u/thelastcubscout

Guys, first off I want to apologize for not posting more DAE content here at /r/intj. But I thought this topic was pretty interesting, so please indulge me.

And second, I apologize for offending any 17-year-olds, with such a judgy post title. But this stuff can be a little bit concerning, and they tell me your brain is still developing, and so maybe it's better to be a bit cautious.

What the Hell This is About

If you ever wondered "Is there a pathology of the unhealthy INTJ," this is probably one of the closest, most detailed takes on that, that I have ever found.

And, it predates MBTI!

Up front, I should emphasize that this is shared as T H E O R I S T entertainment, in a big way. As NT personality types, it's important to let our intuitive-thinker side play with new ideas the way our sensing-feeler side would play with, let's say, a brand new volleyball.

And sometimes that intuitive side gets serious, because the implications are serious - but I believe we can still have fun with that, and find the thrill in it.

Who wrote WHAT now??

So pierre janet was this french psychologist writing about "psychasthenia" back in the day, but because he wrote in French and nobody translated it (that I can find), R.K. Pitman did a synopsis titled Janet's Obsessions and Psychasthenia: a synopsis - and THAT is pretty good reading.

DOI reference: 10.1007/BF01064475

(Pitman is known for his early work on PTSD, and was a psychiatrist in the US Navy during the Vietnam War. He noted in his 1984 paper, "The full significance of Janet's contribution may have yet to be established by developments in the neurosciences.")

Basically, psychasthenia is this intense state of lowered "psychological tension" where you lose your grip on present reality.

(sound familiar, Se-interested folks?)

Your abstract, discursive intelligence stays totally fine, but your ability to actually act and adapt to the real world goes out the window.

Here is the breakdown of my reading notes.

The Brain Rot (Symptoms & Traits)

• Morally Troubling Ideas: You start listing your most unhinged, morally questionable thoughts.
• Conversationally Burdening: You dump your internal monologues on people who don't care or shouldn't have to deal with it. Like doing a "My take is this..." and then 5 minutes later "and another thing..." - just bouncing complex ideas off of people who completely lack the context. This likely gets way worse with anxiety or when you over-caffeinate.
• Summoning a Mental Director: You literally create internal characters and archetypes in your head to give yourself direction, routine, or just for emotional stimulation.
• The "Honesty" Trap: janet notes that psychasthenics have this undue love of honesty and justice, because "these virtues being most useful to the weak, i.e., to those who have need of protection and who fear a fight." ouch
• if you're Stephen Miller, stop reading here and take a break, then come back to it
• Can't Stand Diversity: When attention is weak, diversity causes a meltdown. The patient wants uniformity through authoritarianism or total obedience. If he's reading a book, he wants everyone else in the house to be reading too.
• Physical toll: Sufferers are characteristically thin, pale, drawn, with dry skin and bad breath. Interestingly, janet noted that these physical traits clear up when the mental state improves.
• The EDC Connection? "Psychasthenics often carry favorite objects which provide a sense of security."

(note: some of this stuff is actually productive in a healthy context, like summoning an archeytpe per the "cabinet of invisible counselors," or carrying a useful tool or other item, even as a memento or inspiration...if you feel me)

The Epilepsy Analogy & Psychological Tension

Janet calls an acute drop in psychological tension a "psycholeptic crisis," comparing it directly to epilepsy.

> To be is to act. Not to be able to concentrate one's thoughts and desires in a present action is no longer to be a person.

Basically, in janet's view, psychasthenia might just be an attenuated, chronic form of epilepsy affecting the cerebral cortex. While hysteria is a geometric narrowing of consciousness, psychasthenia is a dynamic lowering of the reality function.

When your psychological tension drops, you experience derealizaton and depersonalization. If you're career-focused, it manifests as crippling indecision; if you love the theater, it manifests as derealization.

Enter the KGB

Here is where it gets more interesting, maybe even creepy.

If you look into the historical history of espionage, the KGB actually had a paper on recruitment based on psychological types, and they explicitly named psychasthenics as one of the 4 primary types targeted for recruitment.

paper title: "Psychological profiles of targets for recrutment operations: general characteristics and identification methods in operational practice" (1987)

or

Психологические профили объектов вербовочных операций: общая характеристика и методы распознавания в оперативной практике

say it with me

"Psikhologicheskiye profili ob"yektov verbovochnykh operatsiy: obshchaya kharakteristika i metody raspoznavaniya v operativnoy praktike"

why recruit this way - well, when someone suffers from global lowering of the reality function, they experience a massive drop in volition. They are desperate for external structure and someone to just tell them what to do to relieve the burden of reality.

also from the KGB paper:

"One of the hallmark traits of individuals with this disposition is poor physical recovery during sleep. Upon waking, they rarely feel refreshed or energized. To fully recuperate, they often need at least 12 hours of sleep per day, which is impractical in everyday life."

