What’s my main character’s worst nightmare?

Posted on by elenapedigo
Hello!

It’s another warm Saturday here in North Carolina, so I’m looking forward to another deep and hopefully refreshing dive into my characters’ psyches. I thought it would be fun–well, fun for me, at least–to put my somewhat dubious side-quest reading into psychology and personality types to use this summer in an examination of my own characters. If you missed the first post, you can check it out here.

Oh, and if you still haven’t gotten The Breathing Sea, the omnibus edition is still free this week but will be coming off free next week. The universal link is here.

So last week I mentioned something about Jung and the MBTI. Chances are high you’ve taken some version of the MBTI at some point and were given a 4-letter code like INFP or INFJ. If one of those (or maybe INTP) was in fact the code you were given, there’s an excellent chance that you then went on to research what it meant and became instantly convinced that you’d just discovered the secret to the universe, or at least to human nature. If you got some other 4-letter code, there’s a non-trivial chance that you rolled your eyes and muttered something disparaging about junk science. Jungian type theory and the MBTI seem to be most popular amongst INFPs, INTPs, and INFJs, who also happen to be the types of some of the main people who created the system. This suggests that the system is in fact measuring something real, although it might be most resonant with people who are the same types as those who created the system…

That was starting to get circular, so let’s move on. Last week I also promised to reveal my own type, so here we go. According to many tests and much reading, my type is INFJ. If you know anything about what that means, you will not be shocked. I don’t know what the percentage of INFJ fantasy authors is, but I assume it’s high.

Unsurprisingly, a number of my main characters are also the same type. I was working on the first draft of The Midnight Land when I first started researching Jungian type theory, and I somewhat consciously included it in my character development.

So what does that mean? The 4-letter code system for the MBTI can be a little complicated, so I’ll keep it as simple as possible and say that for INFJs, the Dominant Function, meaning your primary way of dealing with reality, is Introverted Intuition. Check out the link if you want a good description of Introverted Intuition (Ni), but basically it involves taking in data subconsciously, synthesizing it, and coming up with new patterns and insights. It is convergent, non-binary, and resolutely impossible to control! It is less obviously “creative” or “artistic” than Extraverted Intuition, but often takes the form of dreams, visions, and other “psychic” phenomena. Types with dominant Ni also tend to be non-conformists who question how things are done and come up with new and novel solutions, seemingly out of nowhere. (Sometimes those solutions are better than others, but that’s another story). 

We see this in Slava, the heroine of The Midnight Land, over and over again. She repeatedly experiences sudden visions and prophetic or psychic dreams. This can take the form both of typical magic in a fantasy novel, and of sudden insights that cause her to change her behavior. She has this happen several times in the beginning of Part II in particular, when she’s just come out of the Underworld (her trip to the Midnight Land/the tundra) and is starting the upward climb of her heroine’s journey. Prior to that, her Ni had been suppressed and overwhelmed, and she has to go on a heroic quest to reclaim it.

While Ni is the dominant psychological function for INFJs, the function that the outer world normally encounters is their auxiliary function, Extraverted Feeling (Fe). Fe is the function that notices what other people are doing and allows us to mirror their behavior. People with Fe often come across as warm and, well, extraverted, even if they’re not. When combined with Ni, it often leads to an extreme sensitivity to other people’s emotions. We see this at the beginning of The Midnight Land, when Slava thinks that she’s a “passion-mirror” who reflects other people’s emotions, or a rag for sopping up other people’s feelings. The trick for many people is to learn to balance out their dominant and auxiliary functions; in Slava’s case, her auxiliary function has totally taken over her life and she has to learn to reconnect with what is actually her dominant function, Ni.

So how does she do that? Here comes the villain/holy fool of our psyche, the Inferior Function. The inferior function is the opposite of the dominant function and is our repressed, buried, scary, shadow function. We have a love/hate relationship with it, alternately running from it and worshipping it. It is also the gateway to creativity, personal growth, and spiritual insight. Although it can never be made fully conscious and will probably trigger and trick us our entire lives, we must integrate it into our psyches as best we can in order to achieve psychospiritual wholeness.

For INJ types, the inferior function is Extraverted Sensing (Se). Se is all about the here and now of physical reality. Slava demonstrates a distinct difficulty with physical reality right from the beginning of the book, when she describes how her maids have to check that she’s actually dressed before she leaves her chambers. She also finds clothing and external appearances to be boring and trivial, and focuses largely on the pain and discomfort of her wardrobe and beauty routine.

However, Se/physical reality is impossible to ignore, and Slava must integrate it into her psyche. She does this through two classic literary techniques: a journey and a sidekick.

The journey should be obvious. The hero/heroine’s journey is possibly humankind’s oldest story, and involves a descent into the Underworld to face your fears, which often include the inferior function. In Slava’s case, because her inferior function is Se, the very act of journeying is a heroic quest that requires her to deal with her inferior over and over again. We can see this in the pain she feels from riding, her inability to ski as fast as the others, the times she gets lost, and all the other instances where she is forced to face her own inferiority in the sphere of physicality (everyone around her is bigger, stronger, faster, and more competent than she is in the physical realm).

She is also paired up with someone with dominant Se. Olga Vasilisovna, who leads the journey, is ESTP and is therefore the opposite of Slava in every way. They represent each other’s shadow side, which leads to misunderstanding but also, because they stick by each other even so, personal growth.

I could go on and on about this, with a lengthy discussion of what all the men and animals signify (Se, basically), the Return to the Womb (when Slava goes to Deep Pond (!!!!!) sanctuary and confronts her mother), and so on and so forth, but this has already been a very long email and it’s time to feed my dogs (more Se!), so I’ll wrap up for now. Of course, if you’d ever like to chat about Jungian interpretations of famous works of literature, I would be so, so down for that, so drop me a line!

Next up: I’ll reveal my own and Slava’s core fear and core desire. Stay tuned! 

E.P.