hula-hope:

My grandpa has Alzheimer’s so he has no idea who my grandma is but everyday for the last three or four months he brings her in flowers from their garden and asks her to run away with him and be his wife and everyday she says she already is and everyday the smile my grandpa gets on his face is the most beautiful heartfelt thing I have ever seen.

dear god jesus and the holy spirit

i most humbly approach you, prostrated in servitude, distraught with unrealized desires; i’m burdened- breaking really- with the naive hope of seeing the aurora borealis this week. oh holy father, most high, to you all things are possible! it would mean everything to me to experience the northern lights in this era of abounding fantastic celestial wonders: meteor showers and eclipses and super super moons and oh god pleaseee the gradience/radiance of the sky fills me with a special, infinite awe and appreciation for life.

also remember how i tried really hard to not be a homosexual for an entire year even though it gave me really bad social anxiety? ..you sorta owe me one (you know…?).

anyways, to my namesakes saint anne and bvm and to the communion of saints- the triumphant, the suffering and militant, i request your intercession of prayers for the actualization of my desires.

your goodness and mercy are infinite, oh god. grant me my request of witnessing the northern lights- i beseech you!

in the name of jesus and god and the holy ghost amen lol

entjrant:

The MBTI has little to do with pre-determining specific traits in you (it can only do that to a certain extent). It has more to do with how a particular person perceives and engages reality which makes him or her navigate in that perception of reality in a certain way. Te dominants quite literally perceive the world and engage it differently from, say, Fe. That is what makes them operate within what they perceive in a generalizable but still contingent way.

So MBTI doesn’t really have all that much to say whether you’ll have the traits of a personality disorder or some stereotypical things sometimes attributed to other MBTI types.

Instead you should explore the meaning and character of the functions, explore how reality appears to you and try to understand the correlation between certain functions/types and how you perceive reality. Focus on functions and their synergies, their individual and collective purposes and priorities in structuring your reality - not the stereotypical and ultimately fictional characters (Ego-ideals par excellence http://www.lacan.com/zizraphael.htm ) assigned to the 16 labels. That is the best way to come to a reliable, cohesive narrative of your reality… The purpose of the type is to find others who experience reality in roughly the same categories that you do.

The best use of MBTI is to compare how reality is for you with how reality opens up for other people. Worst use of MBTI is to try identifying with some stereotype of how people labeled a certain thing should act… like saying ENTJs should be leaders and INFP do all the crying - yeah it’s funny to say that but the MBTI type has to do with how they perceive things, not what they do. It’s not MBTI’s job to predict what people do or even who they are as individual people. The best way to describe the difference is to put it like this: MBTI’s job is to give theoretical ramification to describe all variations of an ailement that we all suffer of: having a reality.

This is where I radically disagree with Keirsey’s approach as it strays very far from this philosophical approach that I utilize, that of focusing on the phenomenology of different people (how reality opens up for them) instead of Keirsey et al who approach the subject by having it try to identify with one-dimensional, constructued characters. Although it reveals the very virtual nature of “personality”, it misses the intricasies of the human subject by the pretension that people harbor a certain personality prior to their engagement with reality (ultimately a Cartesian burden still apparent in some cases of MBTI). A good friend of mine also pointed out that identification with types as labeled characters also misses the point because it draws people to the descriptions that they ideally would identify which (which often constitutes of their very weaknesses) which swiftly lead to a disproportioned amount of people claiming that they identify so strongly with the types described as “prophets”, “masterminds”, “complicated people” that they took it as an insult when pointing out that their phenomenological descriptions of reality resembled much more, say, Extrovert Sensing instead of Introvert Intuition. We speculate that the descriptions resonated more with their Ego-Ideals - who they desire to be seen as - than honest analysis of their reality. It is something that you can only access by learning about the functions and then discussing with other people how they see things, first with other people who are well-versed in the expressions used in MBTI, then moving on to try translate the descriptions of others into MBTI phenomenology. Because people don’t see this crucial difference between “who one is” with the “who” as an attribute of the I on the one hand and how one perceives reality in the moment when things happen which is prior to your understanding of it being so for you, many of those who deal with MBTI really do stand out like people who really have no idea who they are as the question “who they are” is an existentially misleading question in the first place.

For the theory to truly concern different kind of people (they must be so if they experience reality in radically different ways) there has to be different people but for structural purposes it has to first conceptually differentiate between people as agents (what is referred to with the pronoun “I”), and how reality opens up for the agent (which is insufficient to refer to as “illusion” or “subjective”) but it must not concern the agents themselves, it must describe their reality. Although the structured reality within which the agent navigates (making him/her a subject) can be described as the constitutive part of the subject as the agent really is just another conceptual construct, the notion of agent is important because that is where the subject sees the “I”, first person, to be.

