Greeting INTJ's, a friend of mine asked me if I could give him more info on his type, which happens to be INTJ - so I grabbed Lenore Thomson's book and transcribed the description to a word document and sent him through mail. In an act of altruism, I hereby present her full description!:tongue:
PS: I didn't bother searching the forum to see if this description is already available, so if it happens to be forgive my noobishness
INTJ
Because INTJ’s rely on Extraverted Thinking for their dealings with the outer world, they often have a scientific, somewhat skeptical approach to reality. They want to know how things work and what they’re likely to do under varying circumstances. Impatient with wasted motion, words, and emotion, their outward demeanor may be difficult to read.
Indeed, an INTJ’s bearing can seem downright Vulcan. The Vulcans, of course, are a fictional people in the Star Trek series – resolute logicians who barely change expression or use body language, even when they’re puzzled or aware of danger. Thus, one might heed the words of Tuvok, the Vulcan tactical officer on the spaceship Voyager, who warns: “exterior composure is no indication of a Vulcan’s inner state”.
Although they superficially resemble Extraverted Thinkers, INTJs are alway guided by their Intuition. They are rarely commited to general assumotions about rules, laws, and hierarchy, and they may have an acerbic sense of humor about such things. INTJs will use what works in the service of their ideas; and they will quickly discard or change what doesn’t.
A (probably apocryphal) story tells of a delegation of sailors who went to the tribunal of the Inquisition in the seventeenth century, when the Catholic Church had forbidden the use of Galileo’s astronomy as an affront to the Bible’s account of creation. The sailos sheepishly confessed that Galileo’s theory had both simplified their journeys and made their maps more accurate. They hoped that the Inquisitors would exempt mariners from the church’s proscription against it. The Tribunal considered the problem, consulted with the bishops, and sent an emissary to the Pope. Finally, they conceded. They said, “OK, if the theory works, use it. But don’t believe it”.
This is a pretty fair description of the INTJ’s basic attitude. Fundamental truth is something different from expressed knowledge, which is always a fiction of one sort or another. If a theory works, it doesn’t matter who supports it or what anyone thinks it means. If it doesn’t, why bother with it?
Although both INTJs and ENTJs realize their Intuitions by way of rational criteria – principles, law, organizational structure, and so forth – ENTJs will not usually pursue a goal unless it strikes them as compatible with reason. INTJs are more classicaly Promethean. They will steal fire from the gods without any assurance that a reasonable hearth exists at which to tend it back home. For such types, knowledge is not information, but a way of looking at things.
Consider James Hillman’s understanding of the soul as “a perspective rather than a susbstance, a viewpoint toward things rather than a thing itself”. This is a typically INTJ antidefinition. Such types may expend a great deal of time attempting to winnow the actual logic of accepted theories and formulations from expedient or merely limited assumptions. INTJs are accordingly drawn to science, mathematics, and medicine – fields in which new ideas about reality are constantly being forged and tested logically. They may also take interest in psychology, theology, publishing, and linguistics. As they pursue their intuitions, they inevitably combine elements from varied fields, perceiving an underlying commonality of form or meaning.
This sense of underlying structure and meaning leads INTJs to value both elegance of form and subtlety of expression. Nothing exists that can’t bear reediting and paring down to its essential components. The connections INTJs perceive among very different areas of knowledge may be sufficient to convice them they’re headed in the right direction, even when they can’t explain what they’re after.
Like the ISTJs, INTJs cannot accept new information until they relate it to their inner world. However, ISTJs analyze new data by aligning it with what they already know. Once they’ve accepted a fact, it becomes part of their identity. INTJs explore information largely by rejecting its influence – examining it from other perspectives and determining its limitations.
Because this inner process is tied to their sense of self, INTJs can take a long time to figure out “who they really are”. Their need to find out “what’s missing” from a system of information invariably takes them into their own mental world – to an imaginative reconstruction of ideas – and the effort necessarily becomes a search for part of themselves. Such types can develop the destructive habit of formulating their identity in terms of their ability to see a situation’s limits, needing to find the flaws that will allow them to become spectators rather than performers.
For this reason, others don’t usually recognize the need of the average INTJ for external structure. INTJs are invariably described as independent and self-motivated, and this is certainly true with respect to their strongest functions. Where technical and intellectual competence are concerned, INTJs have a kind of inner compass, and they prefer a situation in which they don’t have to coordinate their work with or report to someone else.
