# What does Fe do?



## Acerbusvenator (Apr 12, 2011)

Meh, if looking at a picture I generally don't say anything because I'm either analyzing it or because giving my opinion wouldn't change the picture and I mean, when someone asks me what I think of the picture I simply don't bother giving them a large explanation as of why I don't like it so I just give a not so clear answer so they can go away or change subject.

I think that if you talk about Fe then you need to consider in what position it is in. I'd assume Jung was talking about dominant Fe and that one is a lot different from auxiliary, tertiary or inferior Fe. Basically, all your functions try to justify your dominant function so if you are Fe dominant then your world will be based around Fe and if you're an INJ your world will revolve around Ni etc. so the Fe in IFJs just kinda makes our ideas come out less harsh.

I dislike all the BS around the feeling functions. They are functions of reasoning.

For example, when considering an action
Fi - How will this make me feel
Fe - How will this make others feel
Fi is introverted, thus it focuses on you as a person, just like Ti, Ni and Si.
Fe is extraverted, thus it focuses on the external world, just like Te, Ne and Se.

It's not that Fe is this politically correct thing or whatever, it's that concerns are placed on the external world.

Fe is in-tune with the external [social] atmosphere
Fi is in-tune with the internal [social] atmosphere

But whatever, this is just my take on it.


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## JungyesMBTIno (Jul 22, 2011)

> This sort of needing things to live up to an internal standard can result in a very subtle coercion. When Von Franz talks about the inferior Te of Fi-doms she refers to it as having a sort of surreptitious tyranny. The person doesn't outwardly make demands but the atmosphere adjusts simply because of their presence. Everyone feels that so-and-so won't like it even if they don't know why.


Yea...so well put (by you and Von Franz).


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## JungyesMBTIno (Jul 22, 2011)

I don't really take auxiliaries that seriously as a metric, because you tend to get so many different things going on there from person to person, that's it's almost foolish to make any definitive statement about the kind of personality tendencies you'll get from them (e.g. sometimes you get the sort of "overdone" aux. Fe types who seem a little controlling, then sometimes, you get the aux. Fe types who sort of try to mimic something more Te-like, etc.). Same with tertiaries, I don't take them that seriously as a personality metric (once I even have a clue of the true type of the person) - they come around like the auxes, but don't really have decisive influence over the person (you may never really get ideas from them about the true nature of the person - same with the auxiliaries).


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## JungyesMBTIno (Jul 22, 2011)

That whole "the room adjusting with the presence of the Fi dom" stuff really resonates with my experiences with them. I used to think some of those people who I suspect fit the type were just oversensitive (I think I've seen ENFPs do kind of bad renditions of this before, where they literally were oversensitive or kind of perfectionists, so I thought that was universal - sort of the whole self-confessed "I don't want to offend anyone by accident, I'm too much of a perfectionist for that" deal - I can relate more to that than holding people under some kind of "spell") - now, it totally makes sense to me why someone would actually want to lead like that (I mean, if you can get what you want out of everything that easily with your presence (at least something in your life has probably down the road convinced you that you can), who wouldn't want that?).


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## Abraxas (May 28, 2011)

Silveresque said:


> So how would a hermit use Fe? Can Fe be used for decision making that doesn't involve people?


This brings up an extremely provocative insight.

The objective orientation of Fe doesn't necessarily demand the existence of other individual entities as the origin and goal of feeling judgments. It could just as easily be some kind of objectified moral perspective, such as _religious faith_ for example. All that needs to be in place to satisfy the description Jung gives of Fe is that the discerning factor appears to come from the outside world to the individual, and is based in passionately held ethical values.

A hermit might very well be a Fe-dom and make the decision to enter into a monastic lifestyle precisely because his or her judgment is extroverted and based in a religiously held doctrine of moral custom that comes from culture. To them, this is an objective decision - "the right thing to do"; they experience their judgment in a way that it comes to them as pre-determined by the outward situation they exist within - but it doesn't necessarily have anything to do with real people. Being of a religious nature, the morality can be seen as transcendental, and indeed objective for that reason. 

This is where the line between Fe and Fi can get blurry however, because the more Fe becomes differentiated as the principal function, so does Fi as the shadow function. Furthermore, inferior Ti gets repressed and proportionately grows stronger as it does, manifesting in more and more subjective forms of thinking that serve to justify the judgment of almighty Fe as the dominant function.

I have seen this come up in my own experience when I am trying to get a Fe-dom to recognize the subjectivity of morality and that their own moral choices aren't objective, but completely personal. This is impossible, or at the least, unimportant from their perspective because Fi is their shadow function and thus negates their dominant Fe. The more you press the importance of Fi, the more defensively they attempt to wield Ti to justify their Fe rationality and undervalue, or redirect attention from Fi towards "facts" in an attempt to make it seem as if their moral choice was actually an impersonal Te-based judgment, and in the process only make it more obvious to real Te-types how subjective their thinking actually is.


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