The model
Everything grows from three yes/no lines. One line splits into two poles; three lines give the four bare functions their two-line images and then the eight functions their trigrams; eight functions arranged in eight positions give the sixteen types and their 64 cell-hexagrams. This page shows each rung with its own words from the dataset.
The three lines
Each axis is one line of every trigram; each pole is one way of setting that line.
Attitude · the top line
⚋ extraverted 陰 · yin
Libido faces outward, oriented by the object, breadth, the Many.
Sounds like
- Acts on what is outside before checking an inner model.
- Energy spreads across people, objects, and situations.
- Thinks aloud; the room is part of the thinking process.
- Comfortable deciding from visible, shared facts.
- Bored by long private incubation when action is possible.
- Remembers conversations by what was said and done.
- The object decides: what is actually out there outranks a private read of it.
- Trusts what can be verified between people.
⚊ introverted 陽 · yang
Attention turns inward, oriented by the subject, depth, and internal coherence.
Sounds like
- Checks an inner picture before acting on the world.
- Energy concentrates in a private line of thought or feeling.
- Needs silence to finish a thought properly.
- Comfortable keeping a conviction the people around them have not yet reached.
- Irritated when pushed to perform a half-formed inner process.
- Remembers by meaning and fit, not by surface detail.
- The subject decides: the inner frame outranks the object's immediate claim.
- Trusts what stands inside even when everyone present disagrees.
Mode · the middle line
⚋ perceiving 陰 · yin
Stays open; receives and identifies without closing on a verdict.
Sounds like
- Prefers to keep gathering before deciding.
- Notices what is changing before what should be done.
- Comfortable leaving a question open longer than others prefer.
- Reads situations for texture, not verdict.
- Irritated by premature closure.
- Remembers impressions and atmospheres.
- Explores before committing.
- Treats new input as potentially revising everything.
⚊ judging 陽 · yang
Reaches closure by setting criteria and organizing information within a frame.
Sounds like
- Wants a decision, rule, or standard on the table.
- Notices what is wrong or missing before what is interesting.
- Uncomfortable when a meeting ends with no conclusion.
- Reads situations for what they imply should happen.
- Irritated by endless option-spinning.
- Remembers conclusions and rulings.
- Commits, then adjusts.
- Treats new input as something to sort, not merely receive.
Source · the bottom line
⚋ explicit 陰 · yin
Trusts the literal surface: the register of sensation and thinking.
Sounds like
- Works from what was actually said, shown, or recorded.
- Suspicious of readings that skip the text.
- Prefers examples to abstractions.
- Checks details others treat as decoration.
- Believes clarity means saying exactly what is meant.
- Trusts the body of precedent over the flash of insight.
- Wants the spec, the receipt, the citation.
- Treats metaphor as suspect until grounded.
⚊ implicit 陽 · yang
Trusts what is suggested, implied, or between the lines: the register of intuition and feeling.
Sounds like
- Works from what the situation is pointing toward.
- Suspicious of appearances that hide the real pattern.
- Prefers the pattern that explains many examples.
- Notices what is missing or unsaid.
- Believes clarity means naming what was already felt.
- Trusts the flash of insight over the incomplete record.
- Wants the gist, the trajectory, the why.
- Treats literalism as missing the point.
The four bare functions
The four bare functions: mode × source, before attitude is applied. The Four Images midpoint of the 1 → 2 → 4 → 8 generation sequence (source cut, then mode, then attitude); adding the attitude line doubles each into its two function-attitudes. In assessment: a mode verdict plus a source verdict locate the bare function; the attitude verdict then selects between its twins.
S · Sensation
perceiving + explicit · doubles into Se and Si
The reality function: registers what is actually given (the report of the senses and the body) without interpreting, generalizing, or comparing. Those are the other three functions' work on what sensation has delivered.
Se (present contact) trusts what the senses show right now; Si (the archive) trusts the inner reverberation of repeated contact: what the thing has felt like across every encounter.
