The elephant in the room

[Tallmo]

I feel there's an elephant in the room, in the sense that the significance of this typology is maybe not understood or it's downplayed.



I thought about this after reading the thread What interests you about socionics.



Socionics /Jung presents us with the primordial cognitive specialization of mankind. Showing how it is all linked together giving rise to an incredible symmetry. This is not just another psychological theory. It really is the discovery of the natural differentiation of the processes of the mind.



It's almost shocking how this is still unknown to most psychologists. It might very well take hundreds of years before this typology gets more acceptance, because of how difficult it is to learn well, one has to rely on personal experience etc. But it's going to happen at some point. It's human nature.



This has to be one of the greatest discoveries ever.



I don't care that much about the brand Socionics. But Socionics does a great job in making Jung's typology accessible to a greater number of people. The type descriptions are simplified and the relationships give us additional points of reference. We get acquainted with the phenomenon and then Jung's types become clear.



I assume people are willing to look beyond the conceptualizations of Socionics. You know, is duality really the best relationship, are the Reinin dichotomies valid? The basic phenomenon is rock solid, and it is a matter of time and experimenting to learn the types and relationships well enough to get to that point.



Psychology is still in its infancy but we got to see a glimpse of the future.

[Hot Scalding Gayser]

You made good points but I don't think socionics is good at appealing to the masses, at least not in how I understand Americans. That's more of MBTI's thing- which is more career and independent based. The inter type relationships in socionics is a lot more evolved and complicated/interesting/involved. We are taught and groomed in America to be completely narcissistic and self-serving and to not pay attention to others much at all. ((only insofar as how they can advance our own careers.)) So I think most institutions just default to teaching something shittier like mbti.... but socionics is more 'real' in the sense it pierces through to real identities and relationships and the type of people that people want to be romantic with.

In MBTI you are taught to learn about infps through the lens of our careers as being artists. It works in an incredibly shallow way but yea, it is very corporate-based. ((it's also based on truth tho cuz stereotypically, hey, I'm IEI and I also like to make art.)) In socionics you learn much more about the nuances and personality mannerisms of an INFp, and also how an IEI tends to interact with all the other types. You learn why LSEs and IEIs tend to dislike each other as they get closer with each other and why IEIs/SLEs tend to like each other etc. It's just so much more Fi.

Honestly most people don't give a shit about that, so it doesn't appeal to the masses much. People don't like to learn about other people usually unless they do something really fucked up and shocking so they can then feel morally superior to them. It's just too gay and soap opera-y for your average American?

But I'm gay and soap opera-y, so I like it lol.

The masses is kinda stupid anyway. I never liked the masses. Be careful when following the masses, as the M is often silent. I don't think I would ever want socionics to become mainstream. It can't. It makes Karen's heads explode and I kinda like it for that. Karens can go back to learn mbti if they want- but even that they would do only so very shallow-y.

[Kalinoche buenanoche]

It could be that people see therapists to get a grasp of things like change, fear, permanence etc. We go there with a situation at hand but these aspects tend to lie beneath. Presenting a solution from a systems theory perspective might just create another sandbox of dependency. There is also the aspect of overcoming the mind instead of understanding its processes. We don't even know what mind is (attempts are made e.g. theory of mind, but can we know? Similar question to whether anyone can know what reality is), where thoughts come from etc. From a philosophy POV, late Wittgenstein writings might have touched upon this.

[Rusal]

Good points, @Tallmo. But for the sake of clarification and information exchange, I’ll add the whos and the whys in my opinion. What’s missing in the Jung/Socionics tandem are ze Germans (and other, Scandinavian anthropologists) operating in the first half of the 20th Century. They were the first ones (in modern times) to work on physical traits and psychological characteristcs using the European peoples as their study group. Ernst Kretschmer and von Eickstedt, to name two. You can see their work coming to a merging point with Socionics, with the rational subtypes of some of the types mentioned in different terms, for example. But I think this body of work didn’t make its way into psychology due to the war, which might’ve paralized it in its ‘infancy’ stage that you mention: less chance of integrating proto nazis into the study curricula after all that water under the bridge. Now what Socionics has in its favor is that it’s egalitarian: two different subtypes still belong to the same personality type; asthenic should marry a pynkic dual. I’m of the mind that the first Socionists were aware of their Western counterparts but omitted them in their work. On a more personal note: what’s on paper in Socionics is already in the back people’s mind: I have trouble seeing the actor that plays the nazi soldier refusing share information at the beginning of Inglourious Basterds as anything else than SLE-Ti. I very much doubt that Tarantino’s casting director is into Socionics. This might lend some creedence to that first group of anthropologists.

[ouronis]

Unfortunately, it's laced with that early 20th-century smoke of phrenology until there's a clear and convincing argument for it. After reading psychological types, I did not get the idea that there was any hard proof, it was more of a literary theory than anything.

[Rusal]

Unfortunately, it's laced with that early 20th-century smoke of phrenology until there's a clear and convincing argument for it. After reading psychological types, I did not get the idea that there was any hard proof, it was more of a literary theory than anything.

Doesn't initial phrenology go way back before that? I remember coming across sanguine-choleric-melancholic-phlegmatic classic portraits/sketches from before 1800.

[Jarno]

It's almost shocking how this is still unknown to most psychologists.

If you have ever been to a psychologist it wouldn't have shocked you :-)

[Sol]

Objective researches may change the situation sometimes. Step by step.
Without this the theory is seen as doubtful and methods stay too speculative to have not doubtful efficiency.
The situation should be common for new knowledge.

Researches done by fans go slowly, but if the core ideas are correct there is chance to pass the border when Socionics will catch the attention of normal science and its resources. When alchemistry will become a chemistry.