Why must the theory concern their realities instead of the actual agents? Let me share a few theoretical insights on what the MBTI really deals it. I want to repeat: the product that we receive from MBTI, a narrative regarding a personality, has to remain at a distance from describing the agent, the seat of the “I” itself; it must refrain from describing the attributes of the agent itself as its job is most truthfully done when it describes the reality as he or she sees it instead of relying on a misrecognition. The method of prodecure in MBTI that I don’t see as being what MBTI is about, that of identification with the sixteen type descriptions as sixteen fictional personalities that you can identify with, really relies on identification a la “I am like that, and I am like that, and I am like that” where the “that” structurally undermines the “I”, as the identity which recognizes its supposed “itself” in external things must have as a presupposition decided the identity in order to be able to identify it in external “thats”; an identity which is purely imaginary, the identification that the subject does between his or her identity or “I” and the external “that” is in fact not an identification that the subject makes between itself and the external “that” but an identification the subject makes between the “ideal self” and an external “that”.

*For how misrecognition functions in Lacanian psychoanalysis, check out http://web.uvic.ca/~saross/lacan.html *Note the difference between Ego-ideal and Ideal ego, for more, check out: http://www.lacan.com/zizraphael.htm

Want a Hegelian twist to it? In Hegelian dialectics the positive identification (I am like that) is the smoking gun of a reigning negative, absence of identity. As if the positive identification, saying you know who you are by the condition of the external which one identifies with, is the most certain give-away that you really don’t know who you are, that one is dealing with the fact that one does not know who one really is. For Lacan the rational world is the necessary product of the defense one employs against madness, sublating (aufhebung) the madness into its own ramification as a category as that which constitutes itself as the enemy of rational reality. In the case of positive identification with external “thats”, it is in a parallel fashion the product of one employing a defense against the madness of non-identification (not having an identity), against the madness of NOT knowing who you are. Of course, this can only be refered to as not knowing the identitiy of oneself as part of the reality that one constructs when screening this madness with a network of referrals of positive identification (which ultimately makes the structure of identity, identification, a semiotic one).

This is why I want to rehabilitate MBTI to concern phenomenology instead of being a locus of identification or that of identifying with fictional characters. I still believe that the history of which MBTI, starting from Freud and Jung onward, was on to something: why it includes the specific functions is a trial and error process that has discerned eight functions for structuring reality which then are used to create sixteen different arrangements of these functions which provides the tools to cover a very wide spectrum of phenomenology. I hope that, through this project, I can attempt to map a variety of ways in which reality can present itself for people in first person as I believe the eight functions and their combinations actually are sufficient at covering a very wide field. I want to repeat: the MBTI as I use it is not to provide sixteen fictional identities with which you can identify or not, I want to map sixteen hypothetical ways in which reality can open itself up and that this is what people can identify with, not the characters who perceive reality. Reality is as such constructed, in a very Kantian sense, prior to you who has to deal with this reality, and I have no interest in this agency that has to deal with reality given by your functions. I want to focus on the arrangement of functions themselves so that we can understand how things are obvious to each other because reality opens itself in different ways which makes different things obvious. I would say that our realities only pose us with different demands and there is little for us to say about the agents themselves.

I will also start, from this point onward, to utilize some concepts from Hegelian dialectics and Lacanian psychoanalysis in my MBTI phenomenology but send me all and any questions if I am introducing concepts without properly explaining them (which I will do a lot) or forgot to provide material where they are elaborated on.

Introductions to Lacan: http://web.uvic.ca/~saross/lacan.html

http://www.lacan.com/zizraphael.htm

Anonymous asked: You go through phases like the moon, what phase are you in?

i don’t. i’m not. ironically enough, i’m giving up the moon stuff for a while. the moon is my mom and a good friend to me but all she does is cycle between 8 phases; i’ve outgrown most of my fickleness (if thats what it was) &I WANT TO EVOLVE.

thnx 4 the question ur rlly nice and i luv u

i’m taking a break from tumblr.
it’s not helping me become the person i want to be anymore and i’m sort of addicted.
i expect that i’ll be back at some point but until then i want to say that i appreciate every single person i’m following and who’s following me- especially the people that i have followed for two years now (you have a place in my heart) and for all the people who have messaged me when i have freak outs and i just need someone to talk to. all of you have made me feel a lot less alone in this world and i can never reciprocate to the full how youve affected me and influenced me for the better. just thank youuu from the bottom of my heart :’)
i’m obviously writing this more for myself than anyone else because i’m someone who absolutely needs closure…but yeah. i hope you guys smile at least once every day :]

with a lot of love,
Anna-Marie