At the risk of being unhelpful to an IEI (thank you assymetric relations...
), I would like to share my own recent insights about Ti HA. I was asking myself today how it was that one could define a person by history, using it as a guide to assemble character. (a very insightful piece in
Newsweek about GW Bush's failures and their relationship to his personal history brought this question into focus.) I thought, "how is it that I am able to find structure in the choices of character ideations?" Then I realized, it was because the history itself subtly implies an underlying structure.
Consider for example the explanation by an author that a man's character is disfigured because his parents thought him incapable. Is this the beginning of the story, or its climax? We assume that there is cause for the parents' labeling of their child, based on the child's behavior. To win the parents' favor, the child attempts to go out of his way to meet their expectations of him -- taking their advice to be more like
them, no less -- and invariably fails. His failure is proof to his parents that he is incapable of assimilating their advice, and proof to the child that he must try harder to meet the parents on their own ground, thereby all but assuring that his next failure will be even greater than his last. The problem of this cycle -- the child's inability to meet others' expectations -- is indicative of the flaw in the child's character: he reckless attempts to acheive other's praise by being someone other than himself. Unable to be all things to all people -- and neurotically plagued by the impossibility of reconciling conflicting demands -- the child fails. It is the history of repeated character manifestation in similar circumstances which reveals the trait that points to an underlying skeletal component of his personality.
Of course, one can argue that the cycle will break once the advice of the parents is no longer available, and this is a fair assertion. However, the character trait will remanifest forthwith in a negative quality towards the advice of the parents, which in the child's eyes has failed him for so long, when next his parents attempt to impress their virtues onto him.
The point as regards IEIs, is that merely sticking to a pattern of behavior -- even one supposedly forged by circumstance -- points to the existence of an as-yet unrealized structural component of personality. It is this structual component of which IEI is vaguely aware, and seeks understanding of.