Daily Excerpt: Understanding the Analyst (Quinelle) - Introduction
Excerpt from Understanding the Analyst (Quinelle) -
Introduction
Do you ever think you were born into
the wrong family? Ever wonder what on earth your gifts are?
This book is one in a series of 16
books based on Dr. Ekaterina Filatova’s work, which was first made available to
an English-speaking population through her opus, Understanding the People Around
You: An Introduction to Socionics (2009). Each of the 16 volumes is
dedicated to a different socion or sociotype (a personality type within the
framework of a society—or in more familiar Western parlance, a psychological
type, or psychotype); these terms are used interchangeably in this book.
This particular book, the one you
are holding in your hands, is dedicated to the Analyst personality type, the Introverted,
Intuitive, Thinker, Rational psychological type. This book will help you
understand the Analyst personality around you—and if you are an Analyst, it may
help you understand yourself better. It begins where Dr. Filatova’s book leaves
off.
Note 1: It is assumed that readers
are familiar with either socionics or the MBTI—see description below. If not, a
preliminary introduction to either system of personality delineation might be
helpful, such as Filatova’s main text, Understanding the People Around You, or the initial MBTI volume, Gifts
Differing. The overview provided in this book is essentially the veneer, a
reminder of the system of socionics and the theory of Jung but not an in-depth
description of either of the systems spawned by the work of Jung.
Note 2: Those who read all 16 books,
one per socion, may skip the introductory chapters that explain the background
to the books and the theory of socionics. These pieces of information are
needed in all of the books because it is not a given that all readers will read
all of the books in the same order or will be familiar with the underlying
theory.
About Socionics
As noted above, socionics is one of
two widely accepted applications of the personality theory of Karl Jung (1921),
the other being the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, more commonly referred to as
the MBTI (Myers & Briggs, 1980). Socionics has moved in directions beyond
the MBTI and includes a greater attachment to social (as in “society”)
differences among individuals.
The MBTI, more common in the West, is
most typically used for job placement, psychotherapy, research and education (creating
greater mutual understanding in the academic classroom, prompting individual
student and small group adaptations in curriculum and instruction). The US
military services have also used the MBTI in some cases, especially in officer
education.
In the East, socionics is used for
many of these same things, with perhaps the exception of job placement and the
addition of understanding interpersonal relationships (love coaching) and tying
face types to personality types. The latter two applications of the socionics
system have no real parallel in the West.
There are some additional
significant differences between the MBTI and socionics. For the MBTI-educated reader
of this book, however, the most important are the order in which the letters
are presented (which has a far deeper significance than just order, because the
channels and functions are thereby expressed, channels and functions being a
feature of socionics not present in MBTI), the use of the nomenclature and the concept
of the final letter in the four-letter formulation of personality type. This
conceptualization of the final component of a socion or personality
type—Rational or Irrational—in the opinion of this author more closely reflects
the original suggestion of Jung. The Judging and Perceiving (MBTI) concepts,
again in the opinion of this author, differ from the original Jungian notions
in substantial ways. These differences will become clear to the reader familiar
with MBTI as the various aspects of socionics are discussed in this book.
(For those who must make
comparisons, the Analyst would likely be an INTJ on the Myers-Briggs Type
Indicator. However, the correspondence between socionics and the MBTI are not
100%. I, for example, test as an ENTJ (Socionics Entrepreneur) on the MBTI, yet
I am a Seeker (generally considered an ENTP in the MBTI categorization). There
are explanations for that; those explanations are embedded deeply into the
differing ways in which the MBTI and socionics realize the underlying Jungian
concepts, in particular Rationality and Irrationality, a subject far too
complex to go into here.)
About Dr. Ekaterina Filatova
I first met Dr. Ekaterina Filatova,
whom I came to call Katya (the Russian nickname for Ekaterina), at St.
Petersburg State University. I was a visiting scholar in Russia, a country I
had known, until shortly before I was introduced to Katya, as the Soviet Union,
more formally referred to as the USSR. While in St. Petersburg, I had been
hanging out in discussion groups led by Dr. Dmytry Lytov, a young professor in
the Department of Psychology. They were all young, these professors in the
socionics discussion group, and they were all aficionados of Katya.
One day, Dmytry asked me if I would
be able to come by in the evening. He had someone he wanted me to meet. He
seemed excited at the time, but I thought it would be just another of his
graduate students or perhaps a colleague. He had already introduced me to his
wife, Mariana, and baby son, so that was clearly not the source of his
excitement. Of course, I agreed.