Moreover, they don’t take criticism of their ideas personally. Position, title, and reputation have no meaning for these types. They will not entertain another’s judgement of theur worth unless they believe the person intellectualy qualified to make the assessment. And even a legitimate judgement will usually strike them as an indication of the other person’s assumptions and expectations.
Personal relatedness, however, is a different matter. INTJs are much less confident in a purely social situation. It is no exaggeration to say that their primary relationship is to their inner world, and they will nurture that relationship at the considerable expense of social abilities and the art of compromise.
In a field that excites and interests them, they are often driven, and they tend to expect the same degree of investment from subordinates. They frequently convey impatience when a situation that had seemed impersonal and outwardly predictable suddenly requires free-form personal interaction.
INTJs don’t like to say something more than once, and they may cut others short when conversation strikes them as unnecessary. Moreover, their need to find an alternate point of view in order to understand something can sound like disagreement or negativity – as though the speaker’s ideas had been judged and found wanting. Thus, even people who know an INTJ well may believe the person is either indifferent to them or critical of them.
INTJs can also be lonely behind their reserve, not knowing how to fit in even when they want to be included. This aspect of the type is partly the result of the INTJ’s comparative rarity. At 1% of the population, INTJs are usually the only one of their kind in a family. Throughout grammar and high school, they are often the only such type in a classroom.
Altough this ratio changes at the college and graduate level, when INTJs specialize in fields that appeal to other INJs, for most of their developing years, these types have good reason to feel different from others. Because they relate to the outer world with Extraverted Thinking, they generally interact by trying to determine the logical relationship of others’ views and demands to their own needs. Consequently, they get little experience in areas of relationship that don’t interest them.
Many such types become articulate quite early, and they use their verbal abilites to fend off involvment in anything they don’t understand or don’t wish to. However, their awareness of others’ feelings does not keep pace with their verbal abilities. Young INTJs may be intelectually precocious but emotionally imature, exercising their dominant function by distancing themselves from others, engaging in ironic comments and somewhat juvenile sarcasm.
Sometimes, to their surprise, their observations make people laugh and afford them the group approval they were attempting to preempt. INTJs rather enjoy the paradox this sets up and will play to it – experimenting with the boundaries of humor itself. One might consider comedian Dennis Miller, who presents himself as a caustic observer and occasional saboteur of the images and conventions on which his livelyhood depends.
Like all types, INTJs resist their least-developed functions and attempt to avoid situations in which they’ll come into play. It should be granted, however, that Sensation and Feeling, the INTJ’s weakest functions, cannot be avoided wholesale in the course of a normal human life. These functions are our means of concrete embodiement – our physical pleasures and desires, our emotional connections with others, our love of home and hearth, our sense of being grounded and real.
INTJs appreciate these things well enough, but more in the abstract than in the messy realitites of everyday existence. Regarding most events as arbitrary arrangements of elements, to be dismantled and reassembled at will, they may find it difficult to assume the duration of another’s affection or interest in them.
In general, these types deal with feelings the way they deal with ideas – by formulating and explaining them to themselves so they know what to expect, or getting far enough outside them to resist their influence. In an INTJ’s mind, friendships require a particular kind of investment; sexual connections another; marriage another. Such types want to know which category they’re dealing with before they get involved.
But real relationship is unpredictable, and real people resist the categories the INTJ attempts to apply. In fact, sexual attraction and romantic infatuation usually catch these types by surprise. And although they enjoy the distinct pleasures of sensuality, the careening roller coaster of emotions that comes with the territory ultimately forces them to use their inferior functions.
As opposed to their usual view of reality as arbitrary, they begin to experience the influence of primitive Extraverted Sensation and feel an anxious sense of material possession. They feel impulsive, out of control, and unable to take anything for granted. They worry that their intellectual life will never get back on track until the relationship becomes more ordinary and settled. Ultimately, they attempt to regain control – by pressing for declarations and permanency, even if their own intentions aren’t clear to them yet, or by using their critical judgement to distance themselves from their emotions.
INTJs appreciate the security of a commited relationship, and given the ration of Extraverts to Introverts in our culture, often marry Extraverted types. They enjoy their families and mantain an unusual respect for the individuality and independence of both spouse and children. However, they may not sustain the kind of Extraverted interaction their partner expects.
