In my last post I introduced two of the Jungian cognitive functions that make up the foundation for Myers Briggs typing.
Ne aka Extraverted Intuition, and Si aka Introverted Sensing.
What would it look like for these two characters to interact with each other, a la Pixar’s Inside Out?
How about the idea of a SiNe wave, where my consciousness fluctuates between Si and Ne.
What would it look like for them to work together?
In the last post, Si was tracing through old memories.
I like to think of this as drawing a hop scotch board on the pavement.
I now have this trace of memories to skip through with Ne.
Ne is a wild man. He’s got like six different colors of chalk and wants to riff of these old memories, finding hidden meanings and new possibilities.
He jumps through the hop scotch board and wants to draw new paths everywhere.
But we’ve got to be careful. Ne is a maniac, and given his way he would spend the whole day in explanation and conceptualizing and day-dreaming.
We need someone else to come in and keep him on track.
That’s a job for Te, or Extraverted Thinking!
He gives structure to the chaotic brainstorming energies of Ne. He’s like a basketball coach with a timer and a whistle. “Okay Ne, you get two minutes per square, then you have to move on to the next memory”. It’s like doing a timed Pomodoro session.
And after jumping through the hopscotch course for some amount of time, you’ll end up with something like this.
In practice, here’s what my memory reflection might look like.
Ne has drawn many lines out from the initial memory traces set by Si. Perhaps some of them contain a gem to be pursued further, and perhaps some of them are nonsense.
Now we’ve got one character left in our cognitive stack. If we’re sticking with the dominant descriptor of how the cognitive functions fit together, then the fourth cognitive function of an ENFP is Fi, or Introverted Feeling.
This is Dorothy.
She’s reached the end of the Yellow Brick Road.
The scarecrow never got his brain.
The lion never got his courage.
The tin man never got his heart.
There was no man behind the curtain.
She keeps clicking her heels, saying
there’s no place like home
there’s no place like home
there’s no place like home
but nothing happens,
home never comes.
Perhaps her slippers were not so magic after all.
We’ve got to put some magic into those shoes,
And build a new Yellow Brick Road.
*The captions in the character descriptions are taken from the work of one of my readers, Michael, who runs typestudies.net. Thanks, Michael!