# Is the auxiliary the same attitude as the dominant?



## PaladinX (Feb 20, 2013)

Here is an example of a diagram that Jung created to demonstrate the functions:










Which shows TeNe rather than TeNi. (CW10 Par626)

Here is another diagram (CW12 Par137):










Thoughts?


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## PaladinX (Feb 20, 2013)

It makes me wonder about all those INFJs out there who reached that conclusion based on their use of Ni and Ti, where INFJ seemed to be the only type that fit. Perhaps they are really INTJs?


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## Spades (Aug 31, 2011)

It is my understanding that the inferior is oriented in the opposite direction as the dominant, while the auxiliary and tertiary are more ambiguous. I've read interpretations where both were oriented in the same direction as the dominant, though Myers-Briggs set opposite directions for them.

I think when one is typing themselves, they should focus on the dom and inf, and use the letter of the second strongest as the aux, regardless of which direction if points. For example, a Te dom with Ni or a Te dom with Ne would both be "Extraverted Thinking with iNtuition" (ENTJ).


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## Khiro (Nov 28, 2012)

PaladinX said:


> It makes me wonder about all those INFJs out there who reached that conclusion based on their use of Ni and Ti, where INFJ seemed to be the only type that fit. Perhaps they are really INTJs?


While I get the line of thinking, I think it's more likely that Jung would have perceived an INFJ as being Ni-Fi. 

I've not read Jung's work directly, but I know a little about his suppositions as compared to those in MBTI. In this instance I'm not sure where I stand. I identify too greatly with Fe to really feel like I have more of an Fi preference, but I'm wary of outright denying the primary authority based purely on my interpretation of things.


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## LadyO.W.BernieBro (Sep 4, 2010)

l can see why some functions would clash very easily, but others seem like they could coexist even if they had the same attitude.

Te-Ne doesn't sound disastrous to me.

l think that ultimately, a person with relatively balanced use of both sides of the brain will reflect something similar to the opposing function model, and you can definitely see why the inferior would be opposite to the dom; say dom Ne, if this person's inferior were Se they'd be unusually dominant in the right hemisphere but they would also likely experience other issues with functioning l can't really begin to speculate on.

Because of that, l guess you can imagine that if the opposing model will hold true for at least xE _ _ xI or xI _ _ xE, most people will develop in a way that resembles it closely.


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## bearotter (Aug 10, 2012)

Spades said:


> I've read interpretations where both were oriented in the same direction as the dominant, though Myers-Briggs set opposite directions for them.
> 
> I think when one is typing themselves, they *should focus on the dom and inf, and use the letter of the second strongest as the aux, regardless of which direction if points.*




This, definitely. The diagram above, if I understand correctly, is _not_ claiming either that the auxiliary would be entirely introverted or extroverted, but that precisely it is ambiguous. This is in a way natural and an advantage. The dominant function serves the conscious will, so it's unlikely to associate with the contents rejected from consciousness (for an introvert, who may fear, or whatever, the external world, the dominant is unlikely to associate much with the external world and its laws). Thus, this half-half sort of status of the auxiliary function might serve as an intermediary to accessing some of the contents most feared or difficult to reconcile with.
{note: I'm focusing on the second diagram, because I think it makes the most sense -- I don't believe most of us are pure introverts or extroverts, and I'd guess a significant batch of people have mixed leanings, whence as much as I agree a fully extroverted thinking intuitive would be pure Te-Ne, is that realistic ...} 

MBTI goes the extreme direction, probably motivated by not being interested primarily in describing the neurotic messes (e.g. someone utterly terrified of the objective world, or completely blinded to generating subjective data/reasoning) and rather the less dysfunctional individual, and says the auxiliary entirely brings introverts face to face with the external. For instance, Se informs the Fi-dominant. A dominant rational introverted type has only "secondary" need for introverted perception by this model, because they fall under the rational orientation. 

I think MBTI for one thing seems not to be operating from the view of rejecting extroversion or introversion from consciousness. Could be off there, but it seems kind of ridiculous to model with alternating e's and i's otherwise. 

Certainly if someone prefers F to T, and is Ni dominant, INFJ makes the most sense. However, I personally have found the most interest of all in isolating the two axes one falls the most naturally under. Sometimes one's axis preference may be clearer than one's preference for F over T or T over F. In such a case, I'd say identifying MBTI type via this also makes sense. 
With these two methods, I think at least some meaningful version of type can often be achieved, with some subjective choice acknowledged of course.


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## Kynx (Feb 6, 2012)

Consciousness and any function perspectives it contains, are oriented towards one attitude. The unconscious and any function perspective it contains are oriented to the opposite attitude. The functions are of secondary importance.


