The main difference between these two bedeviled dogs is that introverted feeling is unexpressive and extraverted feeling is expressive.
Jung says that introverted feeling appears cold upon first appearance in a person that has it dominant, usually women, which isn’t true. There are just as many men that have introverted feeling as a dominant function as there are women.
Think mafia. The higher up bosses of the mafia are like extraverted feeling types. They have a broad range of feeling values that extends very far into people space. They keep up appearances and usually have a certain physiognomy which is more on the corpulent side. They are fat and pig-like. They talk like Marlon Brando in the Godfather movie. Yes, that is an exceedingly good portrait of an extraverted feeling type.
Fi types are the underlings of the mafia. They carry out order on behalf of the fat bosses that can’t talk straight but are somehow bosses nonetheless. They are the street gangsters that are beholden to the gang. They don’t think for themselves too much. They carry out orders. They do the hits. They keep to the code. They don’t question. These would be the ISFP types.
Introverted feeling is sensitive but not expressive so you can’t really tell as an outside observer how much is seething within these people. As Jung says in his book, Psychological Types, they are like women that appear cold. Introverted feeling lacks personality. Extraverted Feeling, on the other hand, epitomizes personality. Many ENFJs are the most charismatic people on the face of the earth. People like Marlon Brando, Benicio del Toro, Elvis, and on the lighter side people like Tom Cruise. All these people are ENFJs. So, that will give you a sampling of how people with Fe as a dominant function and introverted intuition as an auxiliary function will appear. In a word, charismatic. If they are enneagram point 8 ENFJs, then they will be darkly charismatic. If they are enneagram point 3 ENFJs, they will be lightly charismatic. The point is that extraverted feeling is great for actors, politicians, and anyone in show business where charisma and personality is a necessity.
Contrarily, introverted feeling is pretty much the opposite of charisma and personality. Many of the people that have it possess a quiet charm, but it often lacks the graciousness of extraverted feeling. There is a paucity to it as if the personality were eclipsed in some way. Once you get a feeling for this is becomes unmistakable.
Also, with any dominant introverted function, it can be harder to see it in a person such that an introverted feeling type person could appear more like an introverted thinking person, especially if they are an INFP. ISFPs usually appear like quiet, dark, and respectable people. They are not necessarily dark in coloring but there is an unmistakable muting to their personality. And introverted feeling is a bit like this, the feeling of not having a voice and being inarticulate. It is like having these burning feelings and desires that are very difficult to express openly. So, there is generally quite a lot of secrecy with these folks. Like the mafia thing I was talking about above.
Extraverted feeling types, on the other hand, often express themselves quite well, but it is often through artistic expression where this flowers in the fullest. Think those fat and wailing opera singers like Pavarotti. They can blow you away with the fullness and power of their expression.
So far, I have been talking about these two functions when they are dominant functions. It can be quite illustrative to consider how they express when they are auxiliary functions of a type because auxiliary functions are “show functions” and this is true even if the auxiliary function is introverted.
So, ENFP and ESFP have introverted feeling as an auxiliary function, the auxiliary function generally being the function of greatest visibility in any Myers-Briggs type. For ESFPs this makes them great porn stars for example because introverted feeling is like sex itself. It is desire, magnetism, and ultra-femininity. The most sexual people in the world are ESFPs. Sex is their specialty and they can hardly help coming across in a sexual manner. Because ESFPs have extraverted sensation as a dominant function it makes them very body conscious in an unselfconscious manner. So you combine extraverted sensation and introverted feeling and you get sex itself. Extraverted sensation + introverted feeling = sex. Yes, there will be a test on this later.
Now, for ENFPs, introverted feeling as an auxiliary function manifests in a somewhat similar fashion to ESFPs because they are what is known as look-alike types in Socionics, the Russian equivalent of Myers-Briggs typology. Look-alike types have the same auxiliary function. So, on first glance they could be mistaken for each other. That is because the auxiliary function is a “show function” like I said and this show function is similar to when you put on your best face to impress other people that you don’t know.
