effect of childhood on subtype development

[The Exception]

Can one's childhood and upbringing affect one's subtype, even shift it to the other side?

I ask because I think I shifted from LII-Ti to LII-Ne. In my childhood, I was primarily about Ti. I don't think I was nearly as interested in Ne type stuff. I don't think I got a whole lot of positive reinforcement for my use of Ti, especially when younger. People were turned off by it. When I got older- in my teens and beyond, I discovered that I got more positive reinforcement for my use of Ne. So I think I ended up downplaying my Ti and emphasized Ne more. Note that this could also be due in part to MBTI functional development of MBTI INTPs- the auxilary Ne doesn't start to really develop under around teenage years. (Not all MBTI INTPs are socionics LII of course but I suspect it is the most common socionics type for MBTI INTP).

I wonder if this the case for others who have the creative subtype as opposed to the base subtype as well. I'm just talking about 2 subtype system here, not DCNH creative subtype, which is something different.

So for instance, would an ILE-Ti might be more Ne like when younger but learned to compensate with Ti if for whatever reason felt like there wasn't enough positive reinforcement with Ne?

I sometimes wonder if the base subtype is a more 'pure' and 'natural' form of that socionics type, and fits closer to the stereotype of what you'd associate with that type. For an LII, I think Ti subtype would come closer to that than Ne. After all your base is your strongest function, it would make sense to emphasize that more. So I wonder if putting more emphasis on the creative function is an adaptive strategy of a sort.

Thoughts?

[chemical]

I think all functions develop in some point in life (at least potentially), so yes the emphasis can shift from one to another.

In general I see the subtypes as conveying whether someone is more of a pure logic type with an intuitive flavor, or a strong admixture of the two in terms of what kinds of information they tend to assimilate.

Which to me is a separate story from how rigid, excitable, or whatever else someone is (as I separate the personality side of Jungian typology from the information side).

[The Exception]

In general I see the subtypes as conveying whether someone is more of a pure logic type with an intuitive flavor, or a strong admixture of the two in terms of what kinds of information they tend to assimilate.

So I'm guessing the former is more LII-Ti and the latter is more LII-Ne?

[chemical]

Yeah that's right; to give an illustration, just consider two people's approaches to physics and modeling some aspect of an electron's behavior. I get the sense Ti is more attuned to asking questions about what the structure of the model is, Ne might have just a "sense" of what an electron is, what situations it might fit into, and so forth (and in the Ne-bases is often great at out of box generation of such situations). The latter comes up with fertile ground to create a modeling problem, and the former formulates the structure relevant.
You could say this in more standard socionics terms as, in one case the potential of the idea of "electron" is being sweeped, hence potential intuition.

Sometimes I am wary of the association of "concepts" to intuition, as intuition is really about the springing forth of an unshaped concept. To create logical concepts -- that is, ones which fit within a framework with shape, is more the purpose of Ti than Ne. One can say intuition is the transmission of ideational associations whose logical form is as yet mostly unconscious.

Someone who is an admixture of these two is probably more likely to publish loose sketches of a model which convey an intuition. A more or less pure Ti type might actually not even rely much on intuition from the start except to keep track of patterns while working, lending a speculative touch to their flow of thought constantly (not to generate potential of its own right), and mostly proceed by tracking logical questions directly rather than starting with intuitions that need a lot of shaping.

Sometimes people tend to reduce a Ti subtype to someone who is just very detailed/pedantic, and I think that sorta misses the point and is closer to MBTI ITJ (which admittedly, Gulenko says goes best with socionics ITj...but then they also say don't take these associations too seriously...which I agree with, because one is more cognitive, and the other seems more a matter of temperament than cognition albeit it can certainly bleed over some).
Like I've written on other threads, this strikes me as more dcnh-related (and I don't think it's an accident you identify with MBTI Ip+Big 5 agreeable and identify with H) than truly information-related.
DCNH strikes me as the relation of the IE to temperamental styles/orientation, rather than as strictly information type, i.e. how you think.

[Aylen]

I don't give myself a subtype since I think it fluctuates according to circumstances. I am always coming from an Ni perspective but I use Fe in order to connect with others. Ni tends to keep me in my own realm and Fe helps me to reach out. I think upbringing impacts every aspect of our psyche. Some handle it better than others. In what kind of situations and how did you use Ti and feel it was not positively reinforced?

Like I was told I was really outgoing and friendly until a certain age. Very talkative and questioning everything but I was still trying to figure out how people/things worked so that is probably normal. Then I started school and went totally inside myself. I literally had to be forced to stop reading and go outside to play with other children. I took an "if you can't beat them join them" attitude for awhile and took it to extremes. I think, in part, my wild behavior started as a way to punish my mother for not letting me live in my private world, among other things, then it became a way of life. It was not my natural state.