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## Abraxas (May 28, 2011)

Also worth noting is that Jung did not view the human psyche in static "this-or-that" black-and-white modalities. These terms that he came up with to define the mind that we use all the time are more like broad-strokes of the brush, more like signposts or markers in a forest showing the way out rather than a stone-road. More like a lighthouse on a foggy night warning us of the coastline, rather than a clear starry night to navigate under.

It is more useful to imagine the psyche as being more "nebulous" rather than something with hard-lines and boundaries. It's more like a color wheel, with everything sort've blurring into everything else. There's no clean delineation between introversion and extraversion, for example. While it is true that Jung believed individuals would favor one above the other, I believe he meant this to imply a sort've "average over time." I.e., not meaning to imply that a person just _is always_ going to be acting introverted _all the time_, rather I believe he meant that a person would _most of the time_ prefer a certain attitude, and fall into the opposite attitude at certain times and in certain contexts depending on the situation, but otherwise finds this draining and hard to tolerate for extended periods of time.

Similarly, I believe he conceived of the cognitive functions operating the same way, not as something static, but as something more along the lines of a "default" mode that one doesn't necessarily always have the luxury of being in. E.g., introverts come under constant and significant pressure to act like extraverts or force themselves to "fit in" with an extraverted social world view. For practical reasons, it is unrealistic to assume that a person is just "always introverted," in my opinion. So to, then, it is unrealistic to assume that a person is just "always intuitive" or "always a thinker." While a person might have a comfortable default, reality demands adaptivity. Certainly, having to rely on anything other than one's dominant function is draining, and hard to tolerate for a long time, but nevertheless, we do it anyway. I think, in that sense, the functions are not as static as most people seem to believe.


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## reckful (Jun 19, 2012)

PaladinX said:


> Here is an example of a diagram that Jung created to demonstrate the functions:


Thanks for posting that first picture! I hadn't seen it before. I wish we could tell which particular article that was part of but, because of the way Vol. 10 of the Collected Works was organized, it looks like we can at least tell that "par. 626" (assuming that reference applies to the diagram) would have been from one of his articles from the late 1950s.

I'd say that diagram shows pretty clearly that Jung envisioned that your conscious attitude would apply _both_ to your dominant function _and_ to your auxiliary function (to the extent that you differentiated your auxiliary and brought it up into consciousness in service of the dominant). I've been saying that was really the only fair reading of Psychological Types for a while (for more, see this post and the posts it links to), and Myers acknowledged that her opposing view conflicted with the majority of Jung scholars.


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## LiquidLight (Oct 14, 2011)

PaladinX said:


> It makes me wonder about all those INFJs out there who reached that conclusion based on their use of Ni and Ti, where INFJ seemed to be the only type that fit. Perhaps they are really INTJs?


This is probably true of a lot of types actually. I have observed a lot of people who seem, for instance, to be Se+Te or Te+Se (sort of the ultimate down-to-earth person completely grounded in the observable here and now). I would also argue Freud for having Fi+Ni in some variation (I think it would be hard to argue Freud's ideas as being Ne to me, because they seem much too esoteric and unrelated to anything in the objective world). I also think it is why the validity of type dynamics is so questionable because the entire premise may be built upon a faulty assumption, or at least one that is too rigid to acknowledge the fluidity that might be present with most people. Myers seems to basically conclude that you are both consciously introverted and extraverted at the same time (which is different than being in the middle of the road), since in MBTi the pull of the dom and aux functions ostensibly assert influence over the character of the person (or we could not have IJs and IPs otherwise). I don't think this is how Jung thought of things, and furthermore would've argued, as has been pointed out, the inferior being the counteracting or balancing force not the first aux especially when we consider the notion of the transcendent function. 

The diagram above makes me feel more confident about a notion I've had all along that the aux 'colors' the conscious presentation towards thinking or feeling in the case of an irrational type, but is not necessarily a co-determining influence, and by trying to make it a co-determining influence, even if by accident, you run the risk of putting people into boxes for which they may not fit. Harold Grant's ideas on top of all this about the tertiary being the same as the dominant, etc., only make the issue worse. 

I personally have found its pretty easy to figure out what people are if you almost look at it from a dichotomy perspective. In many cases introvert vs. extravert is fairly easy to spot because the 'styles' as Jung called them are just so different. Even among pretty normal people you almost always quickly tell the two apart (Obama, described by a number of people as an introvert next to Bill Clinton the clear extravert for example. On their own one might question it, but next to one another it becomes obvious which is which). Then for me its just a matter of figuring out if the person leans more toward Sensation or Intuition or Thinking or Feeling and again, if you know what to look for, both are easy to spot. I may not be able to look at someone and say ESTP, but I can definitely look at someone and say "Sensation+Thinking" or "Feeling + Intuition" in some capacity in most cases.