N · Intuition
perceiving + implicit · doubles into Ne and Ni
Perceives what is not explicitly there: the next possibility, the underlying pattern, the implied trajectory. It reports that the implication is there without deciding whether it is right: evaluation belongs to the judging functions.
Ne (possibility) perceives the web of implications around outer objects: what they could become, what they connect to; Ni (the long reading) perceives the web of implications within inner contents: what the symbol is converging toward.
T · Thinking
judging + explicit · doubles into Te and Ti
Orders content by impersonal logical relation: inference, definition, non-contradiction. The criterion is impersonal: the same criterion would apply in any mind.
Te (execution) orders external operations: efficiency, throughput, the system that gets the result; Ti (strict definition) orders internal coherence: definition, consistency, the model that stays together.
F · Feeling
judging + implicit · doubles into Fe and Fi
Orders content by value: felt weight, what a decision costs and what it preserves. Judgment, not emotion: feeling decides, emotion is what affects do. Rational in Jung's sense; the criterion is personal, living between the subject and the content judged.
Fe (group-feeling) orders the life between people: what the group and the bond require; Fi (private conviction) orders the inner life: what one will and will not stand behind.
The two function-axes
A different cut of the same eight: how a function relates to context. The intersection of the two cuts gives the four temperaments.
perception
The four temperaments
fully contextual: goal-oriented in both perception and judgment
The universe revolves around them. The ultimate criterion of value is their own person: its needs, desires, and consequent goals. They cannot see or act disinterestedly: they are blind without a particular context to operate in or a goal to strive toward, and as they know their own context best, it is best to attend to their own goals first. The world is seen in rich lighting, but only from one angle; a thing's value depends on its usefulness from the subject's point of view. Their dream is that what they will IS what happens in the world. Built to command and to be obeyed, and loathe to bow: an aloof solipsism.
Markers and probes
- egocentric utilitarianism
- aiming
- optimization
- elitism and rank
- psychic efficiency
- self-identification sympathy
- defensive purity
- command
- First-person sovereignty grammar: 'my terms', 'my standard', 'what I'm building'
- Rank-talk: better/worse, superior/inferior, worth my time
- Sympathy expressed as self-recognition: 'I've been exactly there'
- Contempt-markers for committees, consensus, and forms ('forms are for mediocrity')
- Ask who gets to judge their work: expect 'ultimately, me' (or a chosen standard indistinguishable from them).
- Ask about an obligation they honored against their own interest: expect reframing as self-chosen, or visible chafing.
- Ask how they handle group decisions: expect strategies for steering or exiting, rarely submitting.
fully universal: fair-minded in both perception and judgment
Opposed to the monarchic in every essential way: they revolve around the universe. Criteria for truth and value are drawn not from their own needs but from everyone else's; they assume an Archimedean perch outside the chaos, where the whole issue can be considered calmly and all at once. The many rule them: they do not rule the many. Kant's categorical imperative is their purest expression: if everyone could reasonably agree to it, then it is moral. They refuse to trust the heart or instincts; disinterest and impartiality are the proper vestments of truth.
Markers and probes
- trans-contextual
- universal compromise
- duty
- impartiality
- selflessness
- rule of law
- the Archimedean perch
- moral worth in the maxim
- Universalization tests spoken aloud: 'what if everyone did that?'
- Duty grammar: ought, fair, everyone's entitled, no exceptions, including for me
- Self-deprecation about their own preferences ('but that's just me, ignore that')
- Procedural appeals: due process, hearing all sides, sleeping on it
- Offer them an advantageous exception to a rule: expect refusal or visible discomfort.
- Ask who should decide a contested question: expect a process (vote, review, principle), never a person.
- Ask what their own desires count for: expect them ranked last, on principle.
hybrid: monarchic (contextual) perception with democratic (universal) judgment
Chief interest and problem: communication, the universalization of an essentially untranslatable private context. Language and reason become tools for guiding others toward sharing their vision; words are a pointing at what ordinary wording cannot fully convey, and truth is something one sees BY MEANS of language rather than something contained in it. The theocrat begins in the mountains and descends to the city, leading everyone up the pyramid to a shared point of unity. Plato's curriculum, years of dialectic arranged so the acolyte finally beholds the Form of the Good, is the temperament's blueprint.
