Not Personality
There seems to be a great deal to personality that Lenore Thomson doesn't talk about.
Hypothesis: It's not about personality
What dimensions of personality are there? What words describe personality?
Calm, high-strung, resilient, sharp-tongued, epicurean, libertine, cautious, melancholic, choleric, sanguine, phlegmatic, peaceful, pushy, a pushover, ethereal, pragmatic, affable, cranky, crusty, curmudgeonly, scientific, curious, gullible, skeptical, free-thinking, conformist, playful, serious, rabble-rousing, hedonistic, neat, sloppy, competitive, hard-working, lazy, strong-willed, weak-willed, precious, precocious, aggressive, passive, talkative, thinks before speaking, loquacious, pugnacious, scrappy, cheerful, lugubrious, strong & silent, decisive, indecisive, persnickety, broad-minded, narrow-minded, spooky, vicious, needy, self-starter, self-absorbed, self-sufficient, clear-thinking, muddle-headed, absent-minded, orderly, ruthless, cold-blooded, charismatic, repulsive, generous, stingy, considerate, inconsiderate, eager, reticent, thick-skinned, thin-skinned, sensitive, insensitive, dominant, submissive, people-pleasing, gruff, whiny, energetic, cunning, trusting, suspicious, vengeful, unflappable, idealistic, loud, quiet, wise, patient, impatient, intellectual, thorough, diligent, tentative, know-it-all, loose, sex-crazed, attention-grabbing, achievement-oriented, detail-oriented, big-picture-oriented, practical, head-in-the-clouds, cat person, dog person, keeps it all bottled up, anal-retentive, anal-expulsive, studious, glib, stick-to-it-ive, and perhaps hundreds more.
Lenore's Main Propositions and Function Attitudes have almost nothing to do with any of this. In Lenore's writing, there is seldom even a mention of typical personality words.
So this page proposes that Lenore is not talking about personality types--despite the title of her book! She's talking about one very thin sliver of the totality of personality: which of a set of conflicting "meaning filters" tends to win the conflicts in interpreting your experience and creating a sense of self. There is no contradiction between most personality-describing terms and any given Lenore-four-letter code. For example, there can be calm ISTJs as well as high-strung ISTJs.
This should hardly come as a surprise. There are only 16 four-letter codes, and we all know how extraordinarily varied people are.
Furthermore, everyone actually has all of the above attributes--potentially if not occasionally. If you are an idealistic person, you are probably also pragmatic in some ways. If you are quiet most of the time, there are probably times when you are loud. The most trustful person is no doubt capable of the most extreme degrees of suspiciousness.
Something unusual about Lenore's writing, compared to most writing about personality, is that it focuses squarely on people's real complexity, including their ability to have opposite attributes even while holding to a complex and ever-refining consistency. Lenore's main idea is not to fit people into categories of behavior, needs, or talents, but to describe ways in which people cut themselves off from and regain access to their full spectrum of ways of thinking and behaving, and why it's necessary to do that.
Then what is Lenore saying?
Alas, it's tough to pin that down. Hence an entire wiki devoted to Lenore-exegesis.
For some overall attempts, see:
All the exegeses listed, especially Cocooning-vs.-Conforming Exegesis and Truth-and-Language Exegesis.
See also: Beyond Personality, Ecclesiastes 3:1-8
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