[The Exception]

I think all functions develop in some point in life (at least potentially), so yes the emphasis can shift from one to another.

In general I see the subtypes as conveying whether someone is more of a pure logic type with an intuitive flavor, or a strong admixture of the two in terms of what kinds of information they tend to assimilate.

Which to me is a separate story from how rigid, excitable, or whatever else someone is (as I separate the personality side of Jungian typology from the information side).

I think the bolded describes me more. Now that I think about it, I rarely use logic in isolation. It always seems to be paired with intuition or oftentimes ethics.

Yeah that's right; to give an illustration, just consider two people's approaches to physics and modeling some aspect of an electron's behavior. I get the sense Ti is more attuned to asking questions about what the structure of the model is, Ne might have just a "sense" of what an electron is, what situations it might fit into, and so forth (and in the Ne-bases is often great at out of box generation of such situations). The latter comes up with fertile ground to create a modeling problem, and the former formulates the structure relevant.
You could say this in more standard socionics terms as, in one case the potential of the idea of "electron" is being sweeped, hence potential intuition.

Sometimes I am wary of the association of "concepts" to intuition, as intuition is really about the springing forth of an unshaped concept. To create logical concepts -- that is, ones which fit within a framework with shape, is more the purpose of Ti than Ne. One can say intuition is the transmission of ideational associations whose logical form is as yet mostly unconscious.

Someone who is an admixture of these two is probably more likely to publish loose sketches of a model which convey an intuition. A more or less pure Ti type might actually not even rely much on intuition from the start except to keep track of patterns while working, lending a speculative touch to their flow of thought constantly (not to generate potential of its own right), and mostly proceed by tracking logical questions directly rather than starting with intuitions that need a lot of shaping.

I'm not totally sure, but again, I think I would be more of a mix Ti/Ne in this example. I think it would be more inclined to just assume its obvious what an electron and that the model is relevant and shape an intuition but I'm not sure. I also do it from the other way, work with logic and see the patterns that arise.

Sometimes people tend to reduce a Ti subtype to someone who is just very detailed/pedantic, and I think that sorta misses the point and is closer to MBTI ITJ (which admittedly, Gulenko says goes best with socionics ITj...but then they also say don't take these associations too seriously...which I agree with, because one is more cognitive, and the other seems more a matter of temperament than cognition albeit it can certainly bleed over some).
Like I've written on other threads, this strikes me as more dcnh-related (and I don't think it's an accident you identify with MBTI Ip+Big 5 agreeable and identify with H) than truly information-related.
DCNH strikes me as the relation of the IE to temperamental styles/orientation, rather than as strictly information type, i.e. how you think.

Hmmm, maybe I didn't really shift from LII-Ti to LII-Ne subtype then. I was probably using a fair amount of intuition all along, even if I didn't really think of it as such. I think what did change is more behavior related- like I'd be more shut off to other peoples ideas or pushing logic on others too much. So maybe I just shifted DCNH instead. I think when younger, I showed a lot more D/N behavior, now it's more H with some C. I also think nowadays, I show more intuition (and ethics too) when interacting with others. The strong Ti is still there of course but if you spew too much Ti, I've learned it tends to turn people away.

I'm curious, what enneagram type do you see me as? More 5-like or more 9-like or something else?

I don't give myself a subtype since I think it fluctuates according to circumstances. I am always coming from an Ni perspective but I use Fe in order to connect with others. Ni tends to keep me in my own realm and Fe helps me to reach out. I think upbringing impacts every aspect of our psyche. Some handle it better than others. In what kind of situations and how did you use Ti and feel it was not positively reinforced?

Like I was told I was really outgoing and friendly until a certain age. Very talkative and questioning everything but I was still trying to figure out how people/things worked so that is probably normal. Then I started school and went totally inside myself. I literally had to be forced to stop reading and go outside to play with other children. I took an "if you can't beat them join them" attitude for awhile and took it to extremes. I think, in part, my wild behavior started as a way to punish my mother for not letting me live in my private world, among other things, then it became a way of life. It was not my natural state.

I think when I was young, I wanted everything to fit into some logical system and have the system by consistent and was bothered when it wasn't and people were like "who cares?" So I downplayed that Ti towards others.
I would tend to do things based on my own logical sense of how things should be but sometimes ignored what really went on in reality. Ti > Te
I had to have everything be *fair*- others didn't seem to care about that quite as much.
Sometimes I'd be over literal in my interpretations of things- at expense of the larger picture. (That's a large part of why I originally thought Ti>Ne)
Sometimes I'd be shut off to possibilities- especially if they didn't fit my scheme of things.

