Am I Really an INFJ?

Okay, it's been a while. But over the past few months, I've been trying to observe myself and figure my type out definitely... but I'm going in circles and its painstakingly frustrating.
At first, I was getting more confident in my being INFJ, since some people here thought I leaned more to those preferences. Then, I noticed that I can jump to conclusions about people (but I still consider their situation afterwards), and I was thinking I might be more of an INFP. Then I took two cognitive functions tests: my Ni was actually pretty high, and I think Fi was the third most used on both of them. My least used function for both tests alternated between Si and Se. So I thought I might really be an Ni user and an INFJ.
Then I talked to my friend, and she said she wouldn't be surprised if I used Fi dominantly. So now I'm confused and lost and I don't want to be wrong in typing myself, but it bothers me by being so open-ended.
If anyone could answer, what could really be a defining point in figuring out my type? I hope to confide in some of my other friends to help too, and hopefully someone on the forums could help. Thank you!
 
MoonstoneSky said:
So now I'm confused and lost and I don't want to be wrong in typing myself, but it bothers me by being so open-ended.
!
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This sounds very INFJish, but here are some links to web pages that compare INFJs to INFPs: The first one is actually from this forum- http://www.infjs.com/forums/showthread.php?t=23470 (A quote on this page from [MENTION=407]Soulful[/MENTION] :
INFPs tend to be more comfortable with the open-ended. INFJs are more likely to be (pardon me, fellow members) control freaks.
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you can decide for yourself whether you agree)

http://www.preludecharacteranalysis.com/types/infj/vs/infp

http://theintuitivemusician.com/tell-infj-vs-infp/

It's plausible that your J and P preferences are so close that it's impossible to tell. You might have to settle with being an INFJ/P. Although, sterotypically, Judgers are more organized than Perceivers so that's one way to approach it. Why don't you make the search for your type more about understanding yourself better than finding out which specific type you are? You are unique! You could probably read descriptions from each of the sixteen personality types and find something that you identify with in each one. I understand that it bothers you to have typing yourself be so open- ended, but typing for some people isn't that easy.
 
MoonstoneSky said:
Then I took two cognitive functions tests
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As a note, both various Jungian analysts and Dario Nardi have tried making functions tests, and they rarely support that the "standard model" saying INFJs tend to have NiFeTiSe as their model, actually holds -- usually the results are a lot more free-flowing and don't follow the purported rules.

You should see the functions models they come up with as a bunch of loose patterns, rather than empirically valid models that capture the reality of the functions.
 
charlatan said:
Well you see, there are many stages in the development of understanding type -- that's stage 1, when people realize there's more to it than the test.

But, then you look deeper and realize the dichotomies hardly equal the test -- the test only has some of the most common, some of the more superficial features, and there's a lot more reading you can do about the concepts underlying them. If you pick up a good book, you realize that the dichotomies tell you a lot of things in general, and are more philosophical than you might have realized. J/P isn't just about messy vs organized, but in some sense about the drive to exact order, versus the drive to simply be, simply observe, and let things unfold. The problem is the tests only cover the most superficial version of order-exacting vs spontaneous perception, in the form of things like "do you like to follow a schedule."

What is shaky isn't necessarily the functions themselves but the idea that the dichotomies and the functions get you the same type. If anything, there's a LOT of cases of someone who is a dichotomies-introvert and yet fits something like a Te-dominant by many definitions you commonly find of Te -- why? They're factual. They prefer efficiency. They're no-nonsense and objective.

The other step is to realize there are a lot of slightly different ways of looking at the functions.

I'm not saying the functions are wrong so much as the two typologies are distinct. To get an idea just how loose the correlation is, the oft-used model that says INFJ=NiFeTiSe is NOT what the original founder of MBTI theory, Isabel Myers, thought is the model -- she said it's NiFeTeSe. This model hasn't caught on as much -- that's about it. There are numerous quantitative studies done to see if in fact there is a pattern in the MBTI test form responses that indicates significant support for these models, and they almost always show there's huge problems....which suggests that the type dynamics models are more a philosophical blueprint than empirically coinciding with the established MBTI types hat accord with the tests. It's possible the Jungian analyst John Beebe is responsible in part for popularizing the commonly used model, as he is one of the few people who is both in the Jung world and in communication with MBTI typologists. Most other Carl Jung followers, like Jung, didn't make much effort to popularize the typology, and not all of them think it is something they find useful.

Just by the way, the concept that the functions always occur as 8 is not so much due to Carl Jung as due to the more modern theorists. Some think INFJ vs INTJ is about Te-Fi vs Fe-Ti but that doesn't accord either with Jung or Myers.

It doesn't mean it isn't philosophically an interesting model --- just that these are ways of seeing the type constructs in action, not necessarily something hard and fast "THE" way to view type.
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bump, just bookmarking this, well put @charlatan
 
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