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Personality frameworks vis-à-vis therapy

[Source: http://intjforum.com/showpost.php?p=4557153&postcount=7 ]

I think that overall, I would rather use the Big 5 and parts of the Enneagram over the MBTI
for psychotherapy.

Things that would discourage me from using the MBTI:

possible need to buy rights to utilize it professionally

potential for confusion toward, or over-intellectualization of the concepts being
tested for and examined (esp. if the patient has a problem involving over-analysis of
themselves or others)
the lack of any concept or measure of neuroticism

On the other hand, the MBTI is firmly established within our culture, and is widely
recognized as a personality framework/test with decently interesting things to say about
people. It also provides a nice language to share with the patient, though I still doubt its
usefulness in therapeutic areas outside of, for instance, career coaching or relationship
counseling.

The cognitive functions also provide a helpful language, but given the confusion/over-
intellectualization point I raised above, I would probably steer clear from them in therapy
forms that aren’t at least heavily grounded in cognitive-behavioral traditions. And even
then, I would have to strive to simplify and adapt the functions into my own model, rather
than emphasize their association with Jung or Myers (since that’s the point where the
functions become pure devices of philosophical or academic scrutiny, rather than
potentially useful tools for treatment and self-identification per se).

Things that would discourage me from using the Enneagram:

possible need to buy rights to utilize it professionally

 stigma against its validity and overtly-ethical outlook (the former of which could,
beneath the growing specter of evidence-based treatment as the expected norm,
lead to a drastic cut in my range of prospective clients)
general ignorance of the system or what it’s about (also limits my range of patients)
the need for a longer therapeutic process, since the Enneagram must reach the
depths of one’s soul in order to be optimally useful

I would definitely favor the Enneagram over MBTI in psychotherapy, since it gives such a
relatively nuanced view of neuroticism. However, I’m a little uncertain of why I would use it
over the Big 5, particularly when it comes to formalized assessment: it’s remarkably easy
to measure neuroticism’s facets with a short Big 5-adapted survey, but the Enneagram
would require building one from scratch (fun, but not entirely practical for most).

I would shift emphasis away from the Enneagram’s type aspect, and focus more on what
type’s neurotic patterns a given patient exhibits. I might also use it as a rough way to
gauge how healthy (healthy, average, unhealthy) or self-actualizing a person currently is.
(The self-actualization component is actually a very viable edge the Enneagram has over
MBTI and the Big 5, though I understand one of the key points of MBTI within therapy
would be to ‘grow [more successfully] into’ one’s type. In contrast, the Enneagram is all
about transcending one’s type, unrealistic though that might be to treat as the goal to
reach by the end of each patient’s therapy.)

Finally, regarding the Big 5, I can’t think of much that would keep me from utilizing it. It’s
the most conceptually specific (with its facet divisions of each basic personality domain), it
provides ready-to-use, non-commercialized assessment tools, and it gives a helpful
amount of detail about one’s psyche at the facets level. It also has a neuroticism
component that captures the more common problems encountered in psychology,
including anxiety and depression, and would be best (in those respects) for gaining an
initial understanding of a patient’s maladies. I think the fact that it can’t give you a ‘type’ of
person, only a picture of the individual in relation to the norm of people, isn’t really a
downside at all: this actually circumvents the potential problem of a patient trying to
shoehorn themselves into an idealized form of their type, even if it does detract a bit from
their ability to find ‘like-minded individuals’ (they wouldn’t exactly be able to find an rLoAI
online forum, for instance).

In the end, I would probably opt to borrow from all three personality frameworks
discussed–MBTI to help elucidate cognitive style, Enneagram to identify the basic ‘type’ of
a person in terms of potentials for growth/disintegration, and Big 5 to zero in on the
specific personality factors worth working with–and adapt their concepts to be suitable
both commercially and for my target client base. My therapeutic methodology, of course,
would flex in accordance with the needs of each new patient (per the eminent existential
psychotherapist Irvin Yalom’s recommendation), and would not rigidly rely on one
framework over the others across all cases.
Modern cognitive psychology and the Jungian mental
processes, Pt. I: Ni/Si (“introverted intuition”/”introverted
sensing”) and long-term memory
[Addressed to the INTJforum ‘MBTI and Personality Theories’ sub-forum]:

Foreword

Easily the most prevalent complaint about the so-called Jungian or ‘cognitive’ functions is
that they lack too much empirical support to warrant the frequently charitable assumptions
made in discussions surrounding them. Many of the frustrations of people who remain
skeptical of the functions thesis can be captured by the fact that, at least at present, the
functions do not (easily) lend themselves or stand up to scientific scrutiny or testing (or
funding).