Anyway, ENFPs often look very sexy too, especially the ones that fall at point 3 on the enneagram. However, the difference between an ENFP and ESFP, both of whom have introverted feeling as an auxiliary function is that ENFPs are much more intellectual and space-cadetish in nature than an ESFP, who are very grounded in their bodies and immediate sensory experience. The end result of this is that ENFPs, because they have extraverted intuition as a dominant function are quite out there types. They are not very conscious of their bodies and the needs of the bodies and all that. So, they are like sexy space cadets. They can be quite exotic creatures, like sexuality from another planet, an improbable creature of sex and intellectuality. Actually, intellectuality is the wrong word, but they are definitely brighter lights than ESFPs generally are.
Now let’s move on to the two Myers-Briggs types that have extraverted feeling as an auxiliary function, which would be the two look-alike types of INFJ and ISFJ. The commonality here is that both types tend to be artistic and people-pleasing in their immediate demeanors. These two types are great with people, are very articulate types, and good communicators. When they are at their best they are displaying tact, diplomacy, and smoothing-over powers of no mean order. INFJ and ISFJ know how to put other people at ease.
Alright, getting back to the mob bosses, the Vito Corleones of the world. These are the types that have dominant extraverted feeling. They have a general background of know-how with the instinctive organization of people, where everybody belongs in the general ranks of their mafia organization. They know when someone is growing too powerful and needs to be taken down a peg, and they recognize new talent that should be promoted and bumped up a rank. This is their general worldview. The world is full of people with different potentialities and they can instinctively sense who is who and where they belong. This is extraverted judgment in general but with extraverted feeling it is more of a felt and unanalytical, non-metric, messy, and imprecise type thing than the extraverted thinking type way of sorting things out. Extraverted thinking is the other extraverted judging function and because it is a thinking function, they tend to be better with things rather than people. Which is not to say they won’t treat people like things because they do it all the time across this lovely world of ours.
Now, these mob bosses are more the extraverted feeling types with an introverted intuition auxiliary. The other type of dominant extraverted feeling is the ESFJ type, who has introverted sensation as an auxiliary rather than introverted intuition. The upshot of this is that ESFJs are a lot nicer and gentler than ENFJs. They still have the dominant extraverted feeling like ENFJs but introverted sensation as an auxiliary paints quite a different picture than having introverted intuition as an auxiliary function.
Picture the fat and happy chef. So, the commonality is that ENFJs and ESFJs are both fat. But, ENFJs are angry and unhappy as a general rule unless they are Tom Cruise, and ESFJs are like pigs rolling happily in the mud.
ESFJs, with their dominant extraverted feeling, aided and abetted by introverted sensation, have no great conflicts in their nature. They are lovers of good food, good entertainment, and good sex, and whatever is good and pleasurable. ENFJs would be like this too if they didn’t have introverted intuition as their auxiliary function. Introverted intuition ruins everything. It makes the owners of such a function tortured, complex, enigmatic, inarticulate, visionary, and just generally unhappy with the way things are. The upshot of that is that ENFJs tend to be sinister, cruel, and people-abusing and using types.
This is because of introverted intuition and not because of extraverted feeling in and of itself. Extraverted feeling in and of itself is pretty fat, dumb, and happy. It is enjoyment, entertainment, and expansiveness.
Introverted feeling tends to be the opposite of those positive type of feelings. It tends to bring on feelings of love, devotion, loyalty (or betrayal when it gets tired of being taken advantage of), maudlin and sentimental feelings, trust, honor, authenticity and basically all these type of feelings that can set you up to be a tortured and tormented soul. Love alone will bring you all kinds of sorrow whether you intended for this to be the case or not. In the matter of love, since it is such an important topic, I will leave off and say that in general introverted feeling desires to be the giver of love and that extraverted feeling is most fortunate to be in the position of receiving love. Them is the general rules. If you don’t like them, consult your local god. I didn’t make these rules.
O, and I forgot to mention INFPs. Well, that should tell you something right there about being an introverted feeling dominant type with auxiliary extraverted intuition. Nobody notices you.