The above were all behaviors I displayed that I think could be attributed to Ti that tended to turn people away.

[blackburry]

Possibly.

I think I've downplayed my Fi a ton over the years... And feel really uncomfortable when people play up their Fi..
I prefer myself fairly neutral/objective. But there's still Fi lurking around somewhat inside.

My parents are very Fe-valuing.

[The Exception]

I also want to add that, while I can see and generate alot of different possibilities, I'm really not that good at out-of-the box thinking. I'm more likely take something that's already there and tweak it, make it even better, change some variables. I really don't have the brain wiring to just invent something totally new from scratch.

Also, sometimes I'll have a strong sense that something is right but I'll have a very hard time proving it. I'm not so good at rigid logical proofs either. I hated doing proofs in math even though I was quick to pick up new concepts. For instance, I sometimes instintively feel like some social issue is right or wrong or someone is or isn't a certain type but writing out a rigidly logical argument with evidence to support my view isn't always so easy.

Sometimes really academic writing is difficult for me to understand. Kant is almost certainly an LII. But I can't get through his writing and make much sense of it even though I try. There are some other LIIs like that too. I think it might be more Ti subtype heavy LIIs- sometimes the writing is too Ti heavy and it's difficult for me to get through.

I also think I'm more ethically oriented than alot of LIIs but that's for another thread.

[chemical]

Sometimes really academic writing is difficult for me to understand. Kant is almost certainly an LII. But I can't get through his writing and make much sense of it even though I try. There are some other LIIs like that too. I think it might be more Ti subtype heavy LIIs- sometimes the writing is too Ti heavy and it's difficult for me to get through.

Probably he's LII-Ti. Like, I'd almost go as far as saying, even if we don't know what LII-Ti is, that's what it should be.

DCNH types can change according to Gulenko.

Enneagram...I feel like there's too many different schools who all see how the symbol maps to reality a different way and then have overly strong rigid opinions on it that fail the test of absolute reason, so I ignore them ;D

Loosely it's natural you have strong 9 influence if you're identified with Ip+Agreeable+DCNH-H. And anyone identifying with an alpha-NT type probably can identify somewhat with the RHETI's version of E5, aka reading/researching everything and so forth.

As far as what E5 "really is" I'd say it's safer to say there's multiple competing perspectives based on what the symbol intuitively means.

[chemical]

I also think I'm more ethically oriented than alot of LIIs

As a note on this issue, there's little to no evidence I can see that the logical and ethical reasoning forms directly suppress each other, and it's quite likely that skill in each increases likelihood of skill in the other rather than skill in one increasing chances of sucking at the other. More like they're complementary, and thus one gets held as the more absolute ego perspective, the other more relative (at least in theory). In one perspective it is important to relate subjectively to a situation as a human being, to assign value, and to convey the truth to another in such a way that they also relate as a human being, rather than logical abstraction being held as the primary standard of reasonableness. Which is why ethical arguments devoid of relatability and feeling, i.e. occurring in the pure logical realm, often are experienced by people as missing the point.

Lots of logic base types wrote extensively on ethics, and while it's true they may have a certain slant to it, at the end of the day I don't think being great logical thinkers made their ethical insights somehow automatically worse. If anything, I get the sense overall your logic and your ethics both increase in quality based on intelligence, inclination to reflect on them, and so forth.

The whole impersonal vs people-oriented temperament thing is a different issue from information and has more to do with MBTI T/F than with Jungian thinking/feeling, which are considerably different things. Which you obviously must know, as it makes zero sense to otherwise call yourself a lowercase-t and yet a Ti-base.

[The Exception]

As a note on this issue, there's little to no evidence I can see that the logical and ethical reasoning forms directly suppress each other, and it's quite likely that skill in each increases likelihood of skill in the other rather than skill in one increasing chances of sucking at the other. More like they're complementary, and thus one gets held as the more absolute ego perspective, the other more relative (at least in theory). In one perspective it is important to relate subjectively to a situation as a human being, to assign value, and to convey the truth to another in such a way that they also relate as a human being, rather than logical abstraction being held as the primary standard of reasonableness. Which is why ethical arguments devoid of relatability and feeling, i.e. occurring in the pure logical realm, often are experienced by people as missing the point.

Lots of logic base types wrote extensively on ethics, and while it's true they may have a certain slant to it, at the end of the day I don't think being great logical thinkers made their ethical insights somehow automatically worse. If anything, I get the sense overall your logic and your ethics both increase in quality based on intelligence, inclination to reflect on them, and so forth.

The whole impersonal vs people-oriented temperament thing is a different issue from information and has more to do with MBTI T/F than with Jungian thinking/feeling, which are considerably different things. Which you obviously must know, as it makes zero sense to otherwise call yourself a lowercase-t and yet a Ti-base.