The idea behind this post (and possibly future ones like it) represents a desire on my part
to hopefully mitigate some of the above-named concerns, by highlighting just a few of the
real connections between our accepted understandings in cognitive psychology, and how
we (viz. casual and expert commentators, and typologists like Berens and Nardi) generally
conceptualize the functions. As this can be approached in a number of ways, for the
purpose of not rambling myself to death at one time, I will narrow the scope of this post to
Ni, Si, (as much about them as we think we might know, in this preliminary stage) and how
modern-day cognitive scientists understand memory.

Chapter 1:

The Jungian functions

It is commonly considered that Si has a memory component to it. Indeed, Dario Nardi’s
own observations on the subject seem to validate this when he notes that:

“Si types may get ‘in the zone’ when reviewing past events…ISTJ and ISFJ easily enter
an expert flow state while recalling, particularly if they close their eyes and take the time to
immerse themselves in the memory, reliving it in rich detail” (Neuroscience of Personality,
p. 94).

…and…

“[Si types] have a propensity for rote memorization, repetition, and in-depth reviews of
daily events…Si types are highly capable at recalling information that has little or no
context, such as lists of random words…” (NoP, p. 94)

But what most seem to leave out in their examination of Si is that, like Ni, it is predictive
and allows users of it to “consider the future” (NoP, p. 95). Nardi notes that both Si and Ni
types show moderate-high activity in a brain region that helps us do this, especially insofar
as it is helping us plan our own actions ahead of time.

Conversely from Si, Ni is most commonly thought of as the ‘predictive’ function, or the one
that most often and accurately allows us to predict what will occur in the future. Though
Ni’s power to do this is clearly exaggerated in the mainstream typology culture, I will not
attempt to dispel this misconception at the present time. Suffice it instead to point out what
Nardi observes about Ni types, who “may easily show a zen state [overall brain pattern]
when tasked to envision the future” (NoP, p. 102). And whether you want to call them Ni
or NJ types, it is common for these types to self-report in confirmation of this observation
made by Nardi in his MBTI-EEG studies.

But Nardi doesn’t mention how Ni looks back in time, or even how Si looks ahead.
Probably our forum’s leading proponent of the functions model, whom we all know (to
varying degrees of reverence) as […], stated it thusly:

“Ni can deduce the past from the present, and predict the future from the present, in
terms of dynamics. Si instead sees things as mostly constant, and tends to be
surprised by change. Both Si and Ni are predictive, but Ni types tend to impress
others in terms of predicting things that were not ‘obvious’. (I.e., it’s obvious that if
this is a rock, then it was a rock, and it will be a rock in the future; it’s not obvious
that this is/was a meteorite that fell from the sky, and contains metals/isotopes that
aren’t commonly found on Earth.)”

And while his example regarding the rock, there, might receive mixed responses from the
subforum community, the important point to focus on is that both Ni and Si are predictive
and backward-looking functions, though they differ greatly in how they go about fulfilling
those purposes.

Now, for those of you who have had enough Nardian ‘pseudoscience’ for one post, you
can rest assured that from this point, we will be moving on to ‘actual’ cognitive
psychology (though we will still be establishing its relations with Ni and Si in their primitive,
abstract forms).

