‘Fluidity’ on Jung types (aka fluidity of “cognitive” functions)

I had saw on the internet a few (ok, some…) websites that did talk about the fluidity of one cognitive function (that is rigorously rather a type in Jung typology) at the expense of the other – the last one that I did remember explained how ‘Fe is fluid’ and compared how Te is more constrained than Fe and ignored Ni entirely – saying that a INFJ has fluidity and chameleon capabilities because Fe is ‘fluid’ and then build an argument over that.

I had saw similar arguments for some few other “cognitive functions” (Jung types) around. I had put some thought of that and I had “found” out that basically all functions and types are fluid except a little bit for Ti and Fi. However, we must pay attention to dichotomy: For Fe and Te, and partially Ni and Si, are related to J, however there is no ‘fluidity’ on the dichotomy definitions for J. In this aspect, the fluidity of pure MBTI dichotomy is linked with Perceiving and Intuition, and actually both the fluidity of these two dichotomies and the fluidity of cognitive functions (or, rather, types, I am migrating towards the rigorous name) can actually create holes on the theories – I won’t really be protective or making them sound poetical and perfect, the ‘fluidity’ of Jung types does generate problems to the whole typology, but they also affect even more the tests and some few people does use that as an argument that tests doesn’t work so they can say whatever they want to say, it will be true anyway (since no test or evidence will prove otherwise, since it is on the person’s core definition that they don’t work). So, time to get started.

Fluidity of Te

Te looks so rigid, right? Things like procedures, ‘objectivity’, plans, scheduling, organization etc… They don’t look fluid at all. A good portion of this, however, is just Thinking+Judgment (TJ), sometimes alternated into T or J, and they come from stuff that are post-Jung – they do not belong to Jung Te per se, even though some of them are good additions.

Jung Te is about the intellectual formula – I like to repeat this over and over again to try to compensate the fact that basically none of the sources I had read about Te (that are not Jung) had ever mentioned this expression while this is the fundamental core of Te – and from the intellectual formula is where the plans, scheduling, organization (note that organization is almost pure Jish, applying to FJ, NJ, SJ, etc…), and it is the intellectual formula which decides what is objective and what is not in most of the times, except when the Te-dom is still picking an ‘intellectual’ formula.

Te depends a lot on the intellectual formula; However, not all formulas are static, some of them can be a dynamic, and on there relies the fluidity of Te. Since the formula shapes the Te-dom, the weakness for the system here is that there is lots of possibilities into what the formula can be. TJ construct from MBTI is partially based on statistics and these statistics mostly comes from western people from 20^th century. However, people from different times or from Asia imminently will start to deviate from the most common formulas from the western, and that changes a little bit of Te is and it is something that reduces the connections from Te and what we understand as TJ. And there are one or two tricky things: First, and this one is slowly happening already, some intellectual formulas fights each other and there is one of them on the administration sector that is actually anti-bureaucracy: It is an intellectual formula that is against too tight procedures, more in favour of more dynamic plans and may not give a big value of organization. Subscribers to that will have a tendency to migrate from ESTJ to ENTJ just because of a different formula – a subscription to a formula can actually change what Te-doms answer on the questionnaire. The second flaw is – what if the formula has Fi-components? I never ever saw that before ever, but there is this possibility: An intellectual formula with some primordial values, that gives some value to feeling and emotions and moral sentimentalism, and etc… Might look exceptionally awkward on tests, but I haven’t seem such formula like that.

Fluidity of Fe

There is indeed some similarities between Te and Fe. Fe is about finding the suitable man and being the suitable woman, or finding the suitable woman and being the suitable man, and that resembles an intellectual formula. The manners of Fe, the things that the ‘shared feelings and social values’ does have some shape on the Fe-dom, and the Fe-dom is likely to adjust her/himself for it. The fluidity of Fe is about meeting others expectations in general to ‘honour’ the shared feelings – the feelings of the person are all somewhat ‘serving a purpose’, regardless if this purpose is to keep something to the past on the present or has something to do with something latter on the future. In the attempt to be a suitable person, the Fe-dom adjusts her/himself to the environment and the expectations of feelings of others, making the person more fluid on that way.

There is one flaw here: If a Fe-dom is on a room of thinkers, then appearing like a thinker might be the solution to be a suitable person. I wouldn’t go far enough to say that on an environment full of Ti-doms, Fe will emulate or go fluid to Ti, I find that still unlikely due to the “Ti nature”.