They’re more likely to settle in and, at their first opportunity , reassert their primary relationship to their inner world. This is true of both male and female INTJs. When there is too much outer stimulation or conflict, INTJs lose touch with their intuitive process and become restless, bored, and emotionally exhausted. Thus, INTJs need a fair amount of time alone.
They also need a fair amount of intellectual challenge and exercise. If a partner can’t provide it, INTJs are likely to seek it privately or with others. The same INTJ who gets bored at parties and looks around for the nearest bookshelf may well forget to eat or sleepn when involved in a complex and intricate conversation about ideas. In fact, for an INTJ, the communion of like minds is a kind of cerebral analog to falling in love.
INTJs may even resist concomitant physical attraction to a kindred spirit for fear of compromising the relationship with the exigencies of chemistry and social expectation. Such types frequently envision an ideal way of life that would unify NTJ cerebralism with SFP physical immediacy, but in actual practice, they are most likely to understand such unification as something ultimately spiritual. For this reason, INTJs may have an abiding interest in Sufism, or the Buddhist warrior philosophy, or the kind of mystical poetry that celebrates this idealized state in language.
Ironically, INTJs can best engage their Feeling and Sensate qualities by developing more Extraverted Thinking. The inner world if an INTJ is so compelling that such types can let their physical and emotional needs go for long periods of time. Deliberate use of Extraverted Thinking gives them more of what they need – a senser of rootedness in the material world: the world of bills, train schedules, medical and dental appointments, shoe repair, and the like. As the Zen Buddhists are wont to say, “after ecstasy, the laundry.”
Extraverted Thinking also connects them to the assumptions and expectations of others, so they are better able to analyze people’s expressions and behaviors for social cues. Many INTJs find, for example, that their carrer ambitions push them into developing a serviceable repertoire of behaviors that convey goodwill and put people at ease. Ultimately, these behaviors are more predictable than the abstract categories of relationship INTJs are inclined to devise.
When Extraverted Thinking isn’t working well enough, INTJs draw directly from their tertiary function, Introverted Feeling, which merely rationalizes and supports their worst tendencies. It encourages them to idealize their abstract ideas about life and to avoid real relationships as unworthy of their investment. Such INTJs are often credited with staying above the emotional fray of life, when they have actually never been in it.
PS: I didn't bother searching the forum to see if this description is already available, so if it happens to be forgive my noobishness
INTJ
Because INTJ’s rely on Extraverted Thinking for their dealings with the outer world, they often have a scientific, somewhat skeptical approach to reality. They want to know how things work and what they’re likely to do under varying circumstances. Impatient with wasted motion, words, and emotion, their outward demeanor may be difficult to read.
Indeed, an INTJ’s bearing can seem downright Vulcan. The Vulcans, of course, are a fictional people in the Star Trek series – resolute logicians who barely change expression or use body language, even when they’re puzzled or aware of danger. Thus, one might heed the words of Tuvok, the Vulcan tactical officer on the spaceship Voyager, who warns: “exterior composure is no indication of a Vulcan’s inner state”.
Although they superficially resemble Extraverted Thinkers, INTJs are alway guided by their Intuition. They are rarely commited to general assumotions about rules, laws, and hierarchy, and they may have an acerbic sense of humor about such things. INTJs will use what works in the service of their ideas; and they will quickly discard or change what doesn’t.
A (probably apocryphal) story tells of a delegation of sailors who went to the tribunal of the Inquisition in the seventeenth century, when the Catholic Church had forbidden the use of Galileo’s astronomy as an affront to the Bible’s account of creation. The sailos sheepishly confessed that Galileo’s theory had both simplified their journeys and made their maps more accurate. They hoped that the Inquisitors would exempt mariners from the church’s proscription against it. The Tribunal considered the problem, consulted with the bishops, and sent an emissary to the Pope. Finally, they conceded. They said, “OK, if the theory works, use it. But don’t believe it”.
This is a pretty fair description of the INTJ’s basic attitude. Fundamental truth is something different from expressed knowledge, which is always a fiction of one sort or another. If a theory works, it doesn’t matter who supports it or what anyone thinks it means. If it doesn’t, why bother with it?
