Function Stacks
A function stack is a specific configuration of functions in a person's mind. While there are 8 functions in total, only 4 of them go into the function stack. An individual's personality is predicated on their stack configuration. There is some speculation that individuals have an additional stack for the other 4 functions, but this will only be discussed in brief towards the very end of the guide as it is not important and again, is only speculation. In total there are 16 different function stacks, each corresponding to the 16 MBTI (Myers-Briggs) types. Each stack contains the following placement of a specific set of functions.
1st slot: Dominant Function
The Dominant Function is the strongest function in a person's mind and is the one that is used most often in life. It is the function that a person relies on the most in order to solve problems efficiently. This function is so strong and experienced that an individual often uses it automatically and is unaware when it is being used.
2nd slot: Auxiliary Function
The Auxiliary Function is the second strongest function in a person’s stack and is the function that is used to balance and support the Dominant function. It is usually used in conjunction with the first function and has the opposite introverted/extroverted nature of it in order to balance it out. It is often used to guide the direction of the first function.
3rd slot: Tertiary Function
The Tertiary Function is the third strongest function and is always the opposite of the Auxiliary function. It is primarily used as a relief function that is sometimes used instead of the Auxiliary. The Tertiary function always has the same introverted/extroverted nature as the dominant function which is what makes it easy to use.
4th slot: Inferior Function
The Inferior function is the weakest function in a person's stack. Because of its weakness, it is the function we all aspire to become better at in life. It is directly opposite to the Dominant Function and is a function that an individual often neglects to use due to the difficulty that comes with using it. It is essentially our blindspot. Out of all of the functions it is the most important to learn about.
Loops
Because the Tertiary function is the function of relief, when an individual is under stress they may sometimes forgo the Auxiliary function and choose to use the Tertiary in tandem with their Dominant function instead for long periods of time. This is referred to as a Loop. It is called a loop because individuals will often become stagnant and repeat the same behavior over and over again for comfort due to the Tertiary function being easy to use. This stagnation occurs because an individual is often proficient enough with the Tertiary function to get by with using it and doesn’t need to develop it because the Dominant function is strong enough to protect it from any problems it may cause. It also occurs because the individual is only using either introverted or extraverted functions. Using only one of these types of functions is dangerous. This is the main reason for why the Auxiliary function exists, to counterbalance the introverted/extraverted inclination of the Dominant function. Using too much introversion leads to spending too much time inside of one’s mind. Too much extraversion leads to not spending enough time on personal development. Both are types of escapism and stop a person from moving forward in life.
It is because of this loop why I personally believe that the Tertiary function is the worst in the stack. It has its uses and it is definitely not to be neglected, however it is not without its dangers. People can get stuck in this Loop for years and in some cases never come out of it. It is often associated with depression and it is obvious why. The way to break free is to restore power to the Auxiliary function and allow it to lead. Balance introversion with extroversion and try to remember what life was like before the Loop and try to return to your mind’s natural stasis.
Grips
The Grip is the most important thing to take away from learning about the cognitive functions.
A grip is when an individual is put in a particular situation where they are forced to use their Inferior function rather than another function. It is the byproduct of our overreliance on the Dominant function to solve every problem we come across and refusal to use the Inferior function. Often individuals do not feel like themselves when in the Grip and this is because we generally feel the most natural when we are using our Dominant Function. Because of this when we are in the Grip we tend to use our Inferior Function in immature childlike ways because we don’t have enough experience with it to use it properly. Because of this we have a tendency to overexert our Dominant Function in order to get us out of the situation but this isn’t always the best course of action.
The grip is the most important aspect of Jungian Psychology because nearly every problem in our lives can be solved by understanding and utilizing the inferior function. Every major undesirable situation in a person’s life is in some way shape or form related to a neglect of the inferior function. It is not an easy thing to do, learning to use the inferior function proficiently, but the reward for doing so is priceless. It is my hypothesis that use of the Inferior function can become easier to strengthen if one was to use it in conjunction with the Auxiliary function, but this is merely speculation.
16 Personalities and Typing them
The Myers-Briggs Typology Indicator is a set of 16 different personality types each consisting of one of the 16 different function stacks. It isn’t entirely clear how personality develops or why a person prefers to use certain cognitive functions over others but the common explanation is that half of the cognitive bias comes from birth and the other half comes from the early developing stages in life. It is also unclear why personality exists in the first place. My personal hypothesis is that it is survival through specialization. In other words, it is more advantageous for humans as a whole to have certain individuals be better at certain things than to have everyone be decent at many things.
