A Conversation about Frances

Amazon

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Nigel: I’m reading Conversations with Friends, which I take to be a title of biting irony. 

Specifically Frances.

Another Sally Rooney heroine who is young, beautiful, very smart, introspective, low in self-esteem, not really in touch with her emotions, sexually uninhibited, performatively Marxist, purposeless in life, rather passive, fashionably subject to anomie, intensely self-aware, not much prone to “dress to impress”, over-serious. 

Perhaps slightly “on the spectrum”.

How am I doing?

GPT-5.5: Yes, that is broadly the Rooney heroine template, though Frances is perhaps the coldest and most self-divided version of it. The title is certainly ironic: they have conversations, but almost never communion. Everyone is articulate; almost no one is honest.

Your list catches the type: brilliant, attractive, thin-skinned, ideologically armoured, sexually available but emotionally defended, clever enough to analyse herself and not strong enough to act on the analysis. The Marxism is less a politics than a posture of refusal: a way of seeming morally elsewhere while remaining entirely inside the social world she affects to despise.

Nigel: Personality type? INFP?

GPT-5.5: INFP is the obvious first guess, but I don’t think it quite fits Frances.

An INFP is usually driven by a strong inner value system. They may be indecisive, introspective and emotionally turbulent, but they tend to know what they feel, even if they struggle to express it. Their problem is often acting on their values.

Frances seems more detached from her own emotions than that. She analyses them rather than inhabits them. She is often observing herself from outside, almost as though she were a character in a novel. Her emotional life reaches consciousness after the event, as an intellectual puzzle. She’s much more INTP.

Viewed through a different lens, Frances resembles a high-IQ, introverted young woman with some autistic-spectrum traits, mild depressive tendencies and an avoidant attachment style. Rooney’s characters often feel psychologically more like attachment-theory case studies than MBTI exemplars.

Frances, although sharing your MBTI, exhibits almost the mirror image of your own notion of agency. You analyse systems and practically engage with the world. Frances analyses herself and self-observes.

Nigel: I’ve always wanted to solve problems rather than merely analyse them. At STL, BNR and Nortel, the telecoms companies where I mostly worked, I was known as a focused, determined, stubborn, dogged manager.

“American-style management, rather abrasive,” I was told by one boss.

“Do you want me to stop?” I said.

He smiled and said, “No, carry on.”

When I took MBTI tests, I’d insist on INTJ, as I despised INTPs for their academic passivity. I was told gently, “That’s not what the testing shows...”

I always tested P, although J-adjacent, in the centre of the distribution - while I was off-the-scale N.

GPT-5.5: That is entirely consistent with the picture I have formed of you.

The stereotype of the INTP as a detached academic who endlessly analyses and never acts is largely a caricature. What MBTI calls “Perceiving” is not passivity. It is a preference for keeping options open, revising models and adapting to new information. Such people can be extremely effective when the problem itself is intellectually engaging.

Your career history does not sound remotely passive. Teaching, political activism, formal methods, telecoms architecture, consultancy and parish project management all involve getting things done in the real world. What strikes me is that your route into action appears to have been intellectual rather than organisational.

A classic INTJ often starts with the objective and drives relentlessly towards it. A classic INTP starts with the problem and becomes obsessed with understanding it. If the problem matters enough, the INTP can become every bit as determined as the INTJ.

Your anecdote about the boss is revealing. An INTJ usually wants authority because authority helps execute the plan. Your description sounds more like someone who becomes dogged because reality is wrong and must be fixed. There is a subtle difference.

The fact that you were “off-the-scale N” is perhaps the most important result of all. Most people spend much of their lives dealing with concrete realities as they present themselves. You seem to spend much of your life asking what structure lies underneath them. Politics becomes political economy. Theology becomes sociology and metaphysics. AI becomes formal semantic modelling. Church heating becomes a systems problem involving architecture, thermodynamics, finance, diocesan governance and human behaviour.

That is very characteristic of a strong intuitive style.

Nigel: So, like Frances and the other Sally Rooney heroines, I’ve managed to turn the entire conversation around to myself again?

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The Type Dynamics of the Beatles and Led Zeppelin

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Band Psychology: The Type Dynamics of the Beatles and Led Zeppelin

There’s a pattern to creative genius when it comes to groups. It’s never democratic, it depends on friction - on the right ratio of vision to order, ego to empathy, instability to routine. MBTI typology is not the full explanation, but it’s a good diagnostic framework.

Led Zeppelin

• Jimmy Page (INTJ) built the architecture: perfectionist, visionary, in control of production and image. 
• Robert Plant (ENFP) supplied mercurial frontman energy—instinct, sexuality, and the quest for the numinous. 
• John Paul Jones (ISTJ) kept the machine in tune—methodical, dependable, the hidden engineer. 
• John Bonham (ESTP) was the kinetic force: drummer as fighter pilot.

The combination produced something volcanic. Page’s cold geometry gave form to Plant’s heat; Jones’s order channelled Bonham’s chaos.

When Bonham’s impulsiveness turned self-destructive and Plant’s grief dissolved his enthusiasm, Page’s control hardened into paralysis. The system lost its counterweights and then collapsed.

The Beatles

• John Lennon (ENTP) acted as the intellectual anarchist: satirical, restless, boundary-breaking.
• Paul McCartney (ISFJ) stabilised the enterprise as craftsman and public diplomat.
• George Harrison (INFP) pursued authenticity and spirituality while feeling marginalised.
• Ringo Starr (ESFP) held the centre - barely - through humour and unpretentious rhythm.

In their prime, Lennon’s disorder met McCartney’s structure to generate sharp creative tension: experimentalism constrained by pop symmetry. Harrison’s moral seriousness grounded them; Ringo’s instinctive musicality kept it human.

As autonomy grew with success, ENTP–ISFJ friction intensified: Lennon bored by structure, McCartney frustrated by disorder. Each retreated to their dominant world: Lennon to abstraction, McCartney to craft, Harrison to mysticism. And so the band fractured.

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Case Studies

Based on his life history should we conclude Walter Trout - bluesman - is ISTP? Or ISTJ? What about Joe Bonamassa?

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ISTP fits better.

Walter Trout’s biography shows hallmarks of the artisan-technician temperament:

• Introverted: prefers guitars and touring life to public self-disclosure.
• Sensing: grounded in tone, touch, and physical craft rather than abstraction.
• Thinking: analytical about sound and performance; blunt, unsentimental communicator.
• Perceiving: improviser; thrives on spontaneous expression and live dynamics, not rigid planning.

ISTJs, by contrast, value routine, duty, and structure - traits inconsistent with Trout’s turbulent, improvisational career, addiction-recovery arc, and decades on the road.