Fluidity of Ni

Fluidity of Ni perhaps is the most interesting one and a little bit hard to explain, and it could not look less mystical than what I am going to tell. This one need you to be informed not only about Jung Ni, but to know what Collective Unconscious means (and archetypes on the alternative explanation).

The fluidity of Ni relates to the “become who you foresee you need to be” phrase that relates to Ni. Let me explain, or re-explain, what that is. Basically, Ni has access to the Collective Unconscious in a way that it can access the life of ancestors – yup, something like that (if you want to make it look a little bit less mythical always think genetically) – and has the ‘ability’ to somewhat incorporate some of the personality, characteristics and abilities of former ancestors – the unconscious of the person just picks which former ancestor is. Or, in a different way, we can also say that Ni has a strong access to many archetypes and can pick which of them the person needs to be in order to fill or pursue something. How the access of these ancestors and archetypes can be explained in both ways; First, and the best to explain, is the mystical route where the person has access to the souls of ancestors and can be partially be possessed by them, giving them some of the abilities of the souls; Another still mystical one is that the archetypes can work as special spiritual figures (oh, I love this idea) that gives the person some abilities; Or, the more boring and yet more ‘rational’ explanation, Ni access the genes in a different way that is able to activate or deactivate and to ‘wake’ different genes of the person that can express different characteristics for a desirable task (this still deviates a lot from science).

Major problem, and I think this one is very real: What if the fluidity of Ni happen to come up with an ancient Se-dom, including the incorporation of Se-dom preferences, abilities, mindset, etc…?? Well, that glitches the system hardly – because we now have a person with a strong Se and also strong Ni, incorporating an ancestor that actually pay attention to the present moment instead of being a Se-tard. This happens in fiction with some Ni-doms that are actually engaged into some Se activity and need to incorporate the spirit of a hero – or to simply ‘become that guy who saves the day’ (think about an action hero). Crazy, isn’t it?

Fluidity of Ne

Ne is perhaps the most fluid of all functions, and which the fluidity can be explained in many ways. The basic thing here is that Ne can pursue many possibilities, including the possibility of becoming and act like a ISXJ, what if we do try to access and let our past orient ourselves some day? Ne can simply pursue the possibility of Si stuff – which is a flaw, but not a long term flaw. The Ne fluidity can be resumed into pursuing different possibilities in simple terms.

However, the wave that Ne causes into other systems makes this flexibility be a little bit wider. Ne relates to cognitive flexibility, and it is actual a real thing that Ne can simply pursue the possibilities related to other cognitive functions, and Ne is able to actually ‘abandon’ its auxiliary function and try another one just for the sake of possibility, which is sort of a flaw.

The second system that hits Ne hard is the Big 5. Ne hits Openness to Experience, both has some good overlap between. The Openness to Experience relates to flexibility as well – it is quite covered on the Wikipedia article.

Fluidity of Se

This is easy. Se is about the present moment, so the fluidity and flexibility of Se are the demands of the present moment that can partially evoke other cognitive functions as well. Im sorry for the short explanation but there is not much I can say except this about it.

Fluidity of Si

Si relates to past experiences (ok, ok, the definitions more common over the web does, Jung Si is a beast! But at least connects to this). The past of an individual and the experiences does have some strength into how the individual personality shapes himself here, in a stronger way than other types. Some ‘types’ of past can indeed relate to some types of MBTI, Enneagram, etc… So, the Si-user past can make the Si-user go towards other types or point to some cognitive functions – and a past of full of varied adventures can even point to Ne, but that is very unlikely – a Si-user will only have a past like that if pushed, and a lot.

Si also has the relations with traditions (actually, that is sort of a stolen Te-component and the tradition thing is more about SJ than Si per si), and the traditions can be biased towards another function (actually, I do sometimes make a case that we shouldn’t link sensing to tradition due to flaws like this), but here they cannot really point much to Ne because Ne is not supposed to build any sort of tradition. But can points to other functions, so, for example, a society where there are lots of rituals and things related to other lives, ancient lives, etc… can point towards N function instead.

In general, Si is not considerable really flexible because the fluidity that I talk about here is more closer to the fluidity of ice than to the fluidity of the wind or water: It takes a lot of time to change, either the general story of the past of the person and the traditions. That is why Si fluidity is not actually much fluid, but it does exist.