The most popular method used for figuring out a person's particular type is the 16personalities website. While I do believe that the site can be a good introduction into typology or even just as a fun activity to do in general, it is not particularly useful for figuring out your true type because it doesn't incorporate any of the Jungian psychology that the types are initially based off of, thus when you go into typology know that the 16 personality test will tell you next to nothing about what actual type you are. In order to be proficient in this particular branch of psychology, you need to learn about the cognitive functions and how to recognize when they are being used in real life. Learning to type yourself and other people can take months if not years to do accurately. This is because we generally cannot recognize the unconscious bias that we have towards our Dominant function. Often in order to find out your type you have to see how other people view you and how they react to your natural self a well as monitor your behavior on a regular basis to recognize how you actually act.
Letter Usage
Each of the personalities have a 4 letter code used to identify them, each letter represents an aspect of the base functions.
I- Introverted
E- Extroverted
N-Intuition
S-Sensing
T-Thinking
F-Feeling
J-Judging
P-Perceiving
It is important to note that the website and the popular description of these letters are not fully accurate to their actual usage. The website attempts to simplify the functions by explaining them in a way that is technically true, but also misleading. For instance, the Myers Briggs indicator assigns an entirely separate function to Perceiving and Judging where the description of a P-type is a person who is more flexible, and adaptive to their environment, rather than being structured and organized. In reality what the P is referring to is whether or not someone has an Extroverted Perceiving function (Se or Ne) as one of their top 2 functions. The thing that is misleading about it is that generally a person having one of these two functions in their top 2 slots can often lead to them being more loose and adaptive due to those functions being based around the act of continuously collecting new information. Nevertheless, you cannot type someone as a P or J solely based off of whether or not they are organized/structured or not. The same is true for Introverted and Extroverted. On the 16 personalities website it is assigned its own separate function when in reality they only indicate whether or not the dominant function in a stack is introverted or extroverted. Again its' technically not false to attribute introversion to preferring isolation and extroversion to socialization because generally having your first function be Introverted tends to result in an individual being more isolated and vice versa, but everyone uses their functions in a variety of ways and some functions despite being introverted or extroverted do not appear in that way when they are manifested. That is why it's not so easy to categorize someone as either an introvert or extrovert. If you had to determine a person's social introversion or extroversion I would base that decision off of whether their main Judging function is extroverted or not as that determines how an individual acts in relation to the group, but again most people use their functions in a variety of different ways so this is not a completely fair assessment.
Using these letters one can figure out their own cognitive function stack. This may be a bit confusing but I'll do my best to explain the process simply.
When figuring out type we're going to pretend that a person's third and fourth functions do not exist. Assume that a person only has a Dominant (1st) and Auxiliary (2nd) function.
The first letter I or E tells you whether or not the first cognitive function is Introverted or Extroverted.
The second letter N or S tells you that one of the 2 functions is either Sensing or Intuition.
The third letter F or T tells you that the other function is either Thinking or Feeling.
Now that we know that the 2 functions in the stack are either T/F or S/N and that the first one is either I/E we can use the fourth letter, the P or J to figure out whether the Perceiving or Judging function is first in the stack.
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It is important to know that if the first letter (I or E) is Introverted, then the placement of the Judging vs Perceiving function is switched. It is also important to remember that the function stack always alternates between introverted and extroverted so you will never have an introverted function come right after another introverted function and vice versa.
Then after figuring out what the first two functions are you can figure out the rest of the stack because you know that the 4th function is the opposite of the 1st and that the 2nd is the opposite of the 3rd.
Example, let's figure out the cognitive function stack of the ESFJ.
The first letter is E so I know that the first function will be Extroverted.
The second letter is S so I know that one of the functions is a Sensing type.
The third letter is an F so I know that one of the functions is a Feeling type.
Going off of the letters we have so far I know that the first function will be Extroverted and either Sensing or Feeling, looking at the last letter (J) I now know that the first function is a Judging function so the first function is Extroverted Feeling, Fe. Knowing this I can also conclude that the second function is Introverted Sensing because you will never see two introverted or two extroverted functions in a row.
Knowing this I can then conclude that the third function is Extroverted Intuition and the last function is Introverted Thinking because the third function is the opposite of the second and the last function is the opposite of the first.
ESFJ stack should look like this.
Extroverted Feeling
Introverted Sensing
Extroverted Intuition
Introverted Thinking
For the next example, I'll show you how to do an Introverted type as well for clarity. Let's figure out the cognitive function stack of the INFP. If you feel that you do not need this example you can skip ahead to the next module.
The first letter is I so I know that the first function is introverted.
The second letter is N so I know that the type is primarily Intuitive.
The third letter is F so I know that the type is primarily Feeling.
The fourth letter is P so normally I would say that the first function is a perceiving function but because this is an introverted type I would place the perceiving function in the second slot instead.
Now that I know that the second function is a perceiving function I know that the 1st function has to be an introverted Judging function, in this case Introverted Feeling and the second function is Extroverted Intuition.
Putting all of this information together the INFP function stack should look like this.