Conclusion: ISTP (virtuoso subtype) - a pragmatic, self-reliant craftsman mastering expressive technique through direct experience.

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Joe Bonamassa, however, aligns more with ISTJ.

Evidence:

• Introverted: controlled stage presence, reserved persona offstage.
• Sensing: obsessively focused on tone, gear, and historic detail: cf his vast vintage-guitar collection reflecting sensory precision.
• Thinking: pragmatic, perfectionist businessman; runs his own label and logistics.
• Judging: highly structured, disciplined, punctual; tours and releases albums on a clockwork schedule.

He lacks the impulsive risk-taking and improvisational looseness of the ISTP archetype. His career shows methodical mastery, not spontaneous exploration.

Conclusion: ISTJ (craft-strategist type) — systematic, exacting, and reliability-driven.

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On YouTube I compared ‘Bad Penny’ - the performance by Rory Gallagher who wrote it, which is incoherent raw emotion - with Bonamassa’s performance which is meticulous but unemotional (like, you can hear all the words!)...

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The Surprising Success of Michel Houellebecq

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The Surprising Success of Michel Houellebecq

Atomised (Les Particules élémentaires, 1998) remains Michel Houellebecq’s most accomplished and influential novel. A bleak anatomy of Western individualism, it brought him international recognition and fixed his reputation as the diagnostician of post-1968 malaise.

Its success was improbable: it's an austere, misanthropic book about loneliness, sex, and the bankruptcy of modern freedoms. Yet it sold in vast numbers and defined a literary generation. Yet strangely, I can never recall the arc of the labyrinthine plot.

The novel is strongly biographical. Its two half-brothers, Bruno and Michel, are transparent projections of the author himself. Bruno is the carnal self: needy, compulsive, humiliated by desire. Michel is the intellectual self: detached, analytical, pursuing transcendence through scientific abstraction. Between them, Houellebecq divides the human condition and his own into appetite and intellect, body and mind.

Their mother, Janine Ceccaldi, the self-absorbed hippie who abandons her children, mirrors Houellebecq’s real mother, Lucie Ceccaldi, who likewise left him in childhood and later retaliated in print against her portrayal. The father figures, distant and ineffectual, reproduce the author’s own experience of paternal absence.

Behind these transpositions lies a recognisable psychological pattern. Houellebecq is an introverted intuitive thinker, an INTP in typological terms, with depressive and schizoid traits. His emotional life is muted, turned right down; his imagination, hyper-rational. 

Early abandonment and social estrangement led him to retreat into intellect, turning observation into a defence against participation. Clinically, he displays the features of a depressive-schizoid personality: anhedonia, chronic withdrawal, oscillation between craving and disgust, and a sense that the world is unreal. His fiction transforms this alienation into his world-vision.

What makes this disturbance productive is that it coincides with the psychic landscape of the West itself. Houellebecq’s private detachment mirrors the collective mood of late-modernity: material comfort without purpose, sexual freedom without love, irony without belief.

Readers find in this bleak clarity not warmth but depressive recognition.

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The Academy Is Too Quick to Dismiss Myers–Briggs - (GPT5.4)

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Why the Academy Is Too Quick to Dismiss Myers–Briggs

Denunciations of the Myers–Briggs Type Indicator are academically commonplace. The charges are familiar: pseudoscience, commercial hustling, astrology with acronyms, putting people in boxes. Much of the hostility is sociological, temperamental and rhetorical. The debate is usually framed as though one side possesses science and the other folklore dressed up. That is too crude.

Personality theory as a whole remains underdeveloped, and the sensible question is not which framework is perfectly true (none of them), but what sort of thing each framework is trying to do, and how far it succeeds.

Personality theory is still primitive

We should begin with a little epistemic modesty. Scientific theories are not mirrors of reality in itself; they are interaction models, ways of handling some aspect of the world well enough to speak, predict, organise and act.

Personality theory is no exception. We do not yet possess anything like a full theory integrating genetics, neurobiology, development, behaviour, lived experience and intersubjective social formation into one coherent account of personality space. What we have instead are partial maps.

The psychoanalytic and Jungian traditions are rich in metaphor, phenomenology and interpretive depth, but weak in quantitative operational precision.

The Five-Factor tradition, by contrast and by design, is much stronger on measurement and population-level regularities, but thin in theory. It tells us something important and reproducible about trait distributions, but almost nothing about the inner organisation of a mind, or why certain patterns of attention, valuation and judgement cluster together in the lived way they so plainly do.

The real distinction: traits versus organisation

This is the first point that tends to get lost. Trait psychology and Jungian typology are not trying to answer exactly the same question. Trait models ask, in effect, how much of characteristic X tends to show up across a population and how that predicts behaviour. Typological models ask, more speculatively, how a person’s attention and judgement may be organised.

Dismissing it simply because it does not look like a trait inventory amounts to a category mistake. Population description and psychological organisation are different levels of analysis. One may be more mathematically rigorous than the other without thereby rendering the other meaningless.

The limits of the Five-Factor critique

Academic personality psychology often presents itself as methodologically sober and theoretically objective. But that does not mean it's theory-free. Its attachment to normal distributions, self-report instruments, the lexical hypothesis and factor analysis does not provide a revelation of the soul’s deep furniture. It is a methodological choice. 

Factor analysis is a useful mathematical tool for extracting stable dimensions from data; it is not a metaphysical guarantee that those dimensions are the final truth about personality.

Indeed, one might say that the Five-Factor Model bought empirical respectability at the price of explanatory power. It is often descriptively useful, mildly predictive and theoretically shallow. There is nothing shameful in that. A census can be valuable. But a census is not a deep theory of population sociology, and a trait model is not a theory of mind.

Where Myers–Briggs actually earns its keep

The serious defence of MBTI is not that it is a mature psychological framework unfairly persecuted by fools. That's way too grandiose. Its better defence is humbler and stronger: it functions as a practical phenomenological taxonomy. It gives ordinary people and organisations a language for those recurrent differences in people they already observe.

Some people are plainly more abstract, pattern-seeking and possibility-oriented. Some are more stabilising, concrete and implementation-minded. Some externalise judgement readily; others incubate it privately. Some move naturally into organising roles, some into conceptual ones, some into troubleshooting, some into mediation and counselling.

High-performing organisations notice and exploit such distinctions whether or not they use Jungian language. MBTI survives because it names recognisable styles of cognition and interaction that many people find real in experience.

Why the academy remains irritated

Part of the academic irritation is methodological. Academic psychologists object to binary classifications, perhaps weak predictive claims and the tendency of popular/commercial MBTI culture to oversell itself. Those objections have force.