Except for that special someone. Wink, wink.
As far as INFPs go, they are good with being noticed by the special someone only.
Great post!
Wink, wink.
I see a LOT of hatred toward NFs coming from this page. WTF?
Listen dude, I don’t hate NFs. And even if I did, it is my prerogative to do so. What are you, the Feeling Police?
‘Extraverted feeling in and of itself is pretty fat, dumb, and happy. It is enjoyment, entertainment, and expansiveness’. Sounds very negative to me… I am an INFJ. I don’t really recognize myself in this post..
I don’t really recognize you in this post either…
Are you in the witness protection program?
Hi Blake,
You mention the connection of Fe with arts. But what about Fi? I guess it is artistic in its own way too? I know well two INFPs, they are both very artistic. They write poetry, romance, they draw.
Maybe the difference is the target audience? The size of the target audience? Fe is capable of reaching a broader audience, while Fi will reach just a selected group, “that special audience”? And maybe Fi works are more difficult to interpret, since they are more subjective, more personal, less universal?
Fe is broad. Fi is deep. To use a musical analogy, Fe is pop music and Fi is blues music. So, Fe goes for mass appeal to the greatest number of people. This is what pop music does by definition, which is why it is popular. And there is a certain formula that makes this music achieve this mass good-feeling effect. Fi, by contrast, is often trying to express an emotion unadorned, a very singular and personally felt emotion. If you are not tuned into this particular Fi emotional experience you may not resonate with it at all. However, when you finally do get it, the Fi emotional experience will sit in your bones and haunt you like a ghost. Often this Fi effect is achieved in art with minimalism. It could be a little bend here, or a twist there, or a slight shift in tonality that speaks universes. Often, it is hard to know how that effect was achieved technically. The reason for this is because Fi and technicalities have zero to do with each other. Fi is that elusive effect in art. You are moved but you may not know why from a technical perspective or by breaking everything down into component parts.
With Fe it is usually clear how the effect was achieved; great melody-line, superb harmonies, stellar orchestration and so on. The conventional artistic standards done well or not well.
Fi art can affect you even if it is using a rather common melody, chord progression, or arrangement. For some reason it just strikes a nerve and resonates deeply beyond its conventional strappings.
You often know Fi is present when some people are deeply moved by something and other people are like, “What the fuck do you see in that?” That kind of extreme. Fe is usually well-liked and understood by most people. Thus, it popularity. Its pretty hard to hate an Fe-type thing unless it is taken to insipid extremes. Fe is the human-appealable and feel-good function.
Thanks! That’s so interesting! I especially liked the musical analogy. Actually, all the musical examples (and the subtle musical references 😉 spread across the articles are cool!
Fortunately, when nobody notices you are there you get lots of private introvert time.
True.
Belatedly reading this post, I noticed this: “Extraverted feeling in and of itself is pretty fat, dumb, and happy. It is enjoyment, entertainment, and expansiveness.”
This is a very interesting way of explaining this function. When you say that for INFJs, “Fe is magic”, this actually makes so much sense to me, to think of Fe as a happy pig enjoying life. What is pleasurable? What gives body-happiness, wordless mind-happiness, right now? Is that Fe for an INFJ who’s stuck in their mindscape? Because I have experienced this so often, that my gloom lifts if I can go be in the sun and the wind near some trees, the thinking stops, I feel peaceful and good, like an animal sunning myself. And I’m never, or very rarely, able to achieve that feeling through thinking. (Perhaps it sounds ridiculous that I think I ought to be able to achieve that feeling through thinking.)
Yes, it’s part of the equation.
This. And getting dirty in sea mudflats.
I don’t think you realise the main benefit of introverted feeling: being able to understand your own emotions and thus extending this to others and so being able to empathise with them. This means that introverted feelers are among the greatest writers, poets, artists, actors and activists and of all time. It is a very powerful function that I don’t think you understand fully probably because it’s not one of your top 2 functions.
