Bridging psychological type and depth psychology
The dynamics of creative process and psychological wellbeing are such that creative artists are often overcome by the demonic. From Nietzsche’s Zarathustra to Curt Cobain’s Nirvana, there is an artistic star swallowed by the unconscious every week. But the arts can also be a type of savior—a place for us to process our darkness and not become it.
She could not compete with me in the extraverted thinking mode that I (and our culture) insisted upon, so my well-meant out-reaching felt like attacks to her, and my peace offering of objective discussion was like a Viking’s looming battle-axe. Rather than take part in a Te confrontation that she couldn’t win, she had changed the rules, initiating an introverted feeling battle of attrition.
The feeling function has its roots with the archetypal mother. My actual mother had limited tolerance for negative emotions from me. Her outbursts frightened me, and my own feelings terrified me even more. Hillman wrote that the mother-complex, “is the permanent trap of one’s reactions and values from earliest infancy, the box and walls in every situation whichever way one turns.”
29 / Culture and Cultural Typology / Personal Development, Health, and Spirituality
January 4, 2017 8
My Feeling is definitely not a matter of determining whether simply I like or dislike something, as Hillman suggested an undifferentiated Feeling function might do. For example, I feel a hundred different aspects of a rose—smell, vibration, gentleness, tone, harmony, etc.—and all of these come into play when I evaluate its suitability for a certain spot in the garden.
27 / Culture and Cultural Typology / Personal Development, Health, and Spirituality
April 6, 2016 3
People of different types are prone to think about religion and spirituality in different ways. While type obviously does not determine a person’s religious beliefs, type is a lens through which one views the world of religion and spirituality, and as a result, contentious religious differences are often, in part, typological differences in disguise.
Husbands and wives frequently feel like their marriages broke down because their spouses didn’t hear what they were saying. Therefore, the mediator’s ability to see and hear what each party is saying, and to reframe it so that the other party can see and hear it, can make or break their ability to reach a settlement.
Like the feeling function itself, poetry captures moments, and it is by feeling into these moments that something else opens and experience is transformed into moments of encounter. Often, the word “encounter” implies a “coming against” something, a meeting that holds impact. Thus, the feeling function, by creating an encounter, demands courage.
These at-risk students taught us how to teach everyone. I have described my classroom set-up as an integral part of the instruction. … Intuitively, before knowing about type, I had set up my classroom to accommodate multiple learning styles. Even the ISTJ students, who tend to like the traditional classroom set-up, performed better in my classroom.
I describe here how I discovered a new way to find the function-attitudes—the ‘building blocks’ of personality type—associated with any set of MBTI® results. I discovered this method almost by accident. My goal was to form teams of graduate design students working together to conceive, build, demonstrate, and report on a physical project.
09 / Culture and Cultural Typology / Personal Development, Health, and Spirituality
February 1, 2012 4
In the MBTI® I found the self-understanding that I had been lacking; I saw myself finally as less of a dilettante than an adaptive explorer, and a powerful implementer of all I had learned. I had been collecting knowledge and skills but had continued to be unclear about my “use of self.” I finally saw my journey as self-actualization.
Fight Club’s accomplishment is to elicit in us the instinctive fear, resistance, and embarrassment we all experience around the domain of our inferior function, whichever function that may be for us. The reward for sticking with the movie until the end is a catharsis that feels as if we have integrated our own inferior function.
The contrasts between the handwriting of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung show that they had very different temperaments and give credence to speculation that the difference in their personalities was an important factor in the final dissolution of their friendship. Freud’s writing is very complex and contradictory; Jung’s very simplified and balanced.