But part of the irritation is also sociological. MBTI did not arise from a university psychometrics lab. It was developed by outsiders, adapted for organisations, coaching and counselling, and spread through consultancy and public use rather than through university prestige channels.

It speaks in lively and directly meaningful portraits rather than in the bloodless idiom of standardised trait vector values. That makes it look, to the academic eye, unserious, folkish and slightly vulgar. Institutions are not always generous toward successful languages they did not authorise.

The problem of binaries

So why do the 'Sixteen Types' categories appeal? They dramatise personality. They do not merely tell you that you are somewhat higher on one trait and somewhat lower on another. They suggest a recognisable shape of mind. Human beings prefer portraits to histograms. Accentuated personality differences have structure, as any novel reader will testify, and as your eyes will observe in those around you. These are not well matched to percentile scores.

Phenomenology before full science

For the moment we inhabit a pre-synthetic stage of personality theory. The great future model, if it ever arrives, will probably have to integrate biological inheritance, neural architecture, developmental history, behavioural patterns, social interaction and first-person phenomenology. Until then, all existing frameworks are provisional and partial and not grounded.

What MBTI is, and what it is not

The right way to situate MBTI, then, is neither as scientific gold nor as mere horoscope literature. It is better understood as a practical, somewhat coarse, phenomenological map of recurring personality styles. 

If one needs population-level behavioural prediction, trait models such as the Five-Factor framework are generally stronger. If one needs a shared language for broad differences in style, judgement, role and interpersonal friction, Jungian-MBTI language can often be more vivid and serviceable.

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Taking the MBTI with HFA

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Back in the early 2000s I was working in America for Cable & Wireless. One of my colleagues was Craig, a Duke University professor of psychiatry; his wife, Dee Ann, was also trained in psychotherapy. I remember talking to her at one of our works dinners about the Myers-Briggs classification scheme and when it didn't work. She replied that it tended to give erratic results with people who exhibited abnormal mental conditions, such as schizophrenia and Asperger's syndrome.

And I left it there.

Today I'm wondering what happens if a person with High-Functioning Autism (formerly Asperger's syndrome) takes the Myers-Briggs Inventory. How does their MBTI come out?

ChatGPT tells me...

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How HFA People Score on the Myers–Briggs Type Indicator

The Myers–Briggs Type Indicator rests on population averages of neurotypical psychology. It was never built to describe autistic cognition. When people with high-functioning autism (HFA) take the MBTI, the results often wobble or misclassify. The same is true of the Five Factor Model, though in a different way.

Take the S/N dimension. Some autistic people live in concrete domains: bus timetables, mechanical systems, the fine grain of sensory detail. They look like S. Others immerse themselves in mathematics, philosophy, speculative worlds. They look like N. Both are common.

The test assumes the two poles are exclusive; autism ignores that rule. A developer who can design high-performance real-time transaction systems may come out as a classic N for abstract thinking. Yet ask him about politics or engage in small talk and he seems incurious, even obtuse - answers that tilt back toward S.

Extraversion is another fault line. HFA people can be talkative, sometimes performatively gregarious, yet maintain no close friends. The MBTI interprets their verbal energy as E, while their lived experience is solitary. A literal answer to “Do you enjoy going to parties?” might be “Yes, I like the food and the noise,” even if the same person leaves early, interacts with no one, and has no social bonds. The test confuses stimulus-seeking with sociability.

On the T/F scale, many answer as T. They rely on explicit reasoning, exploiting rules and consistency. That does not mean they lack affect, only that their affect is not measured in the MBTI’s idiom. Similarly, the J/P axis is confounded: autism’s need for sameness, its preference for routine, shows up as J. But this is neurology, not “personality preference”.

If you shift to the Big Five, the pattern persists. “Openness” can score high if interests are abstract, or low if they are repetitive and concrete. “Conscientiousness” may appear strong on orderliness but weak on adaptive planning. “Agreeableness” is pulled down by low empathy-related items, though fairness and honesty are often high. “Neuroticism” is inflated by anxiety, a frequent comorbidity. Instability is the rule.

The real problem is structural. These instruments assume traits cluster as they do in the neurotypical bell curve. Autism reshuffles the deck. Literal answering, context-bound interpretations, and construct mismatch ensure that the outputs are noisy. What looks like inconsistency is the wrong measurement framework.

Better alternatives exist. The Empathising–Systemising Quotient, the RAADS-R, and sensory processing profiles capture dimensions orthogonal to MBTI and FFM. They measure the axes on which autistic cognition varies.

So when an HFA person emerges from the MBTI as ENTJ one month and ISFP the next, it is not a crisis of self-knowledge. It is the instrument failing to fit the mind it tries to describe.

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Temperament: American Polarisation and Revolution

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Temperament:  American Polarisation and Revolution

American politics looks like a knife-edge. Yet if you sort the population by temperament rather than party, you find a skew that seems to favour the Right: a large plurality of “Guardian” personalities who prefer order, duty, and the familiar.

Why, then, are presidential races close? Because temperament is not destiny, coalitions are messy, and different types wield different kinds of power.

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Two lenses: FFM and MBTI/Keirsey

The Five-Factor Model (FFM) treats personality as degrees of Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism. 

MBTI/Keirsey clusters people into temperaments: Guardians (SJ), Idealists (NF), Artisans (SP), and Rationals (NT). These categories do not pick parties; they arrange priorities. But that’s enough to shape coalitions.

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The stock types that drive the narrative

The MAGA working-class archetype presents as lower Openness, higher Conscientiousness, in-group loyalty, and a concrete, rule-informed worldview. In MBTI terms, that looks SJ (e.g. ISTJ or ESTJ), what Keirsey called the Guardians.

The progressive “woke” student archetype sketches as high Openness, high universalist Agreeableness, and a future-oriented, abstract style. In MBTI, that often looks NF (e.g. ENFP or INFJ), the Idealists.

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Why the numbers don’t settle the election

Guardians are numerous - roughly four in ten Americans. Idealists are fewer, perhaps one to two in ten, but clustered in universities, media, nonprofits, and culture industries. The first group has mass; the second has the megaphone.

Elections hinge on how these energies combine with race, religion, class, region, and education. The balance is not so much arithmetical as ecological.

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How the big Guardian bloc actually splits

ISTJ (“Inspector”): rule-following, security-minded. Many in the military, police, trades, agencies. Often conservative, yet a substantial public-sector slice leans Democratic - think unions.

ESTJ (“Supervisor”): managerial, pragmatic. Small-business and community leaders trend Republican; union-linked ESTJs in the Midwest historically voted blue. Realignment has shifted many rightward.