Chapter 2:

Mainstream cognitive psychology

In going forward, readers might find it helpful to keep this handy reference chart in view–
but they should note that for the purposes of this post, we will be restricting our scope
specifically to declarative (or “explicit”) memory:
(For more on long-term memory’s sub-systems, see here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-term_memory#Divisions_of_long_term_memory)

The important things to keep in mind (or commit to memory, as it were!) are that:

“Explicit memory includes all memories that we consciously seek to store and
retrieve. These memories are also called declarative memories because they
include events that we have deliberately learned, such as ‘I enjoyed playing
poohsticks in Sussex’ or facts, such as ‘they grow coffee in Brazil’, and can be
described or ‘declared’ to others (Milner, 1965). Explicit/declarative memory is
further divided into semantic and episodic memory” (Revlin, Cognition: Theory and
Practice p. 152-3).
“Episodic memory stores and connects the specific times, places, and events in an
individual’s life…our episode memory gives rise to the conscious experience of
recollection (Tulving, 1982, 1985; Wheeler, Stuss, & Tulving, 1995, 1997)…[and]
allows us to travel back mentally in time to earlier moments in our lives not only to
retrieve a fact, but in many cases, to relive the experience [retrospective memory]
…episodic memory also allows us to travel forward mentally in time in order to
remember to do things in the future [prospective memory]” (Revlin, C:T&P p. 153).
“Semantic memory retains conceptual knowledge stored as an independent
knowledge base. It is the library where discrete facts like ‘dogs bark’ and ‘robins are
birds’ are stored. Your memories of where you were when you first learned such
facts, however, are considered part of episodic memory” (Revlin, C:T&P p. 153).

“As a result of implicit memory‘s functioning, we are able to learn without being aware
that we are doing so (e.g., Graf & Schacter 1985), and we can retrieve or use that
information without being aware that we have stored it in memory” (Revlin, C:T&P p. 153).

I believe that understanding the two types of declarative/explicit memory presented is key
to understanding the memory components of Ni and Si. (For those interested in why I
don’t consider implicit memory relevant to the present discussion, see the paragraph
below and feel free to comment on its contents.)
[[[I don’t believe implicit memory is particularly important to understand, here, since it
functions “semiautonomously”, meaning that its mental functions operate automatically
and “in the background”. Treatments of the Jungian functions as unconscious processes
are more apt to describe how each type’s tertiary and inferior functions work (in generally
inopportune ways), whereas the dominant and auxiliary functions are those that we are
conscious of (though it is true that we tend to take the dominant’s operation for granted, as
it’s essentially the ‘water we swim in’ and we’re too used to it to take much ‘conscious’
notice). Further, the EEG technology which Nardi utilized only measured neocortical brain
activity, meaning it could only be used to analyze the topmost (and newest) layer. As this
layer corresponds most closely with conscious and observable thought processes, implicit
memory’s mechanics are a little trickier to uncover without more sophisticated brain-
imaging technology.]]]

Based on the quotes whose respective authors I’ve cited, the connections between Ni/Si
and explicit memory should become clearer. Si thrives on reviewing past events in rich
detail, which correlates strongly with our understanding of episodic memory. Both Ni and
Si engage in prospective memory, and at least Si engages in retrospective memory
(“reliving [past experiences] in rich detail”, as Nardi observed). Finally, Si certainly utilizes
semantic memory, which serves as a “library where discrete facts are stored”.

The above seems to leave Ni a bit in the dark, however. Specifically, two questions are left
unanswered: 1) Assuming it can equally well engage in retrospective memory, how does it
do so in a manner distinct from Si?; and 2) Given that Ni is far more apt to store relations
and abstract principles than “discrete facts”, what is Ni’s relation to semantic memory?
Might it be that there is some other memory bank which has been either unexplored in
cognitive psychology, or left out of the present discussion? For now, I will leave these
questions to readers to examine, though I will do so myself in a (hopefully, though not
necessarily) timely manner.

In closing

My point here hasn’t been to ‘prove’

or ‘disprove’ the functions. Rather, I
went forward with the assumption
that the functions are worthy of
further refinement and scrutiny, and
in this early stage of their treatment
the best we can do is ensure that
they be defined in terms as
technically precise as possible. If
this can be done, then perhaps the
functions can someday be studied in
a more rigorous and scientifically-
respectable manner–and there are,
for purposes of better understanding
ourselves and others, very
compelling reasons for the rich
variety in cognitive modes across
humans to be elucidated and properly accounted for.