Fi is in my top 8 functions so I think I do understand it just fine.
Or maybe not.
However, since when does someone have to be something in order to understand it? Haven’t you heard of the benefit of seeing something from a distance? It’s called objectivity (or the nearest facsimile thereof). Outsider perspectives are valuable. They prevent insularity and an overly self-congratulatory demeanor.
I might add a broadening description to go along with Blakes dichotomy of broad/deep which might help illuminate how Fe and Fi contribute differently to a person’s creative instinct.
Fe, as well as being broad, is also inclined towards objectivity and responsiveness to the human needs of the object. This feeling tone is what informs a Fe type’s art. Fi, on the other hand, is oriented towards and primarily concerned with the human needs of the individual artist.
Fe tends more towards the modern idea of “song writer”, whereas Fi tends more towards the idea of “lyricist”. The former writes songs, but the creative act is extrinsic to the writer, who is attempting to create something that appeals to everyone collectively. (If you just reflexively said “You mean they appeal to the lowest common denominator”, you might be a Fi type.) Fi, on the other hand, doesn’t care what you think so much, and it writes its music as an expression of its own inner values and nature. To the Fe song writer, if no one listens to his music, then he will eeither stop creating, or will change his artistic expression to again be responsive to the needs of the many. Fi doesn’t care if no one, ever, anywhere, approves of her music. She didn’t write it to make you happy, she wrote it to express the feelings and urges she feels so deeply inside of her. She will continue to write if you buy an album, and if no one buys an album, she will write still write in the way that is most real and “true” to her as an individual.
I also have this vague sense that Fe is like clasical music (established, well regarded by everyone, familiar and able to be more or less correctly understood by the average person in which the culture in which the music was written.) Fi, on the other hand, might be jazz. Unpredictable on the surface, but adhering to deeper, higher spiritual principles. There is no right way to Fi, but Fe does not share this perspective (if your feelings are not congruent or harmonious with others, then feelings can be evaluated to be disorderd and made to change.
Fe gets a bad rap when it comes to creativity, largely because it is so very conventional. Fi, on the other hand, is individualistic and principled, which is part of what contributes to the perceived creativity of Fi artists. After all, there’s a fine line between “this is new” and “this is new to me”. Fi might not be any more original or creative than Fe, but it is at least arising from a single point of perspective, so it is far more likely to *seem* new.
I also can’t quite get past this idea that Fi is somehow easier to understand and process than Fe is, and that this is why artists tend to be more likely to be Fi types and Fe types.
I’m not going to be dogmatic about it (because I’m INTJ and, well, Fi ain’t my most natural way of being), but I have the exact opposite understanding of Fi. Fi is incredibly esoteric in the way it expresses it’s views of the world, but it is also maddeningly perfectionistic and obsessed with ensuring that the image of itself that is put out into the exterior world is accurate down to the most minute detail.
Fe, on the other hand, is objective. Fe arises in response to objects, not a priori like Fi. This means that 1) Fe is easy to get to know, because it is predictable to the degree the individual’s objective world is predictable. Since the world is rational, Fe also tends to be rational (meaning “existing and expressing itself for fairly knowable and understandable reasons). (Also, to head off any confusion, in my usage rational means “happening for a reason”. Logic means “happening because it makes the most sense, or conforming to the rules of reason.” The world is rational, meaning it operates according to cause and effect. It is not, however logical. There often is no logically necessary connection that causes one phenomena to follow another.)
Fe is also outward looking, responsive to the opinions of the outward majority, and far more motivated to act on the object in order to lessen any disharmony. I would argue this makes Fe *incredibly* easy to predict, understand, and adapt to for Fe users. It’s predictable for one, so if one develops in an even sort of normal way, one becomes familiar with the patterns of ones own emotional life relatively early in life. Fe wants to adjust itself to the feelings of others in the world around it, but it also has a greater tendency to express itself and make its views know (on the whole). So it is both looking outward to make sure it’s aware of what it should be feeling, while other Fe users are simultaneously putting their Fe values out into the world, where they can be seen, understood, and responded to by others. It’s as if Fe creates a sort of positive feedback loop which ensures Fe knows what it needs to know in order to be Fe.