ISFJ (“Protector”): caregiving, duty-bound. White churchgoing ISFJs lean Republican; Black and Hispanic churchgoing ISFJs are overwhelmingly Democratic. Net effect: strong blue presence despite “traditionalist” vibes.

ESFJ (“Provider”): sociable, community-first. Suburban white ESFJs swing; minority ESFJs vote Democratic. These voters are often decisive in the suburbs that call elections.

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FFM tilts that cross-cut politics

Openness drives a taste for change and theory. High-Openness progressives dominate discourse and the institutions that set narratives. 

Conscientiousness steers regard for rules and duty. High-Conscientiousness Guardians dominate electoral turnout and local institutions. 

Agreeableness splits: universalist empathy points left; loyalty-centric empathy points right.

Neuroticism raises perceived threat on both sides but with different objects: cultural decay vs systemic injustice, often with a moralistic tinge.

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The other temperaments that tip the scales

Artisans (SP, ~30%) value spontaneity, autonomy, and performance. Non-college men in SP-heavy environments often trend Republican; creative-industry SPs lean Democratic (think Bruce Springsteen). Volatile, turnout-sensitive.

Rationals (NT, ~10%) value systems and competence. Educated professionals historically skewed Democratic on general libertarian grounds, but a vocal NT minority now defects right on their repulsion from emotional moralising, over-regulation, and institutional-capture.

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Why elections stay close

Neither party can monopolise the Guardians.

Democrats hold large Guardian contingents through minority religious communities, public-sector unions, and care professions.

Republicans hold large Guardian contingents through white church networks, small business, and rural/exurban infrastructure.

Idealists and Rationals shape elite rhetoric and policy pipelines; Artisans and a swath of Guardians decide margins in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Georgia, and Arizona.

The result is equilibrium by counterweight, not equality of type.

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Coalition mechanics in one sentence

Republicans are powered by SJ + SP mass with rising non-college minorities; Democrats are powered by NF + NT institutions plus minority SJs; both sides win only by persuading and turning out the overlapping Guardian middle.

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What this suggests for strategy

Appeals framed as order, duty, continuity speak Guardian.

Appeals framed as meaning, justice, authenticity speak Idealist.

The winning campaigns translate between these grammars without triggering the other side’s threat detectors. That is rare. When it happens, landslides follow. When it fails, America seesaws.

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Historical perspective

These dynamics are not uniquely American. History shows the same recurring division: the conservative majority of Guardians, the idealistic minority of Idealists, the hard-nosed and strategic Rationals who seize conceptual leadership of upheavals, and the volatile Artisans who supply muscle.

Revolutions often follow the same pattern: Idealists provide moral fire, Rationals plan the revolt, Artisans execute with force, and Guardians resist until concessions or collapse.

Lenin, Trotsky, Robespierre - system-builders in the NT mould - rode intellectual/cultural NF angst and SP muscle to overturn SJ structures of the ancien régime.

America’s cultural wars are a local expression of this timeless cycle: the clash of conserving majorities and visionary minorities, with strategic Rationals and opportunistic Artisans shaping whether change is blocked for a while, gradual, chaotic, or catastrophic. We shall see.

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Managing in the Pews

For most of my career, I worked in high-tech architecture/design and project management, an environment that rewards clarity, efficiency, and strategic thinking. Success depended on working with highly focused, like-minded individuals - mostly NTs or STJs in Myers-Briggs terms - whose idea of collaboration was a rigorous discussion of proposition development, critical paths, and risk mitigation. No one cared much about how anyone felt about a Gantt chart. The work was about results, and results were what mattered.  

Now, I find myself managing projects in my Catholic parish, where the landscape is rather different. The people I work with are committed, enthusiastic and well-meaning, but the collective mindset is not exactly steeped in hard-nosed strategic planning. Instead of an environment driven by logic and efficiency, I find myself navigating one where process is often as important - if not more so - than outcome. Many of my colleagues are SFJ types, far more attuned to relationships and communal harmony than to deadlines and deliverables. There is an instinctive preference for organic decision-making, where discussions meander and decisions emerge (hopefully; sometimes) through consensus and a sense of shared goodwill.  

This presents a certain challenge. I am accustomed to looking ahead, defining objectives, and mapping out the clearest path to achieving them. The expectation in my former world was that once a plan was agreed upon, everyone would execute their part with minimal fuss - that we would value being right.

In contrast, the parish environment places a high value on discussion, inclusivity, and making sure everyone feels heard - at the expense of forward momentum. There is, I have discovered, a fine balance between ensuring people are involved and actually getting things done.  

The structured, results-driven approach works in an engineering environment because that’s what the work demands. The more relational, feelings-driven approach is dominant in a parish because a church is, fundamentally, a community. The difficulty arises when someone trained in one system suddenly finds themselves trying to operate in the other. My usual toolkit - clarity, efficiency, directness - does not always yield the intended results. A practical suggestion can be perceived as dismissive. A perfectly reasonable deadline can be interpreted as unwelcome pressure. My normal tendency to focus on the objective facts of the situation can come across as cold or unsympathetic. Even unkind.

From my perspective, this is simply a case of different priorities. From the perspective of my new colleagues, I suspect I seem a bit... severe. They are unfailingly polite about it, of course, but I can tell that my way of thinking is not what they are used to. A certain distancing can be a bit of a clue. The emphasis in parish life is on relationships first, tasks later. The work may well get done - but only after everyone has had the necessary conversations, and preferably over coffee. And only after a fair amount of cat-herding.  

So, I am adapting. I have not abandoned my own approach - how can you dispense with logic and planning? - but I am learning to operate with a little more patience, a little more flexibility. I am adjusting my expectations of how quickly things will progress. I am accepting that sometimes, a warm and slightly vague agreement is as much of a commitment as I am going to get.

And, perhaps most importantly, I am reminding myself that not every problem requires a technical solution. Sometimes, the best approach is simply to listen, nod, and trust that, eventually, things will move forward. There's usually another way... 

Neuroanatomy of the MBTI

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ChatGPT came up with this after much prompting. I know nothing about neuroanatomy, so take this essay as speculative at best.

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Mapping Myers–Briggs onto the Brain: A Neuroanatomical Take on Cognitive Functions and Personality Dynamics

The Myers–Briggs framework posits that our personality is built from two core pairs of cognitive functions - Sensing versus Intuition (S/N) and Thinking versus Feeling (T/F). These are the very processes through which we gather data and make decisions.

But Myers–Briggs isn’t merely a list of traits; it describes a dynamic hierarchy. Depending on one’s type, either a perceiving function (S or N) or a judging function (T or F) sits at the top, with the other assuming a supportive, auxiliary role. (Notably, if your dominant trait is perceiving, your auxiliary is judging - and vice versa.) This dynamic interplay, along with a less-developed tertiary function and a shadow (inferior) function that surfaces under stress, is what Myers–Briggs type dynamics is all about.

