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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