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Types #17X ← ✸
On top of all the other problems in typology, there’s a clear obstacle (and consequent global distortion) coming from the fact that many people who are interested in types are very young. Youth tends to imply two opposing things: on one hand an interest in finding something to belong to, identify or describe oneself with (preferences, styles, crowds, fandoms, classifications, labels, ideologies, movements, careers, etc), and on the other a more or less pronounced lack of self-knowledge and self-awareness. We want to know who/what/how we are, but we don’t know it. We are confused, so we look for some certainty, but that very situation is quite slippery: how much are we really finding out and how much are we only assuming to be true?
First, in terms of dichotomies, young people don’t tend to be confident in groups or in public, basically because they lack experience, and they often consider themselves outsiders (partly because of that, but also because others seem weird, we don’t like them, we don’t “fit in”, etc), which leads to a [false] I>E tendency. The same happens with S/N. It’s quite difficult for young people to see themselves as traditional instead of original, or even realistic vs imaginative, for example, so you get a lot of false “Ns” (in general, common definitions of “intuition” refer to many things that aren’t N). And then a similar thing happens with J/P, too. From a broad perspective youth is more about exploring and trying things and being casual than going by principles and being systematic, planful and so on. All this extends to different ways of trying to distinguish the dichotomies, directly or indirectly, and taken all together it skews things towards “INP”.
In terms of functions, one of the most widespread misconceptions about them is mistaking them for what’s actually related to pairs of dichotomies (“Ti” = TP-traits, “Si” = SJ-traits, etc), so you get again the same problems. Other incorrect definitions might also have that kind of thing, but of course they or their supposed order are wrong so they are already mistyping everybody, regardless of age.
Young people are also quite prone to unconscious focus or confusion. Things are still mixed together, and they might think that their interests define their consciousness, or just have a hard time recognizing where they stand psychologically, because they are still trying to figure themselves out. Some can go from being very shy to always trying to get attention, in a few years. They can start something, totally convinced that it’s “their thing”, just to find out rather quickly that it isn’t, at all. And it’s complicated because not all changes might go in the same direction or be type-relevant.
The chance of mistype is not much lower when it’s another person doing or helping with the typing. Just like the mind in itself can be mixed/confused, the observable behavior is prone to reflect that and give contradictory signals. The same happens with the various kinds of self-reporting, where there are also obstacles like insufficient perspective, the young person’s [interpretation of] language having a rather narrow scope, and in some cases the limitation of having to work only with what they say about themselves.
The solution includes not only forgetting all the distortions and incorrect typology stuff, but also, quite obviously, waiting. It’s a good idea to keep early self-types as speculative (and private), and recheck things periodically. If you take what’s actually a self-mistype too seriously, you’re very likely going to hurt yourself in some way, and probably others. Believing that you are a type other than your true one can lead you to mistake your weak points for your strengths, and vice versa. It can make you ignore the things that you need to be more careful and mindful about. It can make you more confused about yourself. It can prevent relationships from improving, or make them worse. If you talk about types you will be saying incorrect things, which in turn can generate more mistypes. Etc.
So please be careful. And be patient. Like I said before, your type isn’t going anywhere, it’s already a fact in you, already “working”. And if the question is identifying it, what’s important is knowing about the whole landscape, which implies being aware of how other people think, that is: stepping out of yourself and being exposed to remote and unfamiliar psychologies. You need to get the coordinates and the ranges right, understand conscious vs unconscious, check all the different angles of analysis, and have a wide enough perspective so that you can locate yourself in all that. This takes time, and can’t be rushed. It’s a complicated thing and there are no shortcuts. Even if we ignore their wrong foundations (which of course are sufficient to invalidate them), quick answers like those you get with tests or other “methodical” means can’t really be trusted because there is no space for a steady and reliable analysis that’s deep enough to get to the core and avoid filters like language and changing psychological states.
Some people are too emotionally influenced to be able to type themselves or someone else impartially, so the chances of doing it correctly decrease quite a lot. It can get to a point where no matter how much incompatible information is there suggesting a different type, they can’t acknowledge it. Many of them would probably deny it, but they can’t make a neutral analysis because their emotions keep having an effect on their conclusions. With that, it’s extremely easy to misdirect the typing, in different ways, and end up with a mistype.
Perhaps you can take a moment and examine your reactions, check how do you go about these things. For example: if your personal relationship with someone changes from good to bad or vice versa and that in turn makes you change your typing of the person, that means you’re not being objective about it, and your analyses are rather unreliable. You can also be wrong about someone’s type but refuse to change it because your admiration or disdain for the person prevents you from reconsidering. For some people their opinion of others is a strong force, not easily altered or ignored, that tints what requires detachment, and sometimes they are quite unaware of this.