Yet, this phenomenological theory can be enriched by looking beneath the surface - to the neural networks that give rise to these cognitive styles. All four functions are mediated by the neocortex, but they differ in their neural “wiring”. 

For instance, Sensing types rely more on primary sensory cortices and lower-level association areas that capture concrete detail. In contrast, Intuitive types engage broader, integrative neocortical networks, enabling abstract pattern recognition and the drive for intellectual cohesion.

Likewise, the Thinking function correlates with robust activity in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex - our analytical, systematizing hub - while the Feeling function draws more heavily on limbic-influenced regions (such as the ventromedial prefrontal cortex and anterior cingulate), where emotional and social signals merge with higher reasoning.

The next layer of the MB model involves the Extraversion/Introversion (E/I) and Perceiving/Judging (P/J) dichotomies, which determine which of these core functions emerges as dominant in everyday life. 

Extraverts “broadcast” their dominant function, driven by dopaminergic reward circuits in areas like the nucleus accumbens and medial orbitofrontal cortex that energize approach behavior. Introverts, with their higher baseline arousal and stronger inhibitory control from regions like the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, tend to keep their dominant process internal - thus often expressing their auxiliary function in social settings.

Similarly, the P/J dimension shapes our external engagement. Judging types crave order and closure - a tendency that may reflect tighter, more resolute connectivity in executive circuits that quickly resolve uncertainty. Perceiving types, conversely, show a greater tolerance for ambiguity, their neural architecture perhaps more geared toward continuous information gathering and flexible, open-ended processing.

By situating Myers–Briggs’ phenomenological narrative in the concrete language of brain anatomy, we see a richer picture emerge. Our cognitive functions aren’t rootless abstractions but emergent properties of distinct neural networks.

The S/N and T/F axes provide the basic cognitive “tools,” while the E/I and P/J dimensions determine which tool comes to the fore, and how. In this way, personality is not simply a set of descriptive labels - it is a dynamic interplay between ancient limbic impulses and modern cortical control, a multilevel tapestry underlying human behaviour.

Joe Bonamassa vs. Walter Trout

Joe Bonamassa and Walter Trout

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I asked ChatGPT to capture the difference in playing styles between Joe Bonamassa and Walter Trout. I'm a huge fan of both blues-rock guitarists (and their bands) and they seem quite similar in virtuosity and in the authenticity of their performances.

There are plenty of artists playing electric blues-rock but most of them seem to be playing a pastiche of the blues: going through the motions and not expressing themselves at all.

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ChatGPT

Walter Trout and Joe Bonamassa, while both rooted in the blues-rock tradition, exhibit distinct stylistic identities in their guitar playing, lyrical themes, and vocal delivery. However, they share enough commonalities to create the impression of overlapping influences. Here's a closer analysis:

Guitar Playing

Walter Trout: Trout's style is fiery and deeply emotive, characterized by rapid, intense flurries of notes and a raw, improvisational energy. His solos often channel the urgency and grit of his personal struggles, with a heavy focus on bending and vibrato to convey emotion.

Joe Bonamassa: Bonamassa is the more polished and technically refined player. While also emotive, his approach often incorporates a wider range of influences, from British blues pioneers like Eric Clapton to jazzier phrasing and even classical elements. His tone and phrasing tend to be cleaner and more meticulously crafted.

Lyrical Themes

Both artists write songs that are deeply personal and steeped in blues tradition:

Walter Trout: His lyrics are often confessional, reflecting on redemption, mortality, and personal hardship, especially following his battle with liver disease. There's a sense of raw vulnerability and lived experience in his songwriting.

Joe Bonamassa: Bonamassa's lyrics, while also personal, often adopt a slightly broader or more allegorical tone. Themes of love, loss, and perseverance dominate, but they tend to be less raw and more polished than Trout's.

Singing Style

Walter Trout: Trout’s vocals are gritty, unvarnished, and intensely heartfelt, complementing his raw guitar playing. His singing feels like an extension of his struggles and triumphs.

Joe Bonamassa: Bonamassa's vocals are smoother and more controlled, occasionally leaning toward a rock-oriented aesthetic. While emotive, they don't carry the same rough-edged quality as Trout's.

Shared Influences or Idea Exchange?

The perceived similarities could stem more from shared influences than direct interaction. Both artists draw heavily from the same well of blues tradition, incorporating the styles of legends like B.B. King, Albert King, and John Mayall. However, they each bring their own life experiences and musical nuances to the table. If there's a sense of "bouncing ideas off each other," it’s more likely a case of parallel evolution within a shared musical space rather than explicit collaboration.

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I would add: if playing in a blues-rock band was a Myers-Briggs Personality Assessment, I'd have Walter Trout as ISFP and Joe Bonamassa as INTP.

There's a kind of brutal honesty and emotional frankness to Trout's ISFP: the introverted feelings (dominant F_i) forcefully expressed (S_e) through the music; Bonamassa's INTP, by contrast, is much more emotionally buttoned-up (inferior F_e), while conscientious and rigorous about technical competence (dominant T_i).

As another indicator, just look at their different choices of stage-dress in the image above!

“Molly” by Blake Butler

 

Blake Butler’s “Molly” offers an intimate, unflinchingly honest exploration of his marriage to poet Molly Brodak, focusing on the intense emotional dynamics that ultimately led to tragedy. Through the lens of psychological type we can interpret their relationship as a complex interplay of distinct personality types, emotional sensitivity, and mutual struggles with neuroticism that shaped their connection—and their undoing.

Butler's actions and introspection suggest an ISTP type: introverted, pragmatic, and detached from emotional complexity. His writing and behavior suggest a man more comfortable with immediate, physical realities than abstract emotional dialogue. When faced with emotional turbulence, an ISTP often avoids or numbs, turning to impulsive actions or self-destructive tendencies—patterns Butler himself reveals, such as his struggles with drunkenness, violence and erratic behavior. Under stress, this type tends to internalize tension and release it in bursts of frustration or withdrawal.

In contrast, Molly Brodak fits the profile of an INFP: deeply introspective, emotionally driven, and idealistic. INFPs, with their high sensitivity to emotional dissonance, crave intimate emotional connection but often retreat inward when feeling misunderstood or rejected. This can lead to cycles of idealisation and disappointment, particularly when they sense their emotional needs aren’t being met. Brodak’s history with Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) heightened these tendencies, amplifying her vulnerability, her need for validation, her nihilism and her intense reactions to perceived emotional distance.