Although both INTJs and ENTJs realize their Intuitions by way of rational criteria – principles, law, organizational structure, and so forth – ENTJs will not usually pursue a goal unless it strikes them as compatible with reason. INTJs are more classicaly Promethean. They will steal fire from the gods without any assurance that a reasonable hearth exists at which to tend it back home. For such types, knowledge is not information, but a way of looking at things.
Consider James Hillman’s understanding of the soul as “a perspective rather than a susbstance, a viewpoint toward things rather than a thing itself”. This is a typically INTJ antidefinition. Such types may expend a great deal of time attempting to winnow the actual logic of accepted theories and formulations from expedient or merely limited assumptions. INTJs are accordingly drawn to science, mathematics, and medicine – fields in which new ideas about reality are constantly being forged and tested logically. They may also take interest in psychology, theology, publishing, and linguistics. As they pursue their intuitions, they inevitably combine elements from varied fields, perceiving an underlying commonality of form or meaning.
This sense of underlying structure and meaning leads INTJs to value both elegance of form and subtlety of expression. Nothing exists that can’t bear reediting and paring down to its essential components. The connections INTJs perceive among very different areas of knowledge may be sufficient to convice them they’re headed in the right direction, even when they can’t explain what they’re after.
Like the ISTJs, INTJs cannot accept new information until they relate it to their inner world. However, ISTJs analyze new data by aligning it with what they already know. Once they’ve accepted a fact, it becomes part of their identity. INTJs explore information largely by rejecting its influence – examining it from other perspectives and determining its limitations.
Because this inner process is tied to their sense of self, INTJs can take a long time to figure out “who they really are”. Their need to find out “what’s missing” from a system of information invariably takes them into their own mental world – to an imaginative reconstruction of ideas – and the effort necessarily becomes a search for part of themselves. Such types can develop the destructive habit of formulating their identity in terms of their ability to see a situation’s limits, needing to find the flaws that will allow them to become spectators rather than performers.
For this reason, others don’t usually recognize the need of the average INTJ for external structure. INTJs are invariably described as independent and self-motivated, and this is certainly true with respect to their strongest functions. Where technical and intellectual competence are concerned, INTJs have a kind of inner compass, and they prefer a situation in which they don’t have to coordinate their work with or report to someone else.
Moreover, they don’t take criticism of their ideas personally. Position, title, and reputation have no meaning for these types. They will not entertain another’s judgement of theur worth unless they believe the person intellectualy qualified to make the assessment. And even a legitimate judgement will usually strike them as an indication of the other person’s assumptions and expectations.
Personal relatedness, however, is a different matter. INTJs are much less confident in a purely social situation. It is no exaggeration to say that their primary relationship is to their inner world, and they will nurture that relationship at the considerable expense of social abilities and the art of compromise.
In a field that excites and interests them, they are often driven, and they tend to expect the same degree of investment from subordinates. They frequently convey impatience when a situation that had seemed impersonal and outwardly predictable suddenly requires free-form personal interaction.
INTJs don’t like to say something more than once, and they may cut others short when conversation strikes them as unnecessary. Moreover, their need to find an alternate point of view in order to understand something can sound like disagreement or negativity – as though the speaker’s ideas had been judged and found wanting. Thus, even people who know an INTJ well may believe the person is either indifferent to them or critical of them.
INTJs can also be lonely behind their reserve, not knowing how to fit in even when they want to be included. This aspect of the type is partly the result of the INTJ’s comparative rarity. At 1% of the population, INTJs are usually the only one of their kind in a family. Throughout grammar and high school, they are often the only such type in a classroom.
Altough this ratio changes at the college and graduate level, when INTJs specialize in fields that appeal to other INJs, for most of their developing years, these types have good reason to feel different from others. Because they relate to the outer world with Extraverted Thinking, they generally interact by trying to determine the logical relationship of others’ views and demands to their own needs. Consequently, they get little experience in areas of relationship that don’t interest them.
Many such types become articulate quite early, and they use their verbal abilites to fend off involvment in anything they don’t understand or don’t wish to. However, their awareness of others’ feelings does not keep pace with their verbal abilities. Young INTJs may be intelectually precocious but emotionally imature, exercising their dominant function by distancing themselves from others, engaging in ironic comments and somewhat juvenile sarcasm.
Sometimes, to their surprise, their observations make people laugh and afford them the group approval they were attempting to preempt. INTJs rather enjoy the paradox this sets up and will play to it – experimenting with the boundaries of humor itself. One might consider comedian Dennis Miller, who presents himself as a caustic observer and occasional saboteur of the images and conventions on which his livelyhood depends.
