Fi

Robinson thumb image

18 Oct: Healing the Ancestral Hauntings of the Archetypal Mother

My mother is a ghost now. She died the last day of 2016. She was the person nearest and dearest to me for much of my life, yet it seemed we never quite understood and accepted each other unconditionally. She haunts me as an unfulfilled spirit when I have anxious thoughts, or fearful premonitions, or self-admonition, but also in old sayings, endearing quirks, and the names of flowers and trees. And she inhabits my dreams, mostly as an unhappy child.

il_trovatore

05 Nov: A Broken Personality Repairs Itself

“Everything has a purpose, clocks tell you the time, trains take you to places. Machines never come with any extra parts, you know. They always come with the exact amount they need. So I figured if the entire world was one big machine, I couldn’t be an extra part. I had to be here for some reason. And that means you have to be here for some reason, too. ”

gothenburg_city_scape

10 Apr: Crossing Cultures with Type

While Anna’s direct communication style seems natural to a German or someone with STJ/NTJ preferences, in Korea it would offend. The Korean communication style is indirect and high context; the message is often communicated through other means than the actual word. Body language, tone of voice, hierarchical position, meeting location, personal history …

sleep_mme_vouillard

08 Jan: Dreaming The Dream On

In a dream she showed up as twins. One who was quiet and could play by herself (like her father, Ti) and the other who was very precocious as she hung upside down from a tree (like her mother, Te), reflecting the inherent nature of the Opposing Personality. From the outset of our work her battle seemed to reflect inferiority about not being an extravert.

dylan_bob_self_portrait

08 Jan: Archetypes in a Portrait of Bob Dylan

The portrait of Bob Dylan in the film “I’m not there” demonstrates how a lack of father-specific structure is compensated by a powerful and extraordinarily creative but volatile and defenseless Puer structure; and the movie further illustrates the tendency of the Shadow complexes to rise to repair such psychic vulnerabilities and restore equilibrium.

self_portrait_with_masks

01 Feb: Type and Other Biases

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.

cezanne_still_life_apples

04 Oct: Using Type for Healthy Habits

Type enthusiasts may wonder whether we can purposely apply our personality preferences—which are comfortable ‘tools’ to make habit change a little easier. Speaking as a lifestyle medicine physician, as well as a type enthusiast for the past two decades, I believe we can. …Type affects what motivates us and how we learn new skills…

kaufman_entertainer

02 May: Typing the Group Mind – Part II

You can assert yourself … with an introverted function. You can take care of others … with an introverted function. You’re just not likely to do both these things with an introverted function, any more than one would do both with an extraverted function; our alternation of attitudes between the dominant and auxiliary takes care of that.

walton_fox_guillaume

02 May: Partnering Type with Graphology

The blank piece of paper symbolically represents our universe. How we put writing on the paper—how the pen moves across the paper—represents how we see ourselves fitting into life and how we navigate through it. Extraversion is characterized by a tendency toward expansion. There is an emphasis on centrifugal movement (movement away from the body).

nolde_vorabend

05 Jan: 3000 Years of Type Dis-Integration

The schizoid nature of western civilization gives credence to our emphasis on the necessity of using all of the functions (S, N, T, F), in both attitudes of Introversion (I) and Extraversion (E) … When civilizations emphasize only one part of psychological type, they diminish themselves and set themselves up to see the world through distorted lenses.