allanhunter.net Blog

I’ve had two splendidly intelligent responses to my preliminary comments about type and archetypes, and all I can say in each case is: yes. Now I have to explain what that means.

We all have preferences. Whether we are right handed or left handed, prefer sweets or savories… we all have preferences. And, when we face a new situation we will tend to want to revert to those preferences. I’m right handed. If you lob me a tennis ball when I’m holding a cup of tea I’ll put the cup in my left hand and then catch the ball. I could catch the ball with my left hand. I prefer not to.

Within the Jung-generated Myers-Briggs developed set of 4 twinned preferences we are always going to have some ways of doing things we prefer. We have the options of Sensing and Intuiting, of Thinking and Feeling, and we also have the attitudes of Extraversion and Introversion, Judging and Perceiving. And we can be anywhere on the continuum of each set of paired functions. We are predisposed to be slightly more of one than another, and we go to where we feel comfortable.

Circumstances and education can alter these preferences (If that tennis ball is thrown, not lobbed, I’ll have to use my left hand, and I do.) Jung suggested that all such preferences, whether physical or mental, can be developed, and that our life task is to balance these qualities appropriately. So the active sporty person will one day need to develop a more contemplative side, and the logical engineer may have to learn to live in the world of the emotions if each of them wish to be fully engaged in life’s richness. My friend Andrew’s father, deceased last week, was a man who never made it out of engineer-thinking, and Andrew feels he hardly knew the old man at all. Any of us can choose to stay put - and if we do so we miss out on being able to contact others who may have a huge amount to offer us.

So yes, we have preferences, and yes, we can choose to grow, and yes, circumstances sometimes prevent us from growing. Now, if we know this we can, perhaps, make some observations. One of those is that certain MBTI types are over-represented in the six archetypes.

Speaking anecdotally as a teacher of writing for over 30 years I can say that those students who have the greatest difficulty considering anything more than their own world are the ST and SF students. In terms of SF (sensing and Feeling) the challenge is to get them to write about something without making themselves the center of it. The ‘I’ voice is very strong for them. If they’ve seen it then it’s true (No matter that it may be a skewed perception). If left unchecked this personal viewpoint leads to mild forms of racism - as in: “I was there. You can’t tell me that isn’t true. All Italians smell and are rude.” (and that is an actual example from a class…..)

The sensing world-view may well be the one that is most hard to escape, and it is hugely over-represented in those who are Orphans. Is it possible to escape? Of course it is. but in order to make a break first one has to ask oneself if there is something better worth escaping to. And those in the S world have trouble either seeing that or believing it. Those in the Intuiting world of N idealism and possibility are always thinking there has to be a better way to do everything, so this is far less of a radical challenge for them. All they then need is the courage to act on this notion.

It may be true that we are born with certain preferences. What we can say for sure is that we have them and that they can change and grow as we grow. We can also say that narrow-mindedness is almost always a function of those who get stuck in certain unvarying formulaic ways of being - Orphans by another name.

As I say in ‘Stories’ it’s really easy to accept what others tell us to think, not question, and focus on amassing consumer products. This is the way of the sensing person. This is the way of the Orphan. Political conformists are Orphans, and conforming is much more widely accepted in conservative circles. Indeed it’s encouraged. Bush has encouraged us to feel afraid so we will give up our rights of privacy (to give just one example) and he’d dearly love us to be unquestioning Orphans.

It’s hard to forgive him, and other similar politicians, for shoving this great country of ours into Orphan-think.