In these cases there’s very often the [involuntary] revelation of a[n unconscious] type hierarchy: the newly assigned type (or the one that needs revision) is one that the person likes or dislikes more than the previous (or potential) one. Some people are definitely lumping together all kinds of types into their own ideas of “good” and “bad” types (a common tendency here is the classic “intuitive bias”, where sensors are considered “inferior”). This internal ranking can also have a distorting effect on the person’s self-type, of course.
Some people project their emotional slant tendency on others, assuming that they also have hierarchies, perhaps imagining various “signs” and “proofs” (when this is bilateral it can lead to veritable emotional wars disguised as “typology discussions”, without a trace of actual knowledge or helpfulness, like those you can find in many type “communities”). In my case, I’m actually a bit shocked when I find them because I do precisely the opposite: I assume that others don’t have internal rankings. And I might be too optimistic also in the sense that rejecting them might not be as easy for people as I think (I’ve seen examples where after supposedly being into typology for years there’s still “X is better than Y” stuff in there).
When likes and dislikes enter a given case the typing is prone to start going astray. It doesn’t matter if you have a “good” or “bad” image of a certain type or person, that’s just an opinion, and you really need to forget about that when studying types or analyzing an individual’s psychology. What you’re doing is researching and learning, and you can’t let sentiment interfere with that. If you have it, put it aside. You need to be open to reevaluations, discoveries and surprises (not just about psychology, but about how the world works, and what it contains). You don’t know what kind of people you might still find in the future inside a certain type. You might be mixing or seeing several in one. You don’t know if you’re misinterpreting what you get from a certain person or group. You might be blowing details out of proportion, or focusing on just a limited set of traits, and undervaluing or filtering others out. You might not know everything that’s relevant about them, and they might reveal new sides.
You might be wondering, what if I see someone else doing this? Well, you can state the issue, but don’t make it personal, and don’t escalate. It’s not worth it. Tell people about the widespread misconceptions. Let them read and think. And keep looking.
The whole point of type is about knowing yourself and others better. It’s about having an impartial knowledge of intrinsic differences that resolves and avoids conflicts (both internal and external), instead of worsening or creating them. If you find yourself arguing continuously about type, or because of it, or turning it into extra fuel for your value classifications, or trying to provoke people, you’re not getting (nor transmitting) what you should be getting from it. Type should help balance opinions and emotional responses, not magnify them.
Jung wrote lots and lots of things, he mixed the functions and other terms in complicated ways, and his definitions changed. Many people read him and get caught up in particular textual details, without seeing the big picture. This is many times a consequence of not being able to recognize the psychic functions and their configuration by themselves. In this post I’ll try to clarify a few things related to intuition and idea. In general, you’ll see how his writing makes much more sense when you keep in mind his own type: INTJ (Ti-Ni-Se-Fe).
1. INTUITION AS “PERCEPTION VIA THE UNCONSCIOUS”
When Jung says that intuition is “perception via the unconscious” he’s simply referring to the fact that conscious intuition implies unconscious sensation (cN = uS). Having one side of sensation (e or i) in the unconscious means that the other side is reflected as a ghost in consciousness, for example gSi3 coming from Se3 (check the diagrams in post #140). That ghostly sensation is what Jung takes as a manifestation of intuition, calling it “perception”, but when he talks like that he isn’t really pointing at the essence of the function (sometimes he even seems to confuse himself and call “intuition” to all kinds of G3←X3 and G4←X4 transferences). In fact, Jung admits that his definition of intuition is “somewhat makeshift, and in fact a declaration of scientific bankruptcy”, because he’s actually using elements of another function (S) and only referring to intuition in an indirect way. His definition is basically the same as saying that feeling is “thinking via the unconscious” (cF = uT).
This is important for several reasons. One of them is that lots of people keep mistaking the mere graphic imagery of visions and dreams as the essence of introverted intuition, when it’s not (I’ve talked about this before, for example in post #178). Others mistake it for abstract concepts, which is like going one step further in the wrong direction, because now you’re involving Ti. Others mistake intuition in general with non-thinking, which can actually be about feeling, etc. The essence of intuition isn’t any of that, not the concepts, or the non-thinking, or the imagery, or the sounds, or anything with form, or anything that’s in itself a representation. You have to consider how presence (S) and absence (N) complement each other, how you can point at S-elements but not at N ones, etc. Jung himself says elsewhere that intuition is an “awareness of relationships”.
The difference between Si and Ni might be easier to understand if you think first about the difference between Se and Ne, which I’m assuming is less difficult to see (although some people are still going to confuse gSe with Ne, for example). Se is obviously about what’s out there, right now, for everybody, what has a physical presence, visually, sonically, etc, with all its shapes, textures and details, so Ne can’t be about that. Ne is about the relations between things, the links and possibilities in that moment, the potential. You can’t really feel or touch or see Ne-elements like you feel and hear the wind, or see a tree. (I think the closest to an Ne-related presence would be things like the force of gravity: not the sensation or experience of it, but the power that it has, its ability to change the situation). Ne is not the name or identification of things, either. It’s not a structure or a concept. Ne doesn’t have form and it’s not a representation. You can try to represent it, for example drawing arrows between objects, but Ne isn’t those arrows, either.