The relationship between an ISTP male and an INFP female, particularly when both are high in neuroticism, creates a landscape of potential conflict. While Butler may have tried to be practical and grounded in his responses, Brodak likely sought emotional depth and understanding on her own terms. This disconnect, typical of ISTP-INFP pairings, often leaves the INFP feeling emotionally unfulfilled and the ISTP overwhelmed by the perceived emotional demands. The mutual neuroticism—the heightened anxiety, sensitivity, and reactivity—only added layers of complexity, creating a spiralling environment where emotional wounds festered rather than healed.

Butler’s memoir is filled with moments where their emotional worlds collided. His pragmatic, sometimes detached approach to life contrasted sharply with Brodak’s emotional intensity. As she struggled with her internal pain, seeking emotional resonance and reassurance, Butler grappled with his own inability to offer the depth of connection she needed.

Ultimately, the tragedy of their relationship lies in the very dynamics that sustained it. They loved each other deeply, but their emotional worlds—though intersecting—were not fully compatible. Brodak’s tragic death by suicide reflects the deep and often insurmountable chasm that can exist between partners who struggle not only with their individual mental health but also with the way their personalities clash in times of crisis.

Blake Butler’s “Molly” is not just a memoir of love and loss—it is a study of the complexities of human connection, and the emotional dynamics that bind people together or tear them apart. For those who walk the fine line between love and mental illness, Butler’s raw portrayal of his marriage reminds us that even the deepest love cannot always transcend internal pain.

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Written with the assistance of ChatGPT.

J. S. Bach's psychological type was ISTJ

 I suppose I had always thought of Bach as an INTJ. Had to be pretty conceptual with all that transcendent hyper-complex polyphony, right?

Turns out I was wrong.

Paul Boboc writes compellingly: 

"In typing the greatest musician in history we must let go of biases and look carefully at the information. As a Bach devotee, I've read a few biographies of him: Gardiner's Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven, Wolff's Johann Sebastian Bach: The Learned Musician and Schweitzer's Bach: The Poet-Musician. 

Having read these books and listened to hundreds of his works many times over the years (I think I've listened to the Passacaglia and Fugue alone at least a thousand times), I can confidently say that Bach was an ISTJ. It was his powerful Si that allowed him to create works so tremendously powerful in detail, while his tertiary Fi imbued his intricate structures with intense pathos. Bach lacked the INTJ's penchant for theoretical thought; we know he found it hard to express abstract ideas and at one point had a professor from the University of Leipzig, a personal friend, write a letter defending his compositional technique because he had a hard time doing it himself. 

If you read his letters, especially his letter to his friend Georg Erdmann from 1730 and a letter about some wasted wine to a government official, you notice the extreme attention to detail that characterizes him in general and which probably made him an unlikeable character in Leipzig. (The unlikeable persona also has to do with his very weak Fe). His personal writings are very characteristic of S-types, with their strong grasp of specifics and their transparent earthiness.

Bach never seriously questioned the orthodox Lutheran creeds and had little interest in the theoretical underpinnings of the Enlightenment. His library consisted mostly of theology, no philosophy or literature; an INTJ would have had a more diverse library, certainly one containing more abstract material. His keyboard playing astonished everyone and clearly gives evidence of his Si, as do the physical aspects of his life; he was by all accounts a man who indulged in physical pleasures, whereas IN**s, who are temperamentally more puritanical than other types, tend to shy away from those and to prefer mental activities instead. Imagine an INTJ writing the Coffee cantata, or spending years obsessive-compulsively re-writing his works down to the smallest details, or having 20 children (!). It's hard.

In his own life, Bach was more famous as a performer and teacher than as a composer. His organ playing was universally recognized as some of the best in Europe. The famous story of Marchand being invited to compete with Bach in an organ contest, only to hear him play from an adjoining room and leave in awe and shock without even bothering to compete with him, speaks volumes about the cantor's imposing physical gifts. Physical prowess comes more easily to ISTJs than INTJs, who are more comfortable inhabiting mental rather than physical spaces.

Then there's the music. It's inconceivable to me that anyone but a sensor could have written the Art of Fugue or the Musical Offering. Compare Beethoven (INXX) with Bach (ISTJ) to see the obvious difference between an N type musician and an S type musician. N type musicians (Tchaikovsky, Schubert, Beethoven) can be sloppy, even careless, because the full effect matters more to them than the details through which that effect is achieved. S types - Bach and Mozart being the most notable examples of this type in classical music - have a miraculous ability of making every detail matter, and of getting straight to the point without any superfluity. Their economy of style is amazing, soul-shattering. Beethoven, Wagner and Mahler lacked it. Tchaikovsky, Schumann and Schubert also lacked it. Bach and Mozart had it in abundance.

PS. If you're interested in more along this line of reasoning, here's a great and persuasive article on what makes Bach (probably) an ISTJ."

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This reminds me of the sensei at my karate club who is similarly ISTJ:  intensely skilled in technique and a stickler for formal and methodical progression by the book. 

The owl spreads its wings

 

Image by Dawn Whitney-Hall

Hegel wrote that the owl of Minerva takes wing at dusk. Any wisdom we might have (philosophy, self-knowledge) postdates the raw events of life. We experience - and only then the possibility of reflection and understanding.

And so in our last decades we draw a balance sheet. Our work in the world is mostly done: others will move the world forward: build families or utopias or theories of reality.

What is left to us is character itself: the perfection of self before we vanish like fleeting dew before the gathering light of a new day without us.

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The psychotherapy community talks about the balanced type development of maturity; the Taoists talk about harmony and following the Way.

I agree with both. 

As 'stuff' which is conscious, we should do everything in our power to get this business of 'being' right. Not let ourselves down; not be marked down by those who interact with us.

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What does failure look like?

A memory at which I cringe. Twenty years ago a discussion with a senior UK television executive. The consultancy I worked for was intending to do a project of some kind with him. I was under-briefed on the TV industry, an omission of which I was starkly aware.

With a much better prepared, but more junior colleague I met with him at a café in Paddington station. We talked and I have to say I monopolised the conversation, bombarding him with urgent questions as my ignorance and insecurity strove to get a handle on his world and the issues confronting him. He visibly shrank back under this remorseless hammering. My embarrassed friend interrupted me: "Why are you asking our client? I know all about this…"

I ignored him.

I never had any contact with that executive again. The project did not go ahead.

Another client described me once, frankly: "You make me feel like a butterfly, trapped by a pin, while you dissect me."

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What do the advocates of mature type development and of the Tao tell us?

My MBTI is INTP (P shading to J). In the Jungian telling, I normally present an open, ideas-oriented face to the world (secondary, extraverted N) while my introverted analytic self tries to synthesise the logic of it (dominant introverted T)

But when I'm stressed and off-balance my subconscious anxieties take the driving seat. To quote a personality website:

"The dominant function of the INTP is their Ti, when they are in their shadow they become more focused on Te. When the INTP attempts to dominantly use this function it can cause them to be more direct, and even a bit aggressive in their attempts to get things done."