Do you think my being an EII though would be totally out of question?

I mean I probably am an LII but I keep coming back to reconsider EII as possible.


In my signature, INtp, is my MBTI designation. I put the t and the p in lower case because on MBTI tests, I tend to be borderline on these two letters with stronger scores on I and N. I'm going by the average of many MBTI tests I've taken. Jungian cognitive function-wise, INTP makes most sense.

[chemical]

@LIIbrarian, well here is my general take: there are 3 possible paradigms weighing in here. Five Factor Agreeableness, MBTI T/F, and then Jungian thinking/feeling functions.

The last one is what corresponds most to logic/ethics in socionics, strictly speaking. MBTI T/F is sort of in-between thinking/feeling and Five Factor Agreeableness -- it mixes in things like toughmindedness vs gentleness with sentiment/logic.
Big 5 researchers concluded that T/F is tapping into BOTH Agreeableness and thinking/feeling too.

They themselves were clear to say that they think you can be what Jung called a feeling type, aka someone who judges the value of things according to some human standard, and be decidedly NOT Agreeable -- especially if you were cold, and prone to negative value judgments.

MBTI N is tapping into both Jungian thinking and Jungian intuition, not just one, so it is quite obvious why a alpha NT would score clearly N.

If you are logic>ethics you are not in my books a candidate for Fi-lead even if you are a nice, well meaning person. And such people don't want people to suffer, and want people's wellbeing to be taken care of, and will thus discuss social issues to ensure the best solutions are in place. Barring that, their real maximal energy in life would probably be more invested in logical activities. Wanting to share those activities with a person or two doesn't make one less of a thinking type albeit it might make one slightly less of a T type.

So unless you relate significantly to Jung's feeling types, I'd say being a Nt in the dichotomies of MBTI doesn't make you more or less of a thinking type than being a NT -- because again, T/F is not just thinking/feeling, but has other ideas inside it.

In fact, arguably it is MORE related to Agreeableness than it is to the thinking/feeling distinction. I also don't personally think functions are properly treated as dichotomies, as it's quite different saying you cannot focus equally on each at one given time and saying that becoming skilled with one hampers skillfulness with the other....that latter claim is utter bullshit. It's how overall intelligent and reflective someone is which says if their feeling or thinking judgments are good.

The reality of functions is they're less like the basic standalone markers which fix your temperament, and more like dynamic, ever-developing aspects of you, and I have a hard time typing someone a EII unless they display essentially their main agenda in life to be ethics oriented.

Also, as a general philosphical breakdown, ethics seems to be an admixture of appealing to value-reasoning, and feelings as triggers to get to know those values.
It's quite possible to repress the feelings part and focus on just the logical concept of valuation, which some less feelingful thinking types will no doubt do.

[nefnaf]

Do you think my being an EII though would be totally out of question?

I mean I probably am an LII but I keep coming back to reconsider EII as possible.


In my signature, INtp, is my MBTI designation. I put the t and the p in lower case because on MBTI tests, I tend to be borderline on these two letters with stronger scores on I and N. I'm going by the average of many MBTI tests I've taken. Jungian cognitive function-wise, INTP makes most sense.

I definitely see you as an EII. You don't really come across as alpha to me at all.

[The Exception]

@chemical

Thanks, this all makes sense. Add to that being kind of limbic by nature and H subtype and you can see why I would be easily confused. Particularly between LII/EII which seems to be an ongoing struggle for me.

[The Exception]

I definitely see you as an EII. You don't really come across as alpha to me at all.

Hence why I'm often doubting LII, I have alot of people suggesting EII.

Then I put my case forward for EII and I have people insisting on LII.

At least I'm pretty sure about Si/Ne valuing and Se PoLR.

Just curious though, why don't you think alpha?

[chemical]

@LIIbrarian well "people" often don't have good reasons, lol. There's a little too much leaps of wild association in typology communities without pinning down what's going on. That matrix of Agreeableness, T/F/ thinking/feeling, logic/ethics is where you probably want to look to clear this up.

Really understand why they're different things.

The key is feelings and thinking aren't really opposed to each other a priori. There are psychological factors which can render someone more likely to pay attention to one than the other, though.

[The Reality Denialist]

Base -> creative with aging?
Well, I don't know. I have become more outgoing, actually. I think I'm more rational aka acceptable aka socially trained aka vegetable. Me and windmills do not meet as often as before (and these days they are high, very colossal and make electricity). In that perspective, yes.

[DirectorAbbie]

I may have shifted from Te to Si, but I wouldn't know. I do know that I spent a whole lot more time with alphas than with gammas as a kid. I don't know of any gammas with the same last name as me.