Personality Type - Understanding ourselves
January 11th 2008 00:26
Jung’s determination of the types defines four functions; any one of which might be the most adapted or dominant function of the personality. These four functions: Sensation, Intuition, Feeling and Thinking offer, each in their own way, a particular lens through which both experience and action are mediated for the person. These functions also present differently depending on the extreme to which they are focused either internally or externally, i.e., Introverted or Extraverted.
For an example of how the four functions differ, let’s look at how four different people might react upon walking into a room and finding in their absence that someone has placed a vase on the mantle.
Thinking says: “Hmm, Vase: basic flower holding device. Uses water for maintenance of freshness.
Feeling says: “Oh, I like the shape of that vase, but the color doesn’t suit me quite so well.”
Sensation walks over and picks up the vase, checks to see if it is glass or porcelain, turns it over to make sure the base is flat then stands it back on the shelf to see if it is balanced.
Intuition says: “Now, how did that get there?”
All four of these thoughts or actions move through us in succession, but the most immediate, the most important to us, the one that results from our dominant function, will be the one which paints our first impression of the vase.
Sometimes it might seem our feeling valuation of the vase is more important than our thinking one, even though we are a thinking type. This is simply because, to thinking, in this situation, the vase might be a relatively uninteresting object, and our thinking evaluation of it is so fleeting that we scarcely notice it, so our feeling valuation becomes more relevant to the experience, even though it remains of secondary importance within the way we perceive the world.
You could say that our dominant function defines what we care about the most, and where it is not called into action, the next most adapted function might provide some interest. Beyond this we fall to the third function which perceives things that we might like to care about if they "actually meant something", and then to the most inferior, which usually just says “Whatever. Who cares?”
Tomorrow we’ll take a closer look at the way each type sees the world and how their specific typology determines their behavior.
For an example of how the four functions differ, let’s look at how four different people might react upon walking into a room and finding in their absence that someone has placed a vase on the mantle.
Feeling says: “Oh, I like the shape of that vase, but the color doesn’t suit me quite so well.”
Sensation walks over and picks up the vase, checks to see if it is glass or porcelain, turns it over to make sure the base is flat then stands it back on the shelf to see if it is balanced.
Intuition says: “Now, how did that get there?”
All four of these thoughts or actions move through us in succession, but the most immediate, the most important to us, the one that results from our dominant function, will be the one which paints our first impression of the vase.
Sometimes it might seem our feeling valuation of the vase is more important than our thinking one, even though we are a thinking type. This is simply because, to thinking, in this situation, the vase might be a relatively uninteresting object, and our thinking evaluation of it is so fleeting that we scarcely notice it, so our feeling valuation becomes more relevant to the experience, even though it remains of secondary importance within the way we perceive the world.
You could say that our dominant function defines what we care about the most, and where it is not called into action, the next most adapted function might provide some interest. Beyond this we fall to the third function which perceives things that we might like to care about if they "actually meant something", and then to the most inferior, which usually just says “Whatever. Who cares?”
Tomorrow we’ll take a closer look at the way each type sees the world and how their specific typology determines their behavior.
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