Skarekrow said:
Never mind that this is on a Socionics website (as most portray the INFJ as a negative entity).
This is a great explanation of Jung’s thoughts on INFJs and Individuation (synonymous with growth or development) and expanded on by W. Harold Grant who worked with Briggs-Myers.
This makes the most sense to me, and explains why there can be large differences in one INFJ to another.
Fair resource, though just some comments...
It's worth noting that things that talk about "type development" using a specific order of functioning tend to follow some of the more prescriptive, overly narrow versions of the MBTI functions models.
Harold Grant's model is often used as the default, but as John Beebe, one of the analysts who likes that model + his additions to it notes, other Jungians significantly oppose that model, and tend towards the viewpoint that the top two functions occur in the same attitude, corresponding to the idea that there is
one overall attitude of consciousness/the ego that applies to the most differentiated/developed functions.
Some general quotes to ponder:
John Beebe said:
So we just sort of learned this in the most down-home natural way, and so, intuitive type, thinking type, feeling type, sensation type were absolute realities to all of us, and extravert, and introvert, and so forth. And then we had Wayne Detloff who was the man who first did the heretical thing of telling us that there was such a thing as a Myers-Brigg Type Indicator, and he was the one who told me something that I gather still is heretical in some circles, but not in the circles I travel in and create for myself, that if the superior function is extraverted, then the auxiliary function is introverted. If the superior function is introverted, the auxiliary is extraverted. And I know that there are many people who still resist the idea, but I am absolutely enamored of it, and I can usually prove how it is true of them, even against their resistance. But in any case, for what it is worth, it was Wayne Detloff who was the source of that idea and my experience.
Here is Dario Nardi on function development/orders:
Dario Nardi said:
Carl Jung identified four functions: sensing and intuiting as ways to focus attention, and thinking and feeling as ways to make decisions. Jung observed functions develop in an introverted or extraverted attitude. Thus, eight function-attitudes. Later, Isabel Myers described sixteen type patterns. We each have a dominant function and an auxiliary function to provide balance – everyone does perceiving and judging, introverting and extroverting. For example INTJ is defined as preferring introverted Intuiting (dominant) with extroverted Thinking (auxiliary). Beyond the first two function-attitudes, there may be a linear sequence. The location of a function in the sequence indicates what is in consciousness, what is preferred, and our skill level using the function. Table 1 shows the possible linear sequence for INTJ. More developed conscious functions are on the left.
Dario Nardi said:
This model does not work for everyone, and diverges slightly from Myer’s original hypothesis, which switches the third and seventh functions. This switch was proposed by Harold Grant and others in 1983 and many find it true. Grant proposed that functions develop one after another over a lifetime following this sequence. This model has caught on but seems to miss something.
I would note that the models go as follows:
- many orthodox Jungians: a type with introverted intuition dom and feeling auxiliary = either NiFeTeSe (with Fe underdeveloped) or NiFiTeSe
(In other words, the attitude of consciousness and the ego remains introverted, and the extraversion of a function in an introvert implies its fusion with unconscious influences, rather than being mostly deployed by an act of conscious willing.)
- Harold Grant/Beebe/usually Nardi/Berens: INFJ=NiFeTiSe, often with an added opposing/shadow personality of NeFiTeSi..albeit this came after Grant, and was pioneered by Beebe
- Myers originally: INFJ=NiFeTeSe (with Fe developed)
- Myers later in life started moving to the Grant perspective
- Socionics theorist Gulenko proposes MBTI INFJ correlates best to socionics EII, contrary to the assumption often made that it correlates to IEI. Here it's because Gulenko is saying INFJ maps to INFj, rather than MBTI NiFe mapping to socionics NiFe.
Note that these theorists may not all define the terms N, F, T, S the same as each other, so that is an additional precision point.
Just throwing this info out there, as it's better to note it down rather than get too attached to one model (because let's face it -- people love to sell their models as the one correct one...but the reality is they're often, as Beebe put it, enamored by their model, and it's not always the case that one single modeling paradigm best describes people.)
There's a good body of evidence from most of the leading functions theorists' tests that people's function-attitudes rarely take any one prescriptive order, and that different models seem to work for different people, so think critically and conceptually about them, or don't use them at all if unwilling to put that time in.
I wanted to note all this, as it's often underestimated how much disagreement there is among the big name theorists out there. A lot of what you see as the functions-theory purported to hold is NOT actually supported by either the man Jung himself or his most orthodox followers.
And Isabel Myers herself admitted that her interpretation of Jung in proposing the aux is the opposite attitude to the dom is not supported by most Jungians (a fact which Beebe echoes, and he should know, as he's a trained Jungian with extensive interaction with other Jungian analysts in his time.)