Markers and probes
- communication of the untranslatable
- gesticulation toward the ineffable
- initiation
- unification
- the descent from the mountain
- sacred order
- conviction
- guiding others to see
- Speech that adjusts register per listener while the doctrine stays fixed
- Initiation grammar: 'once you see it', 'you're not ready for the full version yet'
- Unity metaphors: summit, path, awakening, the same truth under different names
- Testimonial certainty about meaning paired with universal moral framing
- Ask how they explain their deepest conviction: expect staged translation ('it depends who's asking') and faith that seeing it changes a person.
- Ask whether truth is personal or universal. Expect: universal, but only reachable through personal seeing.
- Ask what frustrates them: expect the untranslatability of what they see, and audiences that refuse the climb.
hybrid: democratic (universal) perception with monarchic (contextual) judgment
The theocrat's inverse: retrieves the ineffable FROM articulated space. Where the theocrat leads everyone up the pyramid to a shared point of unity, the anarchist leads everyone back down to each person's own point of individuality: from the same nourishing soil, a thousand different seeds sprout, and each must bloom its own way. The anarchist founds the right to contextual ethics upon the universality of human experience: we can trust each other to be different because we are only ever different within the circumference of a shared humanity (Emerson, Twain).
Markers and probes
- individuation
- back down the pyramid
- every flower its own bloom
- contextual ethics on universal ground
- dissent
- self-responsibility
- the level playing field plus liberty
- retrieving the ineffable
- Anti-authority grammar aimed at imposed contexts: 'who decided that?', 'says who?'
- Common-man appeals: plain speech prized over jargon; suspicion of experts' loftiness
- 'Everyone's got their own way': individuality defended on shared-humanity grounds
- Self-responsibility refrains: earn it, own it, work it out yourself
- Ask about a rule they respect: expect respect conditional on its leaving room for each person's own way.
- Ask if people are basically alike or basically different. Expect: alike at root, and that's exactly why they must be left to differ.
- Ask about gurus and philosophers. Expect deflation: nothing there the human race didn't already know.
The four arcs
Four kinds of developmental work, each at one position, running simultaneously with different emphasis across a life.
The Auxiliary · Auxiliary (Sun Wukong's chair) · nigredo (the blackening: the dominant's complacency dissolved)
young adulthood
Consciously building the Auxiliary into a reliable skill, often by imitating a respected model. It feels effortful and slightly false at first, until execution becomes fluent and others recognize that competence. Structurally, this crosses into the attitude not natively occupied.
Integrated: The developed skill stays permeable to the ruling drive it was built to serve: competence in service, not a replacement identity.
Falls and detection cues
- brittle: the Wall: the auxiliary over-built into a defensive perimeter; competence hardened into a fortress that stands in for the dominant drive instead of serving it
- flooded: the Counterfeit: the auxiliary performed as surface persona with none of its source under it (the false-Wukong); dropping the cross this way opens the way to the Loop
- Reports of effortful, slightly false skill-building in a respected mentor's image
- Identity increasingly organized around a competence that visibly tires them
- Young-adult narratives of 'learning to be taken seriously' in a second register
- Wall signal: competence discussed as armor; Counterfeit signal: fluent gestures with no felt conviction behind them
The Inspiring · Inspiring (Guanyin's chair; the tertiary in Grant terms) · albedo (the whitening: the rejected principle emerging as inner presence)
mid-adulthood
Learning to act on a direction you did not author: a teacher, tradition, or real constraint that you hunger for but do not skillfully use. The call has to be received, not willed into a private possession.
Integrated: The inspiring function works as an opening, with external structure supporting the growth, rather than as a mirror you pace inside alone.
