Post by Auburn on Apr 27, 2017 20:25:05 GMT -5
In light of BellaBella's insights, and Amsterdam's and Zwelious' great commentaries, I wanted to open this topic up more broadly. And also clarify the relationship between emotionality and type. Maybe starting first with a familiar face: TiNe-Fe Alanis Morissette (enneagram 4)
Rather than focusing on her vultology here, I want to focus on her psychology. She describes herself as being bias toward the feminine, feeling that women seem to get things quicker, have more brain integration, and are less one-sided, and are taught to nurture their emotional dimension (all of which are true).
She is also a person with a lot of emotions in general, and she channels that into her music. She's invested in being an individual, having personal expression of herself, but also in integrating all aspects. She's typed INFP practically everywhere, but I see her as a clear TiNe not just visually but psychologically.
If you pay close attention to her dialogue, there is a very persistent 3rd person perspective in the articulation. She often meta-analyzes herself as well as talks in universals about human nature, her circumstantial placement along this continuum as a woman, and how that may be tinging her bias.
Although she has strong biases toward womanhood, she is not only aware of those biases but seeks a sort of transcendence of them into a more holistic perspective which relativises her starting point from a more balanced, global center. This is how Fe/Ti essentially thinks and operates.
The Fi function, by contrast, seeks to "own" its subjective position and protect it rather than yield/submit her position to a sort of necessary relativistic centerpoint found elsewhere/outside-the-self. For Alanis, rather than speaking as Kate Bush or Bjork do, about how their first-person experiences generate their expressions, Alanis talks like a philosopher conversing about psychology, her own psychology, and humanity as a whole. And through this we see a quaint Ti expression of seeking a type of honest/truthful reality that transcends the individual 'subject'.
To be human is to be emotional
Type probably has to be relativised within the context of what it is to be human which, as most of us know, is an experience filled with chaos, emotion and bias. I'm now of the opinion that the default operation of the human being is emotional. And were it not for our recently developed ability to neutralize *some* of those instincts or impulses, through the evolution of our cortical regions, we would be ever at the mercy of the limbic brain. All evidence indicates that the evolution of our rational centers was born out of a need to understand the world better because it is more advantageous to our survival to have an accurate (objective) view of the world, in order to better preserve ourselves and achieve our survival based goals. By that token, even the use of the logical processes is usually in service to the human consideration.
If we keep this reference frame in mind, then we can say that being a logic-lead does not make one emotionless, but helps inhibit the net sway that our limbic center may have in determining our overall actions/views, from whatever starting point of sensitivity we began. Likewise, the degree of prominence of the logical process in the psyche (i.e. subtype/ego-association) also determines how much effort the mind is making to mitigate those effects, without any type having any absolute claim to dispassion*.
So for example, if someone is born with high trait Neuroticism (a Big Five dimension) and a logical nature, the two may just barely cancel out or the neuroticism's predisposition to emotional volatility may still win out but not by as much as it might have if Fe/Fi were being prioritized highly alongside the neuroticism.
So given the gender/physiology and nature Alanis was born into, had she also had a high-F nature, her psychology would be even more susceptible to emotional affect. So the inability of her Type to fully neutralize all the energy emanating from her humanity is not an indicator of a lack of Ti but an indicator of an abundance of humanity. Because insofar as she uses Ji, it is Ti we see, rather than Fi.
But I wonder what you guys think about this perspective? ...or if you think it's accurate?
* I think I've mistakenly assigned more power to the logical functions in my descriptions than is properly due, ironically perhaps from the bias of my own experience with dispassion. As I've opened myself up to other dimensions of psychology, I've seen there's more to it than that.
Rather than focusing on her vultology here, I want to focus on her psychology. She describes herself as being bias toward the feminine, feeling that women seem to get things quicker, have more brain integration, and are less one-sided, and are taught to nurture their emotional dimension (all of which are true).
She is also a person with a lot of emotions in general, and she channels that into her music. She's invested in being an individual, having personal expression of herself, but also in integrating all aspects. She's typed INFP practically everywhere, but I see her as a clear TiNe not just visually but psychologically.
If you pay close attention to her dialogue, there is a very persistent 3rd person perspective in the articulation. She often meta-analyzes herself as well as talks in universals about human nature, her circumstantial placement along this continuum as a woman, and how that may be tinging her bias.
Although she has strong biases toward womanhood, she is not only aware of those biases but seeks a sort of transcendence of them into a more holistic perspective which relativises her starting point from a more balanced, global center. This is how Fe/Ti essentially thinks and operates.
The Fi function, by contrast, seeks to "own" its subjective position and protect it rather than yield/submit her position to a sort of necessary relativistic centerpoint found elsewhere/outside-the-self. For Alanis, rather than speaking as Kate Bush or Bjork do, about how their first-person experiences generate their expressions, Alanis talks like a philosopher conversing about psychology, her own psychology, and humanity as a whole. And through this we see a quaint Ti expression of seeking a type of honest/truthful reality that transcends the individual 'subject'.
To be human is to be emotional
Type probably has to be relativised within the context of what it is to be human which, as most of us know, is an experience filled with chaos, emotion and bias. I'm now of the opinion that the default operation of the human being is emotional. And were it not for our recently developed ability to neutralize *some* of those instincts or impulses, through the evolution of our cortical regions, we would be ever at the mercy of the limbic brain. All evidence indicates that the evolution of our rational centers was born out of a need to understand the world better because it is more advantageous to our survival to have an accurate (objective) view of the world, in order to better preserve ourselves and achieve our survival based goals. By that token, even the use of the logical processes is usually in service to the human consideration.
If we keep this reference frame in mind, then we can say that being a logic-lead does not make one emotionless, but helps inhibit the net sway that our limbic center may have in determining our overall actions/views, from whatever starting point of sensitivity we began. Likewise, the degree of prominence of the logical process in the psyche (i.e. subtype/ego-association) also determines how much effort the mind is making to mitigate those effects, without any type having any absolute claim to dispassion*.
So for example, if someone is born with high trait Neuroticism (a Big Five dimension) and a logical nature, the two may just barely cancel out or the neuroticism's predisposition to emotional volatility may still win out but not by as much as it might have if Fe/Fi were being prioritized highly alongside the neuroticism.
So given the gender/physiology and nature Alanis was born into, had she also had a high-F nature, her psychology would be even more susceptible to emotional affect. So the inability of her Type to fully neutralize all the energy emanating from her humanity is not an indicator of a lack of Ti but an indicator of an abundance of humanity. Because insofar as she uses Ji, it is Ti we see, rather than Fi.
But I wonder what you guys think about this perspective? ...or if you think it's accurate?
* I think I've mistakenly assigned more power to the logical functions in my descriptions than is properly due, ironically perhaps from the bias of my own experience with dispassion. As I've opened myself up to other dimensions of psychology, I've seen there's more to it than that.