Introverted Feeling (Fi)
Extroverted Intuition (Ne)
Introverted Sensing (Si)
Extroverted Feeling (Fe)
Typing yourself and others
The simplest way that I have found for typing someone is to look for the hints that can tell you what that person's main judging function is first and then figuring out their perceiving function after that. In my opinion it's easier to see how a person makes decisions rather than trying to discern how they perceive the world. After figuring out their main deciding function, try to figure out what their main perceiving function is in relation to that decider, and then attempt to see which of these two functions is being prioritized.
When attempting to uncover a person’s main judging function, analyze the person’s actions and determine whether or not they are making decisions based off of the needs of the group or the needs of themselves. Then determine whether or not a person is basing these decisions off of emotional value or rationale.
In terms of discerning a person's perceiving functions, I typically go more off of what type of impression they give me. Generally, I find that sensors have a more intense, explosive type of presence to them whereas intuitive tend to have a deeper and heavier presence, as if there's something behind the veil.
Besides gut feeling there are also trackable methods that can be used to determine a person's type. The main factor to look at is language. Sensors tend to speak more literally about things while Intuitives tend to use much more analogies and metaphors. Feelers tend to speak more emotively whereas Thinkers tend to be more neutral and objective in tone. This alone cannot fully determine type because all types of people use both abstract and concrete as well as emotive and logical language, however what you’re looking for is a bias towards one or the other.
I don’t feel there is much to be discussed in regards to distinguishing between Feeling and Thinking so the next section will discuss the differences between Sensing and Intuition.
A good example of a clash between sensory and intuition was in regards to the movie Star Wars The Last Jedi. The movie had a very divisive reception with most viewers either hating or loving the film. I noticed a pattern emerging among several of the individuals who shared their thoughts on the film. Most of those who hated the film were individuals who might be typed as sensors while those who enjoyed it might be typed as intuitive. Regardless of how they are typed, the arguments from the negative side were mostly in reference to the plot inconsistencies in the movie whereas those who were on the positive side made arguments that pertained more towards the themes presented in the movie.
In a sense, intuition can be seen as a method used in order to gain additional sensory. Take hangman for instance.
D_G
If you were going solely off of pure sensory you would not be able to decipher what this word is, you would need more information. Since there are no other letters at the present moment for us to use, the only way we can figure out what the word might be is to create more information using our imagination to fill in the blank. If we were to imagine an "O" we can then complete the word to create "DOG". This is essentially what intuition is. Artificially creating more information when the sensory is limited. However while you can use intuition to gain more information, that information might not be fully accurate. The word could have been "DUG" for all we know. This is the main drawback and also the trade off of using intuition. You may be able to figure certain things out in an efficient manner but there's always a risk that you're wrong.
Applications
The significance of understanding typology is that it is a very useful tool for self growth but can also be used to understand the world around us better. You can see the functions not only in people but in our environment as well. We can observe processes and systems in the world and how the people behind them use certain functions in order to make them happen. For instance, many of the people in medical fields are ISFJ's and ESFJ's. This is due to the fact that the functions of Si and Fe are very present in many medical processes such as following specific procedures (Si) and having empathy for a wide spectrum of patients (Fe). Likewise many artists are INFP's due to the inner passion (Fi) and the creative imaginations (Ne) that typically goes into producing art. I personally find it astonishing how everything in life can more or less be boiled down to one or more of the functions. Another reason why MBTI is mind opening is due to its precision in regards to what we need to work on in life. Knowing which inferior function you have is powerful knowledge because you are now aware of the source to 90 percent of the problems in your life and that you have a sure way of counteracting these problems by leveling up the inferior function more. This was likely a lot of information to digest but in reality the only essential thing to remember is to work on the inferior function and to try your best to stay out of the tertiary loop once you figure out your type.
Bonus Sections: Shadow Functions and Relationship Types
Shadow Functions
As said before, some in the typing community speculate that the 4 functions that are not in a person's main stack are placed in another stack that belongs to the unconscious mind. These are sometimes called shadow functions and they utilize the following configuration.
Nemesis
Critic
Trickster
Demon
My knowledge of these functions is limited but I will do my best to provide an overview of them.
The Nemesis function is the first of the shadow stack and directly opposes the first function of the conscious stack. It is theorized that the Nemesis function essentially is the function that we feel is directly going against us and preventing us from making progress in life.
The Critic is the auxiliary function of the shadow stack. While the Nemesis is the function that we feel is directly halting our progress, the Critic function is the function we feel the most insecure about when we try to use it. The function that we "criticize".
The Trickster function is the third function of the shadow stack and it is the function that we have the most difficulty accessing. In reality it is our weakest function rather than the Inferior function. Because of this it is sometimes referred to as the POLR function which stands for "Point of least resistance". It is essentially our blindspot.