Falls and detection cues
- brittle: Estrangement: the Inspiring call is admired at a distance but refused entry and left unanswered
- flooded: the Loop: the inspiring call fused inward and taken as one's own; the dominant joined to its same-attitude tertiary, mode-balanced but attitude-collapsed; a MIRROR the type paces inside. Two presentations of the one fall: the senex (settled, rigid, prematurely authoritative) and the puer (restless, perpetually deferring)
- Midlife hunger for a register they admire but visibly miss (the reach that comes out slightly wrong)
- Received form: talk of a teacher, tradition, or discipline they submitted to, experienced as humbling.
- Loop signal: the conscious life runs entirely in one attitude, self-taught certainty, no external structure, the auxiliary's register absent
- Estrangement signal: reverent talk about a calling never once acted on
The Nemesis · sub-inspiring (Zhu Bajie's chair) · caput mortuum (the dead head: the residue that does not transmute)
Lifelong; sharpens in later life.
The craving at the Nemesis position requires containment rather than conversion; it returns on schedule and must be managed again each week. The Dominant is partly defined by what this craving cannot become. Trying to integrate this craving as if patient engagement would transform it usually destabilizes the practitioner instead.
Integrated: Containment without feud or binge, marked by dry recognition that the craving has returned.
Falls and detection cues
- brittle: the Feud: white-knuckle suppression so rigid it secretly feeds the very appetite it fights (surrender in slow motion)
- flooded: Indulgence: surrender to the nemesis appetite outright
- A lifelong, unchanged aversion the person can narrate across decades ('it always comes back')
- Resentment (not mere incompetence) toward one specific register: the resent-heuristic
- Feud signal: moralized war stories against the appetite, told with disproportionate energy.
- Indulgence signal: cyclical capitulation narratives ('every few months I just give in')
- Integrated signal: dry amusement at the appetite's punctuality
The Catalyst · Catalyst (sub-primitive) engaging toward the Primitive (the Jungian inferior). · rubedo → lapis (the reddening toward the philosophers' stone; asymptotic, never possessed once for all)
deepens through late life
The Primitive (inferior) function cannot be developed as a reliable tool; the practice is engaging the recurring catalyst trial in that register over time. Doing so does not turn a person into the opposite type, but matures how the Dominant relates to what it had walled out.
Integrated: The primitive function serves as footing to stand on rather than a skill to display: late ease in a once-dismissed register, used without being claimed as an achievement.
Falls and detection cues
- brittle sub primitive: Starvation: the catalyst-trial refused chapter after chapter; the deep axis never develops
- flooded sub primitive: the Churn: the trial met but never converted; every recurrence a fresh crisis, no work taken
- brittle primitive: Exile: the inferior banished and chronically walled out; the long refusal that precedes the eruption
- flooded primitive: the Grip: the inferior erupts out-of-character under acute stress in archaic, all-or-nothing form, and passes when the stress passes (Quenk), often leaving the embarrassment that re-walls it (Grip receding into deeper Exile)
- A recurring life-trial in the same register across decades (burnout, the body, the returning ordeal)
- Starvation signal: the trial's whole register dismissed as irrelevant for years at a time
- Churn signal: each recurrence narrated as a brand-new crisis with no accumulated learning
- Grip signal: recent out-of-character episodes in the primitive function's register, followed by embarrassment
- Integrated signal: late-life ease in the once-dismissed register, present as atmosphere, not skill
The sixteen conditions
Every position can fail in two directions: too much control (walled, refused, starved) or too little control (overrun, fused, erupted). Sixteen named falls in all; each names its correction. The two directions are not separate rooms; they feed each other in a loop: the crackdown causes the flood, and the flood justifies the next crackdown.
The eruption: What the tightening excludes does not disappear; it builds pressure outside awareness until it bursts through, and too much control becomes too little all at once.
The crackdown returns: The eruption passes and leaves embarrassment, and the embarrassment argues for a harder clamp, so the loop closes. Each position below names its own version of both turns.