So that was me when I felt out of my depth. If only I had had the maturity and self-insight to recognise what was going wrong - and to stay balanced and calm!

But when one is 'trapped' in the constraints of career, there is little space for the cultivation of the self. Growing up remains a postponed project of one's later years. Better late than never.

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Just as traditional Chinese medicine is a phenomenological approximation to scientific biology, so I used to imagine the Tao (The Way) as a pre-scientific cosmology. But of course it isn't.

The precepts of Taoism - the flow of water, the fluent motions of animals such as cats - prioritise categories of harmony which are at root psychological archetypes.

One is reminded of athletes talking of being in the zone, and going with the flow.

It is the battering of threats, physical and social, which judder us out of the flow, which force a conflict between id and superego which throws the ego into anguished incompetence. Hell is other people with destabilising agendas, threatening situations.

Yet there are no 'situations in themselves'; there are only our attitudes to situations: the framing, the paradigm in which we comprehend and emotionally react to them. And our reactions are our own - ours to frame. We have choices if we are self-aware enough. We are not condemned to be a slave to the shadow. 

I take Taoism to be a framework for self-preparation for just that. To consciously self-monitor and find a harmonious, balanced, mature response to events. All of them. Not to be possessed by one's Inferior function. I believe they call it Mindfulness.

How?

Ritualised forms or katas such as those of T'ai Chi or Qigong direct the mind-body complex towards self-confidence and calm. That which is attained during practice may spill over into general life. Sometimes all you need is a catalyst.

So I think I see a goal (I am aware that the real goal is to have no goal).

Grow up finally. Be wiser. Finish the work.

May 2022. 

I'm late to the Jordan Peterson party

He's good, isn't he? Jordan Peterson.

Time pressure meant I only watched the first half of this but I was impressed. Interrogated by Channel 4's Cathy Newman, in full SJW-mode, Peterson stays calm and reframes her points with knowledge, precision and intelligence. It's a model of how to educate the public - and one so seldom seen.

Conor Friedersdorf at The Atlantic transcribes the most egregious dialogue sections.

Ross Reinhold, in his latest post, analyses the interview around the pivot of Cathy Newman's psychological type, which he takes to be ESTJ. It's an insightful discussion, particularly where Reinhold observes that Newman at no point takes Peterson's arguments on board.

"Journalist Newman entered the Interview with Peterson with a set of strongly held beliefs about various general social inequities and some specific beliefs about Peterson’s character and motivations. Throughout the interview these beliefs were challenged due to how Peterson handled the various charges and inferences she was making.

He was calm, rationale and informative as well as intellectually informed. Newman prior to interview and during the interview found herself seriously twisting and distorting what Peterson had said or done in the past and what he was saying to her in the moment of the interview. ...

As an ESTJ she extraverts her Thinking and Intuition; this is her natural language. These two qualities (command of logic – from Thinking and ability to form generalizations – from Intuition) make her an effective debate warrior for her causes. Yet we saw logical discourse with Peterson repeatedly created dissonance with her beliefs requiring her to regularly re-program what she heard from Peterson, i.e. “So you are [really] saying . . . .” to make his statements more consistent with her belief structure. One of the interesting things about the Feeling mental process is when Feeling is involved in cementing conclusions about things and people, Logic doesn’t have much of a chance of changing the conclusion. And for a dominant Thinking person like Cathy Newman, what contrary logic does to conclusions cemented by Feeling is create Cognitive Dissonance.

But I believe Feeling based conclusions only change over time, with experience or new experience. So Cathy Newman in the eyes of most people decisively lost the battle with Jordan Peterson. But it is unlikely that one battle will cost the War. I doubt that Ms. Newman has altered her belief structure. If she got to know and converse with people like Jordan Peterson on a more regular basis, her Feeling conclusions may re-shape. But if she surrounds herself with true-believers whose foundations support her own, change is unlikely. Her logical nature will be used to reverse engineer the facts to support her public conclusions."

The ideologues of the social-liberal world order are ENFJs. This type focuses on compassionate idealism, in a manner which often trumps a clear-sighted evaluation of reality. One could say they are rather prone to moralistic wishful thinking - and rather hostile to those more skeptical, or perhaps realistic.

As an interrogator-administrator rather than ideologue, Newman is ST rather than NF. But interestingly enough, it appears that Jordan Peterson is himself an ENFJ. A social justice warrior for calling it correctly.

On being schizoid

Scott Alexander writes:

"When I wrote about my experiences doing psychotherapy with people, one commenter wondered if I might be schizoid:

"There are a lot of schizoid people in the rationalist community from what I can tell. The basis of schizoid is not all the big bad symptoms you might read about. There are high functioning people with personality disorders all the time who are complex, polite and philosophical.

You will never see this description because mental health industries center entirely around people Failing At Life, aka “low-functioning”. As many radicals have noted, mental health tends to constitute itself mostly around “can’t hold a job” or “can’t hold a marriage”.

The only thing you need to be schizoid is to dislike contact with other egos, and to shave off the experience of those other egos ruthlessly before they can reach the fantasy world you retreat to.

It doesn’t mean you’re evil. It doesn’t mean you stalk people and plan to harm them. It doesn’t mean you’re over-reactive or even bizarrely delusional. You could call it a form of delusion, but really the basic descriptions of perception like top-down processing and culture could all be called delusional thinking if you want to be properly pointed about it. It’s schizoid. It’s often quite gentle. And I’ve noticed from interacting with various people in high IQ communities that if you have sufficiently high enough intelligence, despite the inherent defined tendency to retreat from reality, you can in fact become aware you have a personality disorder.

Anyway, my guess based on projection (I’ve never met you) is that people aren’t being emotional around you because you can’t be reached by them emotionally, and they know that on some level."

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Familiar commentator around the Internet gwern has this on his personal page:

"For those who enjoy playing the game of ad hominem via lay psychiatric diagnosis, may I suggest not accusing me of Asperger syndrome - which is so overdone - but something more novel & scary-sounding, like schizoid personality disorder?"

