Inferior Te in INFPs and ISFPs

By Eva Gregersen

“[Fi types] reveal a delightful repose, a sympathetic parallelism, which has no desire to affect others, either to impress, influence, or change them in any way.“ – C.G. Jung: Psychological Types, Harcourt & Brace 1923 ed., p. 492

In Psychological Types, Jung describes Fi as a “sympathetic parallelism.” Quite a stunning, if obscure phrase. So what did Jung mean by it? To get closer to an understanding of Jung’s meaning here, note that in Jung’s view, Te functions by isolating a distinct goal and steering towards accomplishing that goal. Fi is the opposite of Te.

So by the very fact that Fi is the opposite of Te, we may say that there is a type of hidden parallelism in Fi. For example, while Fi types may frequently have a cause, they are not primarily interested in this cause because they want to apply that cause to general society in a concrete and measurable way.

For example, an IFP may take as his cause the fact that introverts are subject to prejudice and that they are misunderstood in society. In such a case, a frequent outcome will be that the IFP will talk passionately about the injustice for a long time, thereby furthering the listeners’ awareness of the problem. But because IFPs repress Te, actual societal solutions of a political or sociological kind will often be a long time coming. The reason for this is that such solutions have to come through consulting the IFP’s inferior function, which – like all consultations with the inferior functions – is both cognitively taxing and prone to result in solutions that are either impracticable, immature, or overly black and white.

(Again it is important to stress that any type will have such problems when consulting their inferior function. For example, Te types will often run into social and emotional problems because they repress Fi.)

“You May Say I’m a Dreamer”

So the bread and butter of an IFP’s championing of a cause is simply the cause itself. It is the inner harmony and intensity that the cause brings that steers the IFP, not the resolution of the issues that pertain to the cause. The drive of the Fi types is thus not to implement real-world, nitty-gritty solutions to a problem, for such solutions will often be tainted by compromise and the strictures of what is applicable in terms of real-world resources.

Now, if some Fi types are reading this article and want to protest, think of it like this: Just like most Ni types do not recognize that their intuitive visions are of a subjective nature (since extroverted perception is repressed into their unconscious), most Fi types do not recognize that they sometimes recoil from the most practicable solution to the problems that they are pinpointing since, with IFPs, their extroverted judgment is repressed into the unconscious.

An example: An IFP type may dislike the 9-5 conformity of the corporate world. She makes it her cause to want to change that. However, since Te is repressed into her unconscious, she gives it little thought that not many people actually like the 9-5 corporate world. The corporate world as a form of organization has prevailed because it fulfills a socio-economic function that allows us a level of affluence for which most of us would rather cope with the 9-5 corporate world than do without. The conformity and monotony of the corporate world are downsides that most people are willing to put up with, because they want the upsides (higher pay) more than they want to avoid the downsides.

So it probably follows that the best thing that one can hope for if one wanted to change the corporate world would be trying to get a little more creativity and freedom into a fundamentally un-creative and un-free world. A few Te-style calculations will tell you that drastic changes in corporate organization are not going to fly until you can top the economic efficiency of the present, unimaginative model, but such considerations will not normally have access or primacy in the Fi psyche. It is the inner intensity, uncompromised by outer give-and-takes, that is the primary motivational factor of the IFP type. It is the purity of the idea; the subjective championing of the value.

By default, then, IFPs are not interested in real-world solutions to the societal problems that they espouse. This is the “Parallelism of Fi” that Jung talked about. Nor are IFPs particularly interested in placing the societal problems that they are dealing with in a hierarchy of similar problems in order to establish their relative severity. (Again, that would be the priority of the Thinking functions, Te and Ti.)

So are we thereby saying that the IFP types are not interested in realizing their goals? A person who doesn’t want to realize his own goals would be a strange bird indeed.

The Parallelism Explained

Of course, an IFP will rarely tell you that they don’t work towards resolving the problems that they espouse as rationally and efficiently as possible. Indeed, they will often vehemently maintain that that is exactly what they are doing. As we have already pointed out, it is the inner intensity of the passion that is the primary motivational factor of the IFP. Therefore, to preserve the inner intensity of the passion, they must at all times render it internally probable that they are pouring their heart and soul into fighting for the cause, whether that really is the case or not.

Again, it is like INJ types who have to deny that their vision is subjective in order for them to believe that what they have seen is the objective future that will happen no matter what. Only with the IFP types, it is the values, not the visions, that have to remain uncompromised.

Thus, we end up with Jung’s “parallelism” of Fi: IFPs may say that they want this or that change in society. But if you examine their behavior, you will frequently find that their actions are structured in such a way that experiencing intense passion internally by championing a given value or cause is prioritized more highly than formulating and implementing a realistic and workable solution.

Another way to look at it is this:

Just like for the Thinking functions:

• Te prefers achieving goals to pure reflection
• Ti prefers pure reflection to achieving goals

Then for the Feeling functions:

• Fe prefers community harmony through shared values
• Fi prefers inner harmony through purity of values

Repressing Te Leads to Creative Intensity

This means that besides the fact that the Te of the IFPs is unconscious and repressed, the very nature of Fi dominance means that the person is bound to prioritize the inner purity of his values over the prospect of possibly diluting those values through their real-world realization. For having to brush with reality inevitably compromises the inner purity of the value, as it was conceived within the IFP’s own psyche.

As a consequence, many IFPs find a joy in artistic pursuits where they can retain full control of their endeavors. Fiction writing, for example, provides a medium where the IFP writer can retain full control of both plot and characters, thus retaining an inner purity of values. In the creative endeavor, the artist can posit a parallel world that is entirely under his own control and thus safe from contamination from the outside world. Thus the IFP types can easily be creative as long as the inner intensity of the feeling is not fundamentally re-shaped by demands from the outer world.

With this point in mind we can now explain the frequent trope of IFPs lamenting that this or that outer influence is depriving something of its richness. Some examples:

• Bill Watterson, the creator of Calvin and Hobbes: “[Doing everything myself] kept the strip very honest and personal – everything having to do with Calvin and Hobbes expressed my own ideas, my own values, my own way.”[1]
• The musician Fiona Apple: “[I didn’t like the fact that representatives from Sony music wanted to okay my tracks because] then they’re in on the songwriting. And if I start letting that happen, then I’m dead!”[2]
• The filmmaker David Lynch: “I couldn’t and wouldn’t work in a studio if I didn’t have final cut. … How could anyone do that? Absolutely pure suicide. Sadness. Ridiculousness.”[3]

At the start of this article, we saw Jung describing the parallel nature of Fi. And indeed, this need for absolute creative control pertains exactly to what Jung called the “parallelism” of Fi: In the mind of an Fi type, the inner, creative world that is not compromised by outside interaction is more important than the outer world. The outer world, with its conformity and strictures on creativity, is a sort of “parallel” world that is not the primary psychic playground of the IFP types.[4]

So in a way the IFP is indeed living in two worlds; the outer, common world, to which they do not pay much attention, and an inner world of values and creativity which is truly their own and untainted by compromise.

NOTES

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[1] Watterson, Bill: The Complete Calvin and Hobbes p. 13 (Andrews McMeel Publishing 2005)

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Inferior Te in INFPs and ISFPs © 2014 Eva Gregersen and CelebrityTypes International.

Image of Camus in the article commissioned for this publication from artist Darwin Cen.