If you want to see what it looks and feels like at a visceral level when extroverted feeling makes an entrance, the last five minutes of Martin Luther King’s I Have a Dream speech is a dramatic example.

According to depth psychologist Jennifer Leigh Selig, who has formally studied Martin Luther King for 18 years, during the first 12 minutes of the speech he stays on script. He had used versions of the I Have a Dream speech in the past, but decided to instead use the speech with the cancelled check metaphor.

After he completes that speech, his close friend Mahalia Jackson leans over and says, “Tell them about the dream, Martin. Tell them about the dream.” He moves the papers aside on his podium and speaks extemporaneously for the final five minutes. That is the five minutes we all know; it’s likely if he had stopped after the first 12 minutes, the speech would not be #1 on American Rhetoric’s top 100 speeches of the 20th century.

The 12:13 mark of the below video is where he makes the shift into extroverted feeling. So you’ll want to watch at least the few minutes preceding that, and preferably the whole thing, so you can get the proper feel for it:

In this shift to extroverted feeling, he transformed himself from a lecturer to a preacher. King’s attorney, Clarence Jones, described the moment like this:

I have never seen him speak the way I saw him on that day. It was as if some cosmic transcendental force came down and occupied his body. It was the same body, the same voice, but the voice had something I had never heard before.

Selig isn’t comfortable typing King even though she has studied him for a long time. She does say: “he functioned most effectively in the public and political arena as an extroverted feeler.”

Does that mean he was INFJ or ENFJ, which are types frequently assigned to him on personality forums? Not necessarily. Selig also says:

In reading King’s autobiographical statements, it is obvious that his thinking function was dominant in his childhood, adolescence, and early adulthood; this is seen most clearly when examining his approach to religion. Jung’s thinking and feeling functions relate to how we make decisions: objectively or subjectively, with the mind or with the heart.

[…] King decided to join the church at five, not because he “believed” nor had any feeling of God, but because he wanted to keep up with his older sister. At thirteen, he questioned the bodily resurrection of Jesus; it simply made no rational sense to him. His studies in college made him even more skeptical of the fundamentalism of religion

Integration: The Psychology and Mythology of Martin Luther King, Jr. and His (Unfinished) Therapy With the Soul of America by Jennifer Leigh Selig, p. 92

In Jungian typology, there is a concept called the “transcendent function.” Marie-Louis von Franz, who was Jung’s close associate for around 30 years, describes it like this:

To the four comes a fifth thing that is not the four, but is something beyond them and consists of them all. That is what the alchemists called the fifth essence, the quintessentia or the philosopher’s stone. It means a consolidated nucleus of the personality that is no longer identified with any of the functions. This is a stepping out, so to speak, of identification with one’s own consciousness and with one’s own unconscious

Lectures on Jung’s Typology by Marie-Louise von Franz and James Hillman

The transcendent function can appear in mid-life and beyond, so it’s likely that was in play during this speech. Selig describes his speaking style in general as one that could open the minds of both thinkers and feelers:

Certainly one reason King was such a powerful speaker was his ability in a single speech or sermon to reach into the hearts of the feelers and address the minds of the thinkers; one reason why King was such a powerful healer was his ability in any given speech to open the minds of the feelers and open the hearts of the thinkers. Only a man who holds those two opposites in harmonious balance within could do as much.

Trying to figure out King’s type is almost impossible to do because of his mythological stature. As Jesse Jackson said: “Thinking about him is like thinking about the prism, the sun shining through a glass from as many angles as you look. You know there is another set of rays, and as many angles as you think about Dr. King, there is yet another set of angles with which to analyze him.”

Instead, we would all do well to ponder how, with our own types, we can create the “beloved community” that was King’s goal by integrating the opposites within ourselves and integrating with others.

Thinking is a rational, judging function and on the opposite pole of feeling. It organizes experiences and ideas and tends to be intellectual, analytical and impersonal.

The thinking function has no necessary connection with intelligence or the quality of thought, it is simply a process.
Thinking is taking place when one formulates a scientific
concept, reflects on the daily news or adds up a restaurant bill. It is extraverted or introverted according to whether it is oriented to the object or the subject.

Daryl Sharp, Personality Types: Jung’s Model of Typology, p. 44

Now let’s take a look at Extraverted Thinking (Te).

Extraverted Thinking is mechanistic and is cause-and-effect driven. It creates a world of structured and logical processes and behavior. It can be influenced by societal norms and external experiences.

According to Jungian analyst John Beebe, Te is “interested in definitions that would hold true for everyone, according to ideas everyone might agree with.” Whereas introverted thinking has to “reflect on whether a particular construction really accorded with the conviction of inner truth, regardless of what the received opinion might be.”

At their best, extraverted thinkers are statesmen, lawyers,
practical scientists, respected academics, successful entrepreneurs. They are excellent at establishing order, whether on paper, in their everyday lives, or at a business meeting. With a good sense of facts, they bring clarity into emotional situations. They are assets on any committee; they know Robert’s Rules of Order and when to apply them.

At worst, this type is a religious zealot, a political opportunist, a con man (or woman), a strict pedagogue who brooks
no dissent.