The exit is a different schedule of contact, not a stronger will. A bolted door makes the knocking louder; a door left open lets the visitor move in; the practice is to answer, give the visitor its due, and close the door kindly. The loop runs on contact that is rare and extreme; contact that is frequent and mild leaves nothing to build up and erupt.
Inflation (too much control)
the ruling drive gone rigid; the integration's gifts mistaken for the ego's own (the mana-personality)
Correct by yield.
Abdication (too little control)
the orientation's own line surrendered; the ruling drive dissolved into whatever the moment presses
Correct by hold.
Bolt (too much control)
the Sub-dominant races ahead and overrides the Dominant with raw survey, rigidifying into a fortress of its own findings
Correct by yield.
Drift (too little control)
the survey spins for its own sake, feeding nothing back to the dominant
Correct by hold.
Wall (too much control)
competence over-built into a defensive perimeter; the cross to the opposite attitude dropped; the work sealed off
Correct by yield.
Counterfeit (too little control)
the auxiliary goes slack: gestures performed with no dominant vision under; mimicry answering to no inner line (opens the way to the Loop)
Correct by hold.
Understudy (too much control)
the part learned cold and run privately, but the understudy never goes on; rehearsal perfected, performance never given
Correct by yield.
Spill (too little control)
the private rehearsal register leaks out as though it were the finished public one; the half-formed passed off as proven
Correct by hold.
Estrangement (too much control)
the inspiring call admired at a distance but refused entry; the call goes unanswered
Correct by yield.
the Loop (too little control)
the inspiring call fused inward as one's own rather than received from beyond; mode-balanced, attitude-collapsed; two presentations: senex (rigid) and puer (deferring)
Correct by hold.
Feud (too much control)
rigid suppression that secretly feeds the compulsion it fights
Correct by yield.
Indulgence (too little control)
surrendering outright to the compulsive drive
Correct by hold.
Exile (too much control)
the inferior banished and chronically walled out, never thawed: the long refusal that precedes the eruption
Correct by yield.
the Grip (too little control)
the inferior erupts out-of-character under acute stress in archaic, all-or-nothing form and passes with the stress: often mistaken for transformation (Quenk); its aftermath re-walls the seat (Grip receding into deeper Exile)
Correct by hold.
Starvation (too much control)
the recurring trial refused so long that the deep axis never develops
Correct by yield.
the Churn (too little control)
the trial met but never converted: every recurrence a fresh crisis, no work taken
Correct by hold.
The words this site uses
Each term defined once, in the sense every page uses it.
- Cognitive function
- One of the eight ways attention can move: Se, Si, Ne, Ni, Te, Ti, Fe, Fi. Each is a bare function (S, N, T, F) taken in one attitude (extraverted or introverted).
- Position
- One of the eight roles every personality fills: Dominant, Sub-dominant, Auxiliary, Sub-auxiliary, Inspiring, Nemesis, Primitive, Catalyst. The position decides what a function becomes in a life.
- Type
- One way of arranging the eight functions in the eight positions, one each. There are sixteen types; each carries Pierce's name for the figure it tends to become (the Alchemist, the Swashbuckler).
- Hexagram
- One function in one position: the function's trigram stacked over the position's trigram gives one of the 64 hexagrams. Each is shared by exactly two of the sixteen types.
- Too much control and too little control
- Each position can fail in two directions: too much control (walled, refused, starved) or too little control (overrun, fused, erupted). The sixteen falls have names (the Loop, the Grip, Starvation), each shown with what it means and its correction, and the two directions feed each other in a loop: over-control builds the pressure that erupts, and the eruption's aftermath re-tightens the control.
- Temperament
- One of four family resemblances (Monarchic, Democratic, Theocratic, Anarchic) given by how a type sets its two context dials. Four types share each temperament.
- Arc
- One of four kinds of developmental work (auxiliary, inspiring, nemesis, catalyst), each at one position, all running through a life with different emphasis at different times.
- Register
- How strongly a pattern is being expressed. The same type can run at everyday strength or at full historical extreme; the exemplar figures on each page illustrate the extreme, not the reader's peer group.