Now for Si and Ni you just have to translate that to the internal world. I say “just” but this might be very hard to grasp for many people because they have been drinking some wrong definitions kool-aid for too long. If you are one of those victims, you need a period of detoxification (the comparison is not as exaggerated as it seems), which includes unlearning what you thought you knew, and start using the terms correctly.
You could say that Ne and gSe (or Ni and gSi) are the same thing, because they always go together (they imply each other via the corresponding proper sensation function), but just like you wouldn’t say that Se and Ni are the same, even if they also imply each other (in this case directly), you have to understand that Ne and gSe (or Ni and gSi) are different things. This kind of inescapable implication is a bit like the two poles of a magnet: the magnet in itself is one item, but you can’t say that the north pole is the same as the south one.
Sometimes people try to “retrieve” proper elements from ghost locations. One way that this is done is between the functions at the same level of consciousness, although other functions are often involved as well, for example X1 when it’s X2←G3 (the two unconscious eclipses are also an involuntary/automatic form of this). In a sense X2←G3 is the best altitude for this kind of thing because it’s all conscious but the locations are not disconnected like X1-G4. In fact, Jung worked there a lot, as part of dream interpretation: he tried to extract or extrapolate the Ni(2)-archetype[s] from the (g)Si(3)-imagery of dreams, all from the perspective of Ti(1). The second part of this post is related to that.
2. ON JUNG’S DEFINITION OF “IDEA”
TL;DR: Sometimes Jung uses the word “idea” to indicate a Ti1-element (something that “exists a priori, as a given possibility for thought-combinations in general”), sometimes it’s Ti1+gSi3 (when he uses it “promiscuously with primordial image” or as “the primordial image intellectually formulated”), and sometimes Ti1+Ni2 (when he relates it to “meaning”). He gives various complex and apparently contradictory descriptions, but that’s a good summary of what’s happening: he’s mixing his own Ti1+Ni2+gSi3 in different ways.
Thinking tells you what something is, and feeling if it’s acceptable or not. They don’t tell you its meaning or reason for being. When Jung relates thinking and feeling to “meaning”, saying for example that the “idea” is the “meaning” that “has been abstracted from the concretism of the image”, he’s doing one of two things (or both):
a) He’s referring to the identification or evaluation of something perceived first through sensation (more specifically [g]Si, an “inner image”), that is: a rather weird way of saying “what is that”, from the perspective of his own type (= Ti1+gSi3) or someone like Freud (who was Fi1+gSi3 instead). This would fit “the rational elaboration to which the primordial image is subjected to fit it for rational use”, and the “static images given us by thinking” reality aspect definition.
b) He’s talking about a particular Ni2-meaning translated through Ti1 from gSi3-elements, precisely what he’d do in dream interpretation, including the identification of the archetype[s] (Ni) corresponding to a particular inner image (Si). In this case that “meaning” would actually be introverted intuition described from a thinking perspective. Jung says that the “idea” is “the formulated meaning of a primordial image”, that is: a “meaning” expressed in systematic terms or concepts (Ti1>Ni2).
This explains why he writes that the primordial image (Si) is “a visual thing” with “mythological character”, and the idea “a product of thought” “lacking in visual qualities” (Ti). Then with the added meaning he’s moved from Si to Ni, always from the perspective of Ti1. The process image→idea→meaning reflects his gSi3→Ti1→Ni2, and it would be an example of an entirely conscious ghost→proper translation, interpretation or decoding, mediated by and always in the context of the dominant function: X1(G3→X2). It could include a question like “what does this dream mean?” = how does this gSi3 translate into Ni2? or: what kind of Ni2 does this gSi3 represent? The answer would always be based on Ti1-concepts.
So why doesn’t he mention intuition? Well, that might be because he’s mixing his Ti1 with his Ni2 in some places, as if they were just one thing. An important factor in all this is that Jung was a bit confused about his own auxiliary. In a 1925 lecture he identified himself as Ti1-Si2-Ne3-Fe4 (which would be ISTJ): "thinking and sensation were uppermost in me and intuition and feeling were in the unconscious", adding that “the preliminary conflict would be between sensation and intuition” (common for J types). He has a tendency to explain Ni in terms of Si (which is gSi for him), and he’s kind of obsessed with the graphic aspect, with representations of the archetypes, focusing on his gSi3-Se3. Maybe that’s why he believed his auxiliary was sensation for a while. I think the text in the “idea” definition (and in other parts of the book) reflects that he doesn’t fully realize how intuition is more exactly his Ni2, and not gSi3. This might still be his way of looking at or just describing things when he later identifies as Ti1>Ni2 (INTJ, his actual type). Even before that there are clear indications of his auxiliary Ni in many other things that he writes. (See also point 18 in post #170).
Types #17X ← ✸