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## PaladinX (Feb 20, 2013)

I'm curious... does anyone have access to CW10 and can verify it? In all of my google searches to find other sources, I have only seen that first diagram associated with works by jungian analyst, Anthony Stevens. None of my local libraries, Universities or bookstores carry the Collected Works Volume 10. I only own Psychological Types.

The second diagram, I have been able to verify that it is in CW12.


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## Teybo (Sep 25, 2012)

LiquidLight said:


> This is probably true of a lot of types actually. I have observed a lot of people who seem, for instance, to be Se+Te or Te+Se (sort of the ultimate down-to-earth person completely grounded in the observable here and now). I would also argue Freud for having Fi+Ni in some variation (I think it would be hard to argue Freud's ideas as being Ne to me, because they seem much too esoteric and unrelated to anything in the objective world). I also think it is why the validity of type dynamics is so questionable because the entire premise may be built upon a faulty assumption, or at least one that is too rigid to acknowledge the fluidity that might be present with most people. Myers seems to basically conclude that you are both consciously introverted and extraverted at the same time (which is different than being in the middle of the road), since in MBTi the pull of the dom and aux functions ostensibly assert influence over the character of the person (or we could not have IJs and IPs otherwise). I don't think this is how Jung thought of things, and furthermore would've argued, as has been pointed out, the inferior being the counteracting or balancing force not the first aux especially when we consider the notion of the transcendent function.
> 
> The diagram above makes me feel more confident about a notion I've had all along that the aux 'colors' the conscious presentation towards thinking or feeling in the case of an irrational type, but is not necessarily a co-determining influence, and by trying to make it a co-determining influence, even if by accident, you run the risk of putting people into boxes for which they may not fit. Harold Grant's ideas on top of all this about the tertiary being the same as the dominant, etc., only make the issue worse.
> 
> I personally have found its pretty easy to figure out what people are if you almost look at it from a dichotomy perspective. In many cases introvert vs. extravert is fairly easy to spot because the 'styles' as Jung called them are just so different. Even among pretty normal people you almost always quickly tell the two apart (Obama, described by a number of people as an introvert next to Bill Clinton the clear extravert for example. On their own one might question it, but next to one another it becomes obvious which is which). Then for me its just a matter of figuring out if the person leans more toward Sensation or Intuition or Thinking or Feeling and again, if you know what to look for, both are easy to spot. I may not be able to look at someone and say ESTP, but I can definitely look at someone and say "Sensation+Thinking" or "Feeling + Intuition" in some capacity in most cases.


I don't understand why you exclude the I/E and J/P dimensions here. I've met many people who are more defined by one or both of those dimensions than on the S/N or T/F dimensions, and even if you haven't, it's not difficult to imagine someone who is strongly introverted with strong J traits, but with weak T/F preferences and weak S/N preferences. Have you never met someone and had a strong, instant reaction like "Wow, that person is an EP type of some sort! But I'm not sure about the other dimensions."?


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## LiquidLight (Oct 14, 2011)

Teybo said:


> I don't understand why you exclude the I/E and J/P dimensions here. I've met many people who are more defined by one or both of those dimensions than on the S/N or T/F dimensions, and even if you haven't, it's not difficult to imagine someone who is strongly introverted with strong J traits, but with weak T/F preferences and weak S/N preferences. Have you never met someone and had a strong, instant reaction like "Wow, that person is an EP type of some sort! But I'm not sure about the other dimensions."?


I suppose that one way of looking at things, but to me judging and perceiving sits too much in the subjective realm. I have contended that its fine as an adjectival way of looking at someone, but Thinking vs. Feeling or S vs N are more philosophically coherent ways of looking at things. Perceiving isn't necessarily the opposite, or even complement to judging. The other thing is I try to stay away from MBTI type codes because of all the assumptions that go with them. I'd much more rather call someone an Introverted Intuitive rather than an INFP because I don't know for a fact that their aux is Ne and that it promotes a P-like 'non-closure seeking' perspective. I think that's making too many leaps of causation. 

The more I study people, the more it seems that a lot of what people call J is often really Te, or a combination of the construct of worldview, and attitude and experiences. A lot of it is also a sensation preference (being more oriented to the matters of the here and now). 

I didn't exclude I/E, I said that that's one of the easier dynamics to spot, when the two types are placed up against each other. J/P on the other hand, is to me a bit more nebulous, sort of a 'you know it when you see it' dynamic (that's true of all the functions as well, but because of the philosophical nature of opposition, you can always reverse engineer whether or not someone has a preference based on what they reject assuming they are self-aware enough to make accurate self-assessments. Like I said, from a philosophical standpoint P is not necessarily a rejection of J and also not necessarily a state, but could rather be an approach in a given moment). 