Fi, in contrast, is not able to be observed so easily by the user, and even when it is the similarites between one Fi expression to another can be highly individualistic, making it harder for the Fi type to just look around at society in order to figure out how to do its thing. And since it is also critical, resistant to anything that doesn’t fit what it decided on earlier, perfectionistic, as well as tending to respect the unique values and perspectives of each individual, the Fi user basically has no reliable way of getting any help with its Fi other than long, attentive personal experience.
There’s not more Fi artists because Fi is easier to understand. There are more Fi artists because Fi is both unrelenting and persistent, yet inscrutable while mainting impossible standards before it will let the Fi user relax because they FINALLY became aware of all the ins and outs and nuances that Fi discovers in itself in response to it’s own subjective world. In other words, there’s more Fi artists precisely because Fi is HARDER to understand, and so people are driven to expressive outlets or careers as a means of trying to get some insight into their feelings. The Fi artist creates because the option is death.
And this might hint at a corresponding (but seemingly inconsistent) statement about Fi and the arts: Fi puts out more expressive artists because Fi demands so much more tinkering, observing, analyzing and and “coming to terms with”, and in ways that are very specific to each individual, that the Fi population just has more hours practicing at getting to know their Fi. Not because they’re inherently more attuned to their feelings, but because Fi has basically held a gun to the Fi user’s head since the day they became conscious, and it wouldn’t leave the ego in peace until it met it’s demands for understanding and Fi awareness.
Lastly, this is also consistent with something I notice about Fi which doesn’t seem to be quite so true of the Fe types: The Fi types (consisting of all 8 types who have Fi somewhere in their top 4 functions) seem to show two approaches to dealing with the overbearing and impossible nature of their Fi. The dom and aux
Fi types tend to get it enough in hand that they can then go out into the world and express their truth. The tertiary and inferior Fi types, however, seem to tend to resolve the conflict with Fi by simply become deaf to the voice of their Fi. There seems to be no middle grouns with Fi – you either master it, and therefore win some peace, or you just silence it through repression in order to achieve some sort of stability.
The Fe types, in my observation, don’t show this same starkly polarized approach to their feelings. Fe seems to vary from dominant to inferior in more graduated ways that are predictable based on the nature of the functional slot that Fe is centered in. So INTP/ISTP are definitely not as skilled as ESFJ/ENFJ, and when viewed in that light, they seem like highly undeveloped Fe types.
But I think that might be the wrong comparison. Compare the relative size/shape of IxTP Fe to ExFJ Fe, and you can see how there are still familiarities in how they all tend to feel about things. Compare the feeling of INFP/ISFP to the feeling of ENTJ/ESTJ, and it can appear that ExTJ just has no feelings, and in fact oesn’t have any idea what to do with them or how to respond to them in themselves and others, so they just say “fuck it” and instead turn to control and power to fill the space left behind by their repression of feelings.
@ Mark, this is an old post/comment but your responses are literally my favourite comments ever. Fi held a gun to the users head so long that it HAS to master it? Fucking right.
Fi held a gun to the users head so long that it HAS to master it?
What does that mean?
Fe arises in response to objects, not a priori like Fi.
In my opinion, this is an error and a rather common one.
Hilarious. You are a genius.
Signed, Kit. ESFJ
Meh, I didn’t find this to be very accurate at all and leaning towards a way over simplification of fi and aggrandized view of Fe. This guy obviously likes to hear himself talk and thinks he’s very smart, but it’s clear to me that he doesn’t understand fi at all.
While this text is interesting, I’m also seeing a negative bias towards some personalities in this text, mixed with partial unobjective statements. The answers of the author seem to confirm that. Weird… But that’s just my opinion
Hey, I think your on to something!
“Introverted intuition ruins everything.”
Ha, agreed! But how would you square this with the idea of Ni being magic for ENFJs? Curious INFJ mind(s) want to know.