Into the Wardrobe

Over in Caffe, we're posting our own Myers Briggs type.



So what type do you think Lewis is?

I'm thinking ENFJ

the E slightly expressed, he liked friends but he didn't like group things.
I think the N went off the scale, but I think the F might be slightly expressed too, because his interest in logic and philosophy sounds like a T as well.

And I'm not totally sure on the J vs P divide, but I'm guessing J.

Any other thoughts?

I would have said an IN .. he didn't strike me as an E from all I have read of him.

I did a google, and a few people think he was an INTJ. I certainly think he would have been more T than F.

Naturally, I'd like to claim him as an INFP since I am in INFP ;). But I guess he might be more of a J. Doesn't seem entirely like an INFJ to me though.

Why are so few people - at least online - ISs? It's a type I know nothing about and yet statistically it should be more common than INs.

Interesting....it seems to me that Lewis was more F than T. Yes, his arguments are largely based on logic, but the Lewis I got from 'Surprised by Joy' is very different....after all, his arguments need not be a reflection of his personality. Perhaps he only used them because that is what people need, but lived more like a F person.

who knows.

I think he's I, not E, because shyness doesn't really have much to do with it. Extroverts need external stimuli, introverts are fine with just their internal 'life'. One can be an introvert and friendly/talkative. Lewis seems to be an introvert because of his preoccupation with 'Joy', etc.

I have always thought Lewis was INTJ (I am INTP so you can allow for my prejudices and misunderstandings). I don't think an interest in poetry is particularly a feeling thing, if anything it is intuitive, about seeing and making wholes out of disparate matterials. As I understand it what Jung meant by feeling was roughly what other psychologists (I am thinking especially of Carl Rogers) would call valuing, though it has an emotional component it is primarily a form of judgement.

I think Lewis's experience of Joy is presented in very abstracted and intuitive terms; the things he values in this way are not concrete. This could suggest introverted feeling but I am inclined to suspect that it is rather intuition. This means that Lewis strongest trait introverted intuition is one he shares with the great mystics. But the other thing he shares with them is a capacity to express these interior experiences in rational terms, this would be through the use of extraverted thinking.

If you look at how he became a Christian, and I mean how it really happened rather than the account he gave later in Suprised by Joy, then a key event was his conversation with Tolkien and Dyson where Tolkien interpreted the incarnation as a true myth. This is a highly intuitive idea and it came to Lewis's aid precisely where rational theology had failed him. He was never able to accept any of the standard theories of the atonement as developed by say Anselm or Calvin.

However when he tries to defend the faith, he does so in rational terms using his secondary function of extraverted thinking. He admits that an emotional approach to evangelism, on which draws on the feeling or valuing function is not for him. He could not just say 'Come to Jesus.'

I think that especially later in his life he began to develop his tertiary function of feeling. As a tertiary function this was primitive compared to his primary and secondary functions; this explains his inability to understand why other did not share his evaluation of Joy Davidman, who was not a great thinker (does anyone else share my view that 'Fire on the Mountain' is a fairly poor book in spite of the praise Lewis heaps on it). The exploration of feeling and emotion in his later work and I would see as an example then of old men being explorers ( to quote Eliot).

This view has the advantage that it allows for Lewis being quite highly developed as a person and not being limmited to two functions.

I was reading a bit more about INFPs which is my type the other day and it said that INFPs typically hate conflict and handle it very badly. That doesn't sound very like Lewis to me though so perhaps I have to resign myself to the fact that he was not an INFP..

Well I am an INTP and I'm going to insist Lewis was INTJ with tertiarry feeling until someone comes up with an argument to the contrary. However Joan there is also the possibility that your spiritual type is not the same as your general personality type. In Knowing me, Knowing God, Malcolm Goldsmith gives a short Myers Briggs spirituality test. My spiritual profile came out the same as my general profile but my wife's was different on three preferences out of four. And sometimes we appreciate a writer who is a different type to us precisely because he tells us things we could not see for ourselves.