Daryl Sharp, Personality Types: Jung’s Model of Typology, p. 45

Below is the infographic I made that describes all 8 archetypal roles of Te. All personality types have Ti and it behaves differently depending on where it is located. Half of the 16 personalities have it in the top four functions where it is more conscious. The other half have it in shadow.

This concludes the eight part series. Here are my other articles in this series:

The 8 archetypes of Introverted Thinking (Ti)

The 8 archetypes of Introverted Feeling (Fi)

The 8 archetypes of Extroverted Sensation (Se)

The 8 archetypes of Introverted Sensation (Si)

The 8 archetypes of Extroverted Intuition (Ne)

The 8 archetypes of Introverted Intuition (Ni)

The 8 archetypes of Extroverted Feeling (Fe)

Now that I’ve covered the functions, next on my agenda is to write about each of the archetypes (Senex, Trickster, etc.). Stay tuned!

Objective Personality isn’t the first to use human needs in personality typing. Perhaps you’ll see some correlations to the four Objective Personality human needs (tribe, identity, control, gather) in these.

Back in 1938, Henry Murray, when he was director of the Harvard Psychology Clinic, developed a personality system based on needs called “personology.” He believed that everyone has a set of universal basic needs, with the uniqueness of an individual’s personality coming from certain needs being more important than others to the individual.

Murray was heavily influenced by Carl Jung and his theory of personality was rooted in psychoanalysis. His work influenced Abraham Maslow in his development of the hierarchy of needs.

The precursor to the CIA (the OSS) paid Murray to write an analysis of Hitler’s personality, drawing from biographies and classified reports.

A short time later he purchased test booklets and answer keys from Isabel Myers. He led a team of wartime psychologists to match agents to missions that best suited their personalities.

The prospective agents came to a farm in Pennsylvania and their real identities weren’t revealed to the others. Murray claimed this anonymity was the only way “to see the person whole and to see him real.”

This operation was all hush-hush and local residents wondered if the farm was an army asylum. There were also rumors that the farm inhabitants were Nazi sympathizers and communists.

The prospective agents were given dozens of assessments, including MBTI. “The staff assigned each subject a role they did not believe he could fulfill successfully based on his personal history, a role that would generate a good deal of tension, anxiety, and embarrassment, thereby short-circuiting each man’s ability to reflect on and alter his natural pattern of behavior.”

Personology was far more nuanced than just the 8 main human needs. He divided them into several binary categories with various secondary needs.

Here are the 8 main needs:

Personology had five principles: 1.) Cerebral physiology; 2.) People cycle between seeking excitement and then relaxing; 3.) An individual’s personality develops over time; 4.) Personality is not fixed and can change; 5.) Each person has unique characteristics and others which are shared by others.

The system of needs influenced the creation of personality tests. By 1956, 60% of corporations were using personality tests. A personality assessment test Murray created, called Thematic Apperception Test (TAT), is still in use today. It uses pictures and the subject is asked to tell a story. The assessor infers personality characteristics from the storytelling.

Murray believed the study of personality should look at the entire person over their whole lifespan. He wrote, “The assessment of men…is the scientific art of arriving at sufficient conclusions from insufficient data.”

_____

Source:

The Personality Brokers: The Strange History of Myers-Briggs and the Birth of Personality Testing by Merve Emre

Introverted intuition (Ni) plays one of eight different archetypal roles, depending on which of the 16 personality types you have. This is per Jungian analyst John Beebe’s 8 function personality type model.

First we’ll take a look at intuition and Ni in general terms.

As Jung described in Psychological Types, Intuition, like sensation, is a perceiving function:

“The primary function of intuition, however, is simply to transmit images, or perceptions of relations between things, which could not be transmitted by the other functions or only in a very limited way.”

According to J. Newman: “While sensation is intimately tied to bodily experience (and emotions), intuition is predominantly a mental function, allowing for the perception, not of physical realities, but of symbolic images, ideas and abstractions. These contents of the intuitive process form the basis of mental experience. Intuition is, thus, an “intellectual” process.”

Regarding Ni specifically, Jung said: “It does not concern itself with external possibilities but with what the external object has released within.” And: “introverted intuition perceives all the background processes of consciousness with almost the same distinctness as extraverted sensation registers external objects. For intuition, therefore, unconscious images acquire the dignity of things. But, because intuition excludes the co-operation of sensation . . . . the images appear as though detached from the subject, as though existing in themselves without any relation to him.”

Now let us consider the archetypes of Ni. Below is my distillation of John Beebe’s descriptions

These archetypes are just sketches and aren’t meant to be literal. They depict complexes, so therefore are qualitative.

No function ever acts separately from the other functions. Jung said we al most never see a pure form of a function. We consider a function in order to better understand the whole of the personality.

This is part 4 of 8 in the series. Part five will be about Extroverted Feeling (Fe). Stay tuned!

My other articles in the series:

The 8 archetypes of Extroverted Sensation

The 8 archetypes of Introverted Sensation

The 8 archetypes of Extroverted Intuition

The 8 archetypes of Extroverted Feeling