I think Jung realized the danger of what I would call referring to people as an 'it.' You are an "extraverted thinker" or an "introvert" or "an artisan" or "an American male," - basically turning people into nouns. I think he realized that people are in fact, not case studies, for whom you can compile a bunch of evidence and then say "such and such person is X thing" but rather that people are fluid and while someone may have habituated a pattern, it could easily change under different circumstances. I think that's why he called trying to type people in the way we do a parlour game because it fails to account for the dynamic nature of the human experience and forces people into boxes. Here in America there is an incessant need for classification, and so its no wonder that an American-borne system like MBTI would focus more on identification and classification, rather than a more descriptive approach like Jung's. You see this happen years later with Beebe, who says "do not take this as law" when he introduces his ideas of shadow functions, and yet everyone immediately made a law out of it, even down to the diminuation of the 5th - 8th function when Beebe himself specifically says "this is not a hierarchy." I think that's why Jung and his disciples talk about the psychological 'styles' of introversion vs. extraversion which is a much better way of looking at it in my opinion. Style is often something that is evident but hard to classify or nail down.


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## Abraxas (May 28, 2011)

_I've decided to move this conversation over into this thread in case @default settings wishes to continue it with me, as it is more pertinent to the topic of this thread and I believe those interested in this thread ought to hear what he has to say and possibly respond to it themselves._




default settings said:


> Are you sure the diagram represents function order?
> 
> It seems to explain that for each introverted irrational function, there is an extroverted irrational function.
> It seems to explain that for each introverted rational function, there is an extroverted rational function.
> ...


To which I responded:



Abraxas said:


> Could you please give a page number or a direct quote of this?
> 
> I actually happen to own a copy of Psychological Types myself, unless you are referring to one of his other works.
> 
> ...


To which he responded:



default settings said:


> I really depends on what you mean by "attitude".
> 
> Are you talking of rational/irrational or introverted/extroverted or sensing/intuition or feeling/thinking, because Myers doesn't even seem to retain the first pair, instead replacing it with judging/perceiving which although related is something else entirely, for at least the introverted types.
> 
> ...


To which I then replied:



Abraxas said:


> > *the secondary function is always one whose nature is different from, though not antagonistic to, the leading function: thus, for example, thinking, as primary function, can readily pair with intuition as auxiliary, or indeed equally well with sensation,  but, as already observed, never with feeling*.
> 
> 
> 
> ...


And that's where we are at.

I'm actually quite interested in this line of refutation. I would like to see it substantiated. To the extent of my knowledge, however, it would seem that the Myers-Briggs interpretation was not really what Jung had in mind, based on what we can see from the diagrams posted by the OP.

The only way I could see one attempting to argue that the auxiliary function had the opposite attitude of the dominant function (according to the diagram posted by the OP) would be if in the "extraverted thinking intuitive" mentioned in the diagram, intuition is not meant to be assumed to be the auxiliary function, and is only being mentioned because it shares the same attitude.


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## I Kant (Jan 19, 2013)

Abraxas said:


> I'm actually quite interested in this line of refutation. I would like to see it substantiated. To the extent of my knowledge, however, it would seem that the Myers-Briggs interpretation was not really what Jung had in mind, based on what we can see from the diagrams posted by the OP.
> 
> The only way I could see one attempting to argue that the auxiliary function had the opposite attitude of the dominant function (according to the diagram posted by the OP) would be if in the "extraverted thinking intuitive" mentioned in the diagram, intuition is not meant to be assumed to be the auxiliary function, and is only being mentioned because it shares the same attitude.












If we go back to his example from chapter X of:
DOM: T
AUX (pairs well with dom function): N
Not pair: F
Does pair equally well: S

And then combine it with the above diagram, as the dom T is actually dom Te,

Then the following needs to apply
Dom T ergo Te
Aux N ergo the only intuitive function in the diagram Ne
Not paired well F ergo the only feeling function in the diagram Fi
Does pair equally well S ergo the only sensing function in the diagram Si

Ergo Te, Si, Ne, Fi (inferior) thus ESTJ in MBTI terms.
*
The proof was basically in the original post in this very thread.*

But I re-explained it again for your convenience.


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## reckful (Jun 19, 2012)

default settings said:


> If we go back to his example from chapter X of:
> DOM: T
> AUX (pairs well with dom function): N
> Not pair: F
> ...


You can re-explain that as many times as you like. If that diagram is Jung's diagram — and, to be honest, if I had to bet, I'd bet it wasn't — then he's diagramming a Te-dom with an N-aux, since he captions it "an extraverted thinking intuitive."

In Chapter 2 of Psychological Types, Jung referred to Schiller — who, _without any doubt_ (based on lots of discussion in Chapter 2), Jung considered a Ti-dom with an N-aux — as an "intuitive, introverted thinking type."

Why would you think Jung would refer to a Te-dom with an S-aux as "an extraverted thinking *intuitive*"?


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