Like all types, INTJs resist their least-developed functions and attempt to avoid situations in which they’ll come into play. It should be granted, however, that Sensation and Feeling, the INTJ’s weakest functions, cannot be avoided wholesale in the course of a normal human life. These functions are our means of concrete embodiement – our physical pleasures and desires, our emotional connections with others, our love of home and hearth, our sense of being grounded and real.
INTJs appreciate these things well enough, but more in the abstract than in the messy realitites of everyday existence. Regarding most events as arbitrary arrangements of elements, to be dismantled and reassembled at will, they may find it difficult to assume the duration of another’s affection or interest in them.
In general, these types deal with feelings the way they deal with ideas – by formulating and explaining them to themselves so they know what to expect, or getting far enough outside them to resist their influence. In an INTJ’s mind, friendships require a particular kind of investment; sexual connections another; marriage another. Such types want to know which category they’re dealing with before they get involved.
But real relationship is unpredictable, and real people resist the categories the INTJ attempts to apply. In fact, sexual attraction and romantic infatuation usually catch these types by surprise. And although they enjoy the distinct pleasures of sensuality, the careening roller coaster of emotions that comes with the territory ultimately forces them to use their inferior functions.
As opposed to their usual view of reality as arbitrary, they begin to experience the influence of primitive Extraverted Sensation and feel an anxious sense of material possession. They feel impulsive, out of control, and unable to take anything for granted. They worry that their intellectual life will never get back on track until the relationship becomes more ordinary and settled. Ultimately, they attempt to regain control – by pressing for declarations and permanency, even if their own intentions aren’t clear to them yet, or by using their critical judgement to distance themselves from their emotions.
INTJs appreciate the security of a commited relationship, and given the ration of Extraverts to Introverts in our culture, often marry Extraverted types. They enjoy their families and mantain an unusual respect for the individuality and independence of both spouse and children. However, they may not sustain the kind of Extraverted interaction their partner expects.
They’re more likely to settle in and, at their first opportunity , reassert their primary relationship to their inner world. This is true of both male and female INTJs. When there is too much outer stimulation or conflict, INTJs lose touch with their intuitive process and become restless, bored, and emotionally exhausted. Thus, INTJs need a fair amount of time alone.
They also need a fair amount of intellectual challenge and exercise. If a partner can’t provide it, INTJs are likely to seek it privately or with others. The same INTJ who gets bored at parties and looks around for the nearest bookshelf may well forget to eat or sleepn when involved in a complex and intricate conversation about ideas. In fact, for an INTJ, the communion of like minds is a kind of cerebral analog to falling in love.
INTJs may even resist concomitant physical attraction to a kindred spirit for fear of compromising the relationship with the exigencies of chemistry and social expectation. Such types frequently envision an ideal way of life that would unify NTJ cerebralism with SFP physical immediacy, but in actual practice, they are most likely to understand such unification as something ultimately spiritual. For this reason, INTJs may have an abiding interest in Sufism, or the Buddhist warrior philosophy, or the kind of mystical poetry that celebrates this idealized state in language.
Ironically, INTJs can best engage their Feeling and Sensate qualities by developing more Extraverted Thinking. The inner world if an INTJ is so compelling that such types can let their physical and emotional needs go for long periods of time. Deliberate use of Extraverted Thinking gives them more of what they need – a senser of rootedness in the material world: the world of bills, train schedules, medical and dental appointments, shoe repair, and the like. As the Zen Buddhists are wont to say, “after ecstasy, the laundry.”
Extraverted Thinking also connects them to the assumptions and expectations of others, so they are better able to analyze people’s expressions and behaviors for social cues. Many INTJs find, for example, that their carrer ambitions push them into developing a serviceable repertoire of behaviors that convey goodwill and put people at ease. Ultimately, these behaviors are more predictable than the abstract categories of relationship INTJs are inclined to devise.
When Extraverted Thinking isn’t working well enough, INTJs draw directly from their tertiary function, Introverted Feeling, which merely rationalizes and supports their worst tendencies. It encourages them to idealize their abstract ideas about life and to avoid real relationships as unworthy of their investment. Such INTJs are often credited with staying above the emotional fray of life, when they have actually never been in it.