer than this way of putting it. The idea that there's no inherent pain associated to the basic human needs, but that the formation of an ego around them leads to that pain sounds like the right idea.
OrangeAppled said:
. An example is color....red, blue and yellow are not the full color spectrum for pigment,
As far as NOT being the primary components of human needs
The core types address more specific fixations, which includes avoidance of various kinds of pain.
Yeah, so that's the thing -- are they the primary components as commonly presented.
Before I commence with that, a comment on the underlined: you're most certainly right that it's good to separate responding to pain from basic human needs, but basically, I think the obvious source of pain is just being denied a certain basic need! If the types seem to add something to that, it seems to just be different ways you can respond to those threats. The actual types of pain would seem to be directly mapped onto being denied the different types of needs! The ego types might include both how to respond IF they get denied to you + also why you might distort the degree to which they are under threat in the first place.
Now on to comments on the actual instincts/about if they're good candidates for "fundamental" needs: well here's one starting point. If self-preservation really does involve a basic preservation of one's sense of wellness/survival, I'd have to worry it encompasses everything about the instincts, as after all, isn't that the point -- instincts are about our basic needs!! If we don't have our basic needs met, from one definition it would contradict our self preservation!
Of course, one could say no no, those instincts are really not basic *needs*, don't take it literally, they're just basic *desires*/drives! So sp is really about what we need strictly for survival. But in that case, sp is again a funny concept maybe because it seems to me basic desires/basic needs sets us up so that if someone has the basic survival needs met, they'll move on to the desires regardless of personality!
Now don't get me wrong: we can still recognize in life the subtypes Naranjo etc posit. But it seems to me they're not really about basic needs so much as different colorful varieties of the core characters that are recognizable to us and plausible ways the ideas of sp/so/sx COULD combine with the ideas of the enneatypes. That's really my worry-- that the subtypes are recognizable, but aren't clear about what the core basic drives really are.
I struggle with this, because I think Naranjo's portraits of subtypes/types both combine to give a lot of vivid insight, but I guess I'm a little biased to having a nice, canonical underlying framework motivating everything.
In fact, maybe in a way, some presentations really tell us the basic driving forces of people are found in the types (this would be a more concrete view of the types), and the only thing that makes them types, not just basic drives, is that one develops a complex about lacking their fulfillment. Like you could say positive stimulation, accomplishment, being liked, and so on are all pretty basic drives one might have. They maybe aren't NEEDS like food/shelter, but finding a mate or finding attraction/chemistry with an idea or social status/community isn't a NEED either by that definition.
But basically they get turned into neurotic "needs" (could read basic desires) if you get obsessed with their fulfillment in a particularly fanatical way.
This concrete view would say that what makes a type a type isn't this cool view where you rationalize the way you can/can't get your basic instinctual needs fulflilled using these 3 centers/figure out how you're gonna respond to the situation based on them, but instead, that a type is nothing more than when you feel threatened about a need -- no interesting stuff about how you rationalize that threat, just the fact that it exists at all in your mind.
So yeah it's a little weird a situation to me.
I really like/want to build this conceptual edifice where the types tell us about how we respond to potential or actual threats to the fulfillment to basic needs (in the instincts), but I guess I wonder whether basic needs and/or wants aren't already suggested by most concrete, less philosophical presentations of the types, and if all the types amount to is a certain extra neurotic fixation on their fulfillment/not. Sometimes it's unclear to me if the instincts really are presented as any more plausibly a source of basic needs than the (concrete versions of) types, however much I think it's a cooler idea if we can separate them out like that.
In fact, sometimes it's unclear if there's a clear subtype/type system, and if there's just an eclectic body of things describing motivational patterns and they're smashed together in various ways ...OK it's a little better than that, but you get the drift.
OrangeAppled said:
In my understanding, Jung doesn't make T/F dichotomous. He really makes Je (extroverted judging) and Ji (introverted judging) dichotomous.