When I showed up at the university
that evening, he proudly said, “I would like to introduce you to Ekaterina
Sergeevna.” (Russians use name and patronymic rather than title and surname for
formal interactions.) I held out my hand in Western fashion—after all, they all
knew I was American—and thus began a collaboration and friendship that lasted
until Katya died in February 2015 (and continues with Dmytry). Katya and I very
quickly found ourselves on a first name basis and using the informal “ty”
manner of communication, yet our letters were always signed “with deep respect,”
for that is what we had toward each other. I suppose she respected me because I
was a Westerner who could straddle cultures, had a deep interest in all things
psychological, and did not match her (and her co-patriots’) view of the
Westerner as avaricious and self-promoting. In fact, she said as much. I
respected her because she was one of the most brilliant people I have ever met,
and I fear that I shall not represent her as well as I would like in my
attempts to make her work better known in the West.
Katya graduated with an
undergraduate degree from the Department of Physics at Leningrad State
University (now called St. Petersburg State University) and a doctoral degree
in Physical and Mathematical Sciences. Perhaps that is why I found my
discussions with her to be so intellectually challenging. I have always loved
science, especially physics, in which I excelled in high school and college, but
I am a liberal arts graduate. The humanities gave me one advantage, though: a
facility with the Russian language, which made communication with Katya
possible.
Katya worked as an assistant and
then associate professor at Leningrad State University and for many years
lectured on physics at various other universities. According to Professor A. V.
Sokolov, Member of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences, who wrote the
preface to her English-language book, Understanding the People Around You:
An Introduction to Socionics, she nonetheless felt that she was missing
something important in her personal self-development. In the words of Professor
Sokolov,
She was introduced to socionics in
the late 1980s, and this acquaintance completely changed her life. Her
intellectual, emotional, and moral potential found a great field of
application. A university professor became a pioneer and discoverer of
perspectives of a new science (p. 9).
Katya became involved with socionics
(personality theory) in 1989, a little more than a decade before I met her, and
by that time had already written a couple of books on socionics theory. In the
1990s, she produced a number of additional books, each looking into socionics
from a different angle and narrowing the perspective into several subfields.
By the time I met Katya, I had
already published books in the US, in English, and in the Soviet Union and Russia,
in Russian, in the area of cognitive styles, a field that offers many parallels
to personality study, and I had ventured into Jungian psychology through the
MBTI, writing a couple of articles that were published in Russia as well as a
book on cognitive style and personality type for the K-12 classroom, which
brought me to the attention of the socionists in Moscow. I met with them at a
meeting legacized on the Internet, and then, they, knowing that I was headed
for St. Petersburg, handed me off, through their network to Dmytry. The rest is
history.
About the Genesis of This Book
Convinced that Katya had something
important to offer to the Western world, and impressed by her desire to do so,
I made a commitment to helping her with the project of publishing an
introductory work in English, based on her core book, Socionics for You.
It was quite a task. The book needed to be translated. Then, Katya needed to
add new information especially pertinent to the West (in Russian, of course),
and those new components needed to be translated. The publication was to be
published by MSI Press, but in those days, typesetting programs were regional
and not international, making it very difficult for the press to handle Katya’s
work even once it was in English. Ultimately, the book was typeset in Russia
and transferred to the American press on disk.
In spite of all the challenges, Understanding
the People Around You: An Introduction to Socionics by Dr. Ekaterina
Filatova appeared in print in the English language in 2009 and became the
seminal work on socionics in the English-speaking world. I am pleased to have
had a small part in that process.
Katya died in 2015, but her work
lives on. It continues to inspire others to explore this emerging field of
personality typology and understanding others in a Jungian vein. The Analyst
is the fourth of 16 volumes in English springing off from Katya’s seminal
English-language work. Many other books have been written in Russian as a
result of Katya’s research and writing. So, while she has personally left us,
her legacy remains and grows.
This book, dedicated to
understanding the personality type referred to by Filatova as “the Analyst,”
contains both specific information about the Analyst and, for those who are not
familiar with the parent book or with the other personality type books in this
series, the essential information about socionics, its model, functions, and
channels. This book also provides the definitions of terms that all the
offspring books will contain, thus making it useable as one part of a series or
as an independent volume. Readers who have already read another book in this
series or the parent book, can easily begin with Part 2.
Happy reading! Happy discovery!
Read more posts about socionics HERE.
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