Daily Excerpt: Understanding the Critic (Quinelle) - Introduction

 


Excerpt from Understanding the Critic (Quinelle) - 

Introduction

Do you ever think you were born into the wrong family? Ever wonder what on earth your gifts are?

This book is the second 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 Critic personality type, the Introverted, Intuitive, Thinker, Irrational psychological type. This book will help you understand the Critic personality around you—and if you are a Critic, 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 even read all of the books.)

About Socionics

As hinted at 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). The field of Socionics has moved in directions beyond those taken by 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, creating greater mutual understanding in the academic classroom, psychotherapy, and research. 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 type in the four-type expression of personality, which more closely reflects the original suggestion of Jung: Rational and Irrational (Jung/Socionics) vs. Judging and Perceiving (MBTI). 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 Critic would likely be an INTP on the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. However, the correspondence between Socionics and the MBTI are not 100%. Not all who test as an INTP on the MBTI would test as Critics in Socionics. 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, 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, 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 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). We very quickly found ourselves on a first name basis and 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 supposed 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 then 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 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 and a book on cognitive style and personality type for the K-12 classroom, which brought me to the attention of the socionists in Moscow. Having met with them, and knowing that I was headed for St. Petersburg, they handed me off, through their network, to Dmytry, and 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 to it (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 Critic is the second 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 Critic,” contains both specific information about the Critic 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!

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