The Demon function is the lowest shadow function and is the function we are the most reluctant to use. Essentially it is the function that we have the most difficulty relating with and the one we blame for the problems in our lives. We can even get extremely upset when other people have this function high in their conscious stack. It differs from the Inferior function in that we actually want to get better at using the inferior function while we tend to want to neglect the Demon function altogether.
So to recap, the Nemesis is the function that you feel is going against you, the Critic is the function that you feel insecure about, the Trickster is the function that is completely foreign to you, and the Demon function is the one you blame the most.
Relationship Types
One of the benefits of learning Jungian Typology is its application in potentially finding a suitable partner. There are many different typologists that study how the different types interact with each other when in relationships. These are some of the common matches between types.
Opposites
The theme of opposites attracting couldn't be more true than in MBTI. Because the inferior function is an individual's aspirational function, a person will naturally find another person who is dominant in that particular function to be attractive. That being said, matching up with the polar opposite type is not without its downsides. This type of pairing tends to be a catalyst for conflict but through this continued conflict a lot of growth can be had. Essentially this type of relationship can likely be the most challenging but also the most rewarding if the couple endures through it for long enough.
Relatives
Relative types are essentially types that consist of the same functions except in a different order, specifically in cases where the Auxiliary and Dominant functions are switched. These types have the same letters except for the first i.e. ENTJ/INTJ, ESTP/ISTP, etc. This is the match type that I personally think is the most reliable. Most of the long-term relationships I've seen consist of this combination.
The reason I think this type of match works well is due to the partner having a very similar outlook on life but with enough key differences to assist in reciprocal growth. Having a partner with your Auxiliary function as their Dominant essentially makes them your Introverted/Extroverted counterpart. Not to mention that while the inferior function is what helps in achieving balance, the Auxiliary function is the function that leads to the most development. It is in my opinion that the Auxiliary function is the most valuable function in a person's stack, so being in a relationship with someone who has this function first is certainly beneficial.
But there is another strength of this relationship as well and that's with having the last two functions switched as well. Having someone with your inferior function in one position higher assists with growth in this function as that person can teach you how to use it in an easier way while still having the relatability factor of the person not particularly enjoying that function either. Take an INTP and an ENTP relationship for instance. The ENTP can assist with the INTP's reluctance to go to a social event that requires the use of their inferior Fe because the ENTP has this function third and can therefore teach the INTP how to use Fe in a more palatable way because the ENTP doesn't always like using Fe either, but are still able to in times of need. Likewise with the INTP teaching the ENTP how to use inferior Si in an easier way.
I believe that having this pairing will also assist in keeping you out of the Tertiary loop and maintain steady growth in the relationship. Another variant of this type would be having a partner whose first function is your third. I personally haven't consciously witnessed any relationship with this set up but my pure speculation would be that this type of relationship could be very enjoyable initially but would be prone to becoming toxic very quickly, as having someone who is dominant in your third function will inspire you to use it more and both partners could risk falling into their respective loops and it’ll be much harder to get out. But again this is just speculation. In reality it's possible for any of the types to be in a healthy and successful relationship.
Shadows
This match consists of two individuals who have the introverted or extroverted version of the other person's functions, for example INFJ (Ni,Fe,Ti,Se) and ENFP (Ne, Fi,Te,Si). In other words the two partners have each other's shadow function set. The reason this is significant is because while the Relative type is similar to being someone's counterpart, the Shadow type is like being their other half. I think out of all of the compatibility types this type of relationship has the highest potential for balance in life because every function is present. This can lead to the couple being able to accomplish great things together due to being able to perform both types of the base functions. For instance an ENTJ and an INTP would be able to accomplish a lot with their dominant Thinking functions due to being able to perform both the Introverted and Extroverted variants of it.
Altered Shadows
This is another popular matching. Similar to the Shadows match, this match consists of two individuals who have the extroverted/introverted version of their partner's first and last functions but have each other's middle functions in a different order. For instance if you are an ESTP (Se,Ti,Fe,Ni) then the ISTJ (Si,Te,Fi,Ne) would be your normal Shadow type while the ISFJ (Si,Fe,Ti,Ne) would be your Altered Shadow, because it's essentially your normal Shadow type just with different functions in the middle.
This type is responsible for the famous ENFP/INTJ pairing, one of the most acclaimed compatibility matchings in the mbti community. This type works well because your lower two functions are potentially able to grow in an easier, less confrontational way. Your last function can grow easier because your partner has a function that can act as a liaison between your dominant and inferior function. For instance, it would be easier for an ESFP to work on their inferior Ni if they had an ISTJ partner. Through the ISTJ they can then learn how to process Si easily due to it being another sensing function and then apply that understanding to their Ni. Likewise the third function can also be strengthened by having someone who has that same function slightly higher without too much risk of falling into a Tertiary loop in the long term.