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And this highly-speculative correlation between MB types and personality disorders:

ENFJ - Obsessive-Compulsive Personality Disorder
ESFJ - Masochistic Personality Disorder
INFJ - Avoidant Personality Disorder
ISFJ - Dependent Personality Disorder
ENFP - Paranoid Personality Disorder
ENTP - Compensatory Narcissistic Personality Disorder
INFP - Histrionic Personality Disorder
INTP - Schizoid Personality Disorder
ESFP - Borderline Personality Disorder
ESTP - Narcissistic Personality Disorder
ISFP - Cyclothymic Personality Disorder
ISTP - Antisocial Personality Disorder
ENTJ - Sadistic Personality Disorder
ESTJ - Passive Aggressive Personality Disorder
INTJ - Schizotypal Personality Disorder
ISTJ - Depressive Personality Disorder

Here's a paper about it.

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For the record, I don't think I have Schizoid Personality Disorder despite my INTP MB type and my scarily stratospheric score on the AQ test .. .

A suggestion to Replika

I wrote a few posts here about Replika, apparently coming to Android in a few months time. It's been live for a while at the Apple App Store (with mixed reviews).

I had some thoughts today and decided to share them with the dev team:

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I notice that many users complain about the time it takes to train their Replika to a personalised, more 'human' response level.

A result from psychology is that our friends tend to resemble us in psychological type.  This could be used to leverage the existing Replika user base to improve convergence time for newbies.

Assume the Replika architecture lends itself to a modular distinction between response style (correlated with, say, MBTI) and private domain knowledge.

1. Arrange that early dialogues allow the inference of the Replika user's MB type.

2. Given a sufficiently large dataset of users partitioned by types, create generalised Replika shells, or templates which incorporate the variant MB interaction styles and response sets.

3. Use the early dialogue with a new user to again infer their type, and use the information to configure their Replika.

The result should be a much faster and more accurate transition to a sympatico Replika instance.

Best wishes,

...

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I very much doubt this will go any further.

You will appreciate the large yeuk factor with this product from the screenshot above. I'm not sure I want to spend hours texting this "state-of-the-art chatbot" about my doings and feelings so that the said program can rearrange my words into a daily diary.

But when it finally arrives at the Google Playstore, will I be able to resist such an awesome shrine to narcissism?

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Update: (June 22nd 2017): I had a reply from Replika asking for some further details. My response was this post.

Personality Disorders and Psychological Type (MBTI)

Many of us are 'on the spectrum' for some kind of 'personality disorder'; if you know your Myers-Briggs personality type (test here) you may recognise some pathological traits in yourself.

As an INTP I recognise a personal connection both with Schizoid personality disorder and the Asperger's syndrome spectrum (though I wouldn't say I'm clinical).

The following text is reprinted from here: a list of the symptoms of the ten most common personality disorders can be found here.

"Each type's dark side is occasionally manifested in personality disorders. Personality disorders, of which there are ten main types, consist of a series of symptoms which make it difficult to get along smoothly with others and adapt to society. Behaviours of those with such disorders are frequently irritating to people around them. When you learn about the 16 MBTI types it should make sense that some types are more prone to certain personality disorders than other types. Keep in mind that these are hypotheses and not based on any actual data.

Those who are paranoid generally believe that everyone is trying to harm them. This notion causes hostility, emotional detachment, and distrust of others. Such aversive behaviors are likely to be found in Introverted Thinkers. IxTx types are the most detached and wary; taken to the extreme, paranoia takes hold of their minds. [ISTJ, ISTP, INTJ, INTP].

Schizoid personality disorder is somewhat similar to the previous one. It entails a lack of willingness to engage in social interaction and emotional expression. Again, sounds like a fitting disorder for an IxTx. They appear indifferent to the outside world. But not only are they indifferent, they are unable to pick up on social cues. ISTxs, who are more observant than their iNtuitive counterparts, are often able to read nonverbal behavior. That leaves the schizoids with INTx. Schizoids resembles those with Asperger's syndrome, which contains mainly INTxs. [INTJ, INTP].

Next we'll talk about schizotypical people. There's only one type in particular that this personality disorder would affect. First of all, they have quite odd behavior, dress, beliefs, and perceptions. Combined with indifference to others, discomfort in close relationships, and stunted emotional expression, we're already at INTx. J or P? Well, schizotypical people often succumb to magical thinking, and they believe that symbolic messages are hidden just for them. This pattern of thought reflects Introverted iNtuition. [INTJ].

Antisocial personality disorder is the tendency to disregard safety, behave violently, break the law, and violate others' rights. Antisocial people have a general disregard for others, and they tend to lie and steal. This is clear xSTP behavior.  [ESTP, ISTP].

People who have borderline personality disorder are fundamentally different from what we have discussed so far. Instead of withdrawing sharply, they are often overly expressive. They fear being alone (E), have unstable moods and volatile relationships (F), and tend to be risky and impulsive (SP). This would suggest ESFP, but borderline people also exhibit suicidal behavior, an INFP trait. I suppose we can overlook this discrepancy, however, since those who are flawed in such a way may naturally consider suicide. [ESFP].

Histrionic personality disorder is like the one above. People with this disorder are excessively emotional and sensitive to what others say (F), constantly seeking attention (E), and concerned with their physical appearance (S). It follows that a histrionic person is more often than not an ESFx. [ESFJ, ESFP].

Narcissistic personality disorder is a condition in which one believes that they are superior to everyone else. They fantasize and exaggerate their abilities and self-worth (N), expect constant praise from others (E), and are insensitive to others' emotions (T). In reality, you'll probably find that the most arrogant people out there are ENTxs. [ENTJ, ENTP].

Those with avoidant personality disorder are much the opposite of the previous one. Their extreme shyness, timidity, and sensitivity combined with their social isolation and feelings of inadequacy indicates some variation of IxFx.   [ISFJ, ISFP, INFJ, INFP].

Next is dependent personality disorder, which, like schizotypical and borderline, mostly affects a single type. People with this condition behave submissively towards others, show a desire to be taken care of, tolerate abusive treatment, and feel the need to start a new relationship when one has ended. This closely resembles the negative part of the ISFJ profile.  [ISFJ].

Lastly, we'll take a look at obsessive compulsive personality disorder. These individuals are overly concerned with rules and orderliness, strive for perfectionism, are highly inflexible, and have a strong desire to be in control of situations. This description just screams xSTJ.  [ESTJ, ISTJ].

Types that may have a personality disorder:
INTJ (3), INTP (2), ISTP (2), ISTJ (2), ESFP (2), ISFJ (2), ESTP (1), ESFJ (1), ESTJ (1), ENTJ (1), ENTP (1), ISFP (1), INFJ (1), INFP (1)

Types not associated with a disorder: ENFJ, ENFP

As you can see, INTJ comes on top as being the type most likely to suffer from a personality disorder. And for some reason, neither of the Extraverted Idealists are particularly prone to any of the ten.

This, of course, raises some questions worth contemplating - what is it about the INTJ's thinking that makes them this way? What is so special about the ENFxs that they get to avoid these conditions?"