Welcome
This is a recreation of the original Lenore Thomson Exegesis Wiki by Ben Kovitz. Why do this? You can learn more on the About page.
For those familiar with Myers-Briggs but not function attitudes or Jungian functions, the Main Propositions and Not Personality will be of interest.
Original Introduction
Welcome to the Lenore Thomson exegesis wiki.
Lenore Thomson is the author of Personality Type: An Owner's Manual, a book that takes the Myers-Briggs personality type system back to its roots in Jungian psychology. Or perhaps redefines Myers-Briggs as a vocabulary for analyzing politics and public discourse. We don't really know. On this web site, we try to figure out what she's talking about. You're invited to help (see below).
About this web site
Lenore Thomson's book is simply written, filled with examples and analogies from popular TV shows like Star Trek and The X Files. Even so, it can be maddeningly difficult to understand. She touches on a wide range of deep and broad topics from ancient philosophy to Sufism to contemporary pop culture. She seems to have something very definite in mind by her many terms with nonobvious meanings. She never really quite defines them, though, and it's difficult to pin down her meaning.
Lenore is the first popular author to go into depth about what the function attitudes are, and she turns Myers-Briggs from a system of personality classification to a path of personal growth, something like the Enneagram. Her book might also be a vocabulary of mental heuristics, a unified view of many conflicting strands of philosophic thought (perhaps what Carl Jung intended), and an analysis of how and why people's rhetorical expectations sometimes clash. We don't really know quite what to make of her book--hence this web site.
This wiki is a place where we explore what Lenore Thomson is talking about by trying to put it into our own words--exegesis. The text on this wiki is written by anyone who cares to post, and edited and rewritten by anyone who cares to edit and rewrite. We welcome all Lenore-related ideas: what's posted here is not necessarily correct, it's not checked or approved by Lenore Thomson, and it's not necessarily any clearer than Lenore's original writing. If you find what looks like an internal contradiction here, it probably is. We make no attempt to be consistent; we're looking for many different angles on Lenore's stuff. The only Lenore-related topic we're not interested in is judgements of whether her ideas are right or wrong. We leave that to the reader.
For more info about this wiki, see About This Wiki. If you'd like to edit pages here or post new pages, please see How to Participate Here.
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