How I've read Jung (and I've read some of your posts around before joining here, so I know you know more stuff about him than most
but I'm probably equally crazy about this stuff), it's basically that there really weren't 8 function-attitudes to him as the basic units of type, more like 4 functions, 2 attitudes, and the idea that Te/Fi and Se/Ni and Ne/Si and so on are the main oppositions rather than a corollary of other more basic ones seems to me to be more of a modern interpretation! In fact, it seems strongly like to him, an introverted thinking type is just someone for whom introversion predominates over extraversion and thinking over the other three functions.
There seem to me to be two clear dichotomies among the four functions established! Feeling/thinking and intuition/sensation -- e.g. CW:
Jung said:
Sensation...rules out any simultaneous intuitive activity, since the latter is not concerned with the present....In the same way, thinking is opposed to feeling, because thinking should not be influenced or deflected from its purpose by feeling values
. That seems a VERY DIRECT statement of a T-F (rather than Te-Fi or Ti-Fe) dichotomy! And my question is basically how do you feel thinking is OPPOSED TO feeling, not just different from (yes we can say technical characterization is *different from* value judgment, but opposed to? my best shot is take Hume's is/ought dichotomy and try to view it psychologically, not just philosophically)
It seems to me that, while it's true say the chief repression of a introverted thinking type falls on extraverted feeling, for Jung this was more a
corollary of the separate oppositions of thinking-feeling and introversion-extraversion than a statement that things like Ti vs Fe and Fi vs Te are more fundamental than F vs T and i vs e! There were four functions to him, while to modern sources there are really eight for all practical purposes
Now, I'm with you if you think the modern systems add some interesting complexity by making all these axes Te/Fi Se/Ni etc the main deal....obviously the way I'm typing myself IS by such a modern framework, but basically, my approach is to stay faithful to Jung
except to add this extra complexity/a few other modifications/spins on his stuff. But basically, Jung's approach seemed strikingly similar to a 4 dichotomies approach: irrational/rational, introversion/extraversion, feeling/thinking, sensation/intuition determines your type.....in fact, the fact that people commonly assert Jung believed in stuff like NiTi>FeSe types (Nietzsche is typed this in Ch. 3 of Psychological Types...well ok, nitpicking, the first two in PT, the inferior feeling/sensation definitely made explicit in the Zarathustra seminar), is a straightforward corollary, because for him, NiTi means nothing *more* than having intuition>sensation, thinking/feeling, and introversion>extraversion.
On the other hand, it is true that there were some peculiarities of each of 4 functions in the 2 attitudes that he noted, so he did get to the concept of a holistic idea such as "introverted-sensation" or "introverted-intuition," just it seems to me based on the closest reading I can give that he really did view these more as offshoots of ideas about the 2 basic function-axes and 1 attitude-axis than as fundamental.
I am just kind of rambling now
That's all I ever do!
perhaps alogical, or existing outside the realm of logic
Yeah, I think of it as having a component that is a-logical but which can be informed by logic, just not reduced to it. It's not contrary to logic of course. I think the real thing that characterizes the feeling function is that our feelings aren't just dumb physical reactions so much as things which adapt and adjust constantly to new ideas.
I think when people ask why humanity has progressed in assigning worth more equally to different kinds of people, it's because our abstract reasoning faculties interact with our subjective reactions -- they're not just concrete, immediate things.
But I do think the reactions are relevant -- I think the faculty that enables us to judge if the reactions are appropriate is subtle, because it involves being able to modify our responses based on reasons...yet in a purely detached sense, NO logical reason EVER could purely be sufficient to modify one's feeling reaction, one must actually feel the new reaction ultimately.... The fact that our feelings involve a cognitive, reason-adjustable component is the main deal I think.
In this sense, I tend to view the idea that feeling judgment doesn't involve actual feelings as pretty much wrong. But it's not "lower order" feelings like liking oranges.
And I was surprised (in a good way) at just how accurate/fitting the description for so/sp seemed to be for me . The element of turning my personal interests into a search&finding of a larger group with those interests/values probably sums up a lot of my life/ attempts (though usually failings 
). And yeah, blind spots and anxieties too. (Also I agree, sx resonates with 4 quite a bit, as a general rule; however I think so/sp here is spot on for me)
