Inner Space
INTP (subtype: Romantic, Sensitive Analyst?)
- Local time
- Today 1:11 AM
- Joined
- Jan 3, 2012
- Messages
- 4
Hello, my name is Ellen and I've just figured out recently that I'm probably an INTP. For a long time before that I thought I was INFP and tested that way, probably for several reasons:
1) I feel my emotions very deeply and I'm very sensitive to being affected by the emotions of people around me, and I thought that meant that I must be an F. But I now think that this is just my Fe being wildly overactive in a dysfunctional way. My emotions are not naturally *in tune* with other peoples' feelings -- I am more likelly to feel overwhelmed and "scrambled" by the feelings of those around me.
2) I was answering test questions in a way that reflected who I wanted to be rather than who I actually am. I had an idealized notion of living "from the heart" and being a loving, humanitarian person. I now realize that although I am certainly a humanist with deeply felt emotions, my decision making process works most *skillfully* when I use rational thoughts. In the past I would often exhaustively analyze my options, but then impulsively veer off into making a "gut" decision based on feelings, which almost always ended up being a bad decision. Unfortunately this has been true for all the major decisions in my life (college, career, mate) which means that I regret most of them.
I really think that most of the MBTI and cognitive process test questions are worded very ineffectively, at least for me. The phrasing is so general that it would require an implausible degree of self-knowledge to answer them accurately. I've found it extremely difficult despite the fact that I have, I believe, a higher than usual degree of self-knowledge, because it's part of my personality to extensively self-analyze.
For example, take the question, "How often do you feel strongly that something is good or bad?" Now, the authors of the test have, in their own minds, a very specific conceptual framework for how the mind works. When they came up with that question, they were thinking of a very specific detail within that conceptual framework. But the wording of the question itself does nothing at all to help me connect my own mental processes to that point in the framework. The phrasing of the question makes sense to them because it evokes the details of the conceptual framework they have studied. But for me, the test taker who has not studied Jungian psychology, the question "How often do you feel strongly that something is good or bad" evokes memories of an extremely wide range of past mental experiences, many of which have nothing to do with the specific part of the conceptual framework that they are attempting to reference. I might think of moral feelings, aesthetic feelings, emotional reactions to events, concepts, objects, etc....
I wish the test questions would use very specific examples, like "How often do you feel strongly about whether another person's actions were morally right or wrong?"
It would be even better if they gave a specific example and then asked you to choose between two examples of reactions, one on each end of the spectrum within that cognitive process. For example, "Think of the last time you had an argument with someone. Is it more likely you might have said 'That doesn't make sense,' or 'that's not what I believe'?
That's the best example I could come up with, and having to come up with it made me realize that it is very difficult to do. But I think part of my difficulty is my lack of knowledge about the miniscule details of the cognitive process. It makes me wish I could go back to school and study Jungian theory. Who knows, maybe I will one day.
But I think someone who was sufficiently immersed in the details of the theory could, with careful effort and collaboration, come up with a test with questions like that which would do more to connect the theory with the users' actual, specific mental awareness and memories of their own mental experiences.
So anyway, all that being said, I'm still not 100% sure that I'm an INTP, but that's my best guess at this point and I'm fairly sure that's correct. It just fits me and my history so much better overall than any of the other type descriptions. Once I understood the possible wacky role of the inferior function (in my case, Fe) then it all started to make sense.
1) I feel my emotions very deeply and I'm very sensitive to being affected by the emotions of people around me, and I thought that meant that I must be an F. But I now think that this is just my Fe being wildly overactive in a dysfunctional way. My emotions are not naturally *in tune* with other peoples' feelings -- I am more likelly to feel overwhelmed and "scrambled" by the feelings of those around me.
2) I was answering test questions in a way that reflected who I wanted to be rather than who I actually am. I had an idealized notion of living "from the heart" and being a loving, humanitarian person. I now realize that although I am certainly a humanist with deeply felt emotions, my decision making process works most *skillfully* when I use rational thoughts. In the past I would often exhaustively analyze my options, but then impulsively veer off into making a "gut" decision based on feelings, which almost always ended up being a bad decision. Unfortunately this has been true for all the major decisions in my life (college, career, mate) which means that I regret most of them.
I really think that most of the MBTI and cognitive process test questions are worded very ineffectively, at least for me. The phrasing is so general that it would require an implausible degree of self-knowledge to answer them accurately. I've found it extremely difficult despite the fact that I have, I believe, a higher than usual degree of self-knowledge, because it's part of my personality to extensively self-analyze.
For example, take the question, "How often do you feel strongly that something is good or bad?" Now, the authors of the test have, in their own minds, a very specific conceptual framework for how the mind works. When they came up with that question, they were thinking of a very specific detail within that conceptual framework. But the wording of the question itself does nothing at all to help me connect my own mental processes to that point in the framework. The phrasing of the question makes sense to them because it evokes the details of the conceptual framework they have studied. But for me, the test taker who has not studied Jungian psychology, the question "How often do you feel strongly that something is good or bad" evokes memories of an extremely wide range of past mental experiences, many of which have nothing to do with the specific part of the conceptual framework that they are attempting to reference. I might think of moral feelings, aesthetic feelings, emotional reactions to events, concepts, objects, etc....
I wish the test questions would use very specific examples, like "How often do you feel strongly about whether another person's actions were morally right or wrong?"
It would be even better if they gave a specific example and then asked you to choose between two examples of reactions, one on each end of the spectrum within that cognitive process. For example, "Think of the last time you had an argument with someone. Is it more likely you might have said 'That doesn't make sense,' or 'that's not what I believe'?
That's the best example I could come up with, and having to come up with it made me realize that it is very difficult to do. But I think part of my difficulty is my lack of knowledge about the miniscule details of the cognitive process. It makes me wish I could go back to school and study Jungian theory. Who knows, maybe I will one day.
But I think someone who was sufficiently immersed in the details of the theory could, with careful effort and collaboration, come up with a test with questions like that which would do more to connect the theory with the users' actual, specific mental awareness and memories of their own mental experiences.
So anyway, all that being said, I'm still not 100% sure that I'm an INTP, but that's my best guess at this point and I'm fairly sure that's correct. It just fits me and my history so much better overall than any of the other type descriptions. Once I understood the possible wacky role of the inferior function (in my case, Fe) then it all started to make sense.