Real Life Triggers & Traps

• Accidental Marriage: He mentions that psychasthenics literally wander into marriage just because they don't want to offend anyone by saying "no." They don't actually decide if they want it until the paperwork is already done.
• Big Changes: Occupational changes, retirement, moving, exams, lawsuits, and quarrels will cause the illness to bloom.
• The Morning Slump: Most sufferers are way more symptomatic in the morning than in the evening.
• The Kid Warning: In children who fit in this circle, janet is of the opinion that we should actually mistrust their wisdom, overprudence, and deep reflection. It looks like high intelligence, but it might be this early psychasthenia stuff! (in his opinion)

Janet even argued we'd eventually require medical certificates before marriage to avoid passing this down. (Which makes me wonder... was Pierre Janet a Ni-dom INTJ himself? That hyper-focus on future time intuition - conceptualizing the ways of the future - in his writing starts to feel like a tell).

---

How to Fix It (Elevating the Mental Level)

In janet's view, this stuff usually gets better before age 40 due to delayed maturation. But to actively raise that psychological tension and cure the "incompleteness," janet suggests a mix of bizarre and practical things:

WARNING WARNING WARNING

This is VERY sensing-heavy. To me, that is a fairly one-dimensional fix and almost guarantees a lot of unnecessary dopamine exposure. Working professionally in personality type, I cannot recommend ANY of these without important caveats, even if I do see some of their pros.

anyway - his fixes:

• Lifestyle simplification (moral treatment): Since the brain's higher adaptive functions are fried, reduce the demands on it. If an engagement is causing psychasthenic doubts, break it off. Career promotions can cause relapses. Some psychasthenics actually thrive in the military because the regimented lifestyle removes the burden of choice.
• The shocks: Upward spikes in mental energy can be triggered by alcohol, ether, morphine, a change of scenery, or physical exercise. Happy emotions work (one patient improved after buying a horse or hearing military music; another, Jean, had a 2-week remission after hitting it off with ladies at a dinner party).
• The paradoxical shock: Negative emotions work too. Janet literally frightened a patient named Claire and made her cry, and her obsessions vanished for a week. Another guy felt better after being in a literal shipwreck.
• Preventative Habits for the Predisposed: A simple, mainly vegetarian diet, country life, early bedtime, and learning crafts/skilled movements.
• Parenting advice: Kids prone to this need to confront dangerous situations alone, according to janet. Nothing makes a child timid like parents hovering, because they don't make their own effort. he even wrote that such children should be encouraged to get into fights with peers - worrying about their future is worth a few punches. Emphasize the physical over the intellectual, reality over introspection, and smash daydreaming with quick, practical activity.

(guys - just to mention - i really doubt some of this is smart, let alone effective these days! please don't interpret this as advice. more like historical interest. Even the strong-Se POV can absolutely railroad you past a lot of the best in life.)

ultimately, the idea was that psychasthenia preserves your abstract intelligence but kills your reality functions (attention, volition).

Treatment is basically a slow, hard educational grind to force yourself back into the present moment. Once volition is restored -- according to janet -- the lower-level obsessions and tics just disappear because they no longer have a reason to exist.

Wrap-up

Why read it?

If you read this far, and you know, you know. Many /r/intj discussions and comments can also be found about single-bullet-point items above, to say nothing of the Ni-Se dichotomy fit!

---

And just in case I can help soothe your worries with my never-skipped-Fe-day levels of concern:

1. "i don't have any such problems so this would NEVER apply to me, how dare you" - i got u fam no worries
2. "people take MBTI too deep" - again it's just exploring concepts fam, it's OK & nothing formally pronounced on anyone or any type model
3. "does this apply to all INTJs" noooo, remember it's a pathological model! BUT: could a derivative of it apply to all INTJs...? hmmm? some of the logic is just sitting right there.
4. "i am scared that the KGB will target me and it'll JUST WORK" me too tbh
5. "you are clearly posting this to attack me personally, or to attack my type" nah, it's interesting to me as an INTJ! I have coached and trained hundreds of INTJs over the years. some of these patterns are too real.
6. "i hate being portrayed as such a troubled type", no worries - even the KGB knew this was just ONE example of a target-able type! All personality types have their stuff to deal with.

---

Questions for you

• Were you ever recruited by the KGB??? (Did they give you a cool code name too? Mine is CUBSCOUT) j/k
• Does the expression of negative emotion ever build capacity for more constructive DO-ing in your life?
• Were you ever accused of being "too wise" as a kiddo?
• Does it ever help you to listen to march music, or military music?

no ai / no promo / formatting, bolding, and HRs added for long-as post reasons

Quick note: These are all really good books in their way for sure. It's difficult to do a tl/dr here, so if you need that, feel free to skim as I have bolded the book titles below.

(Also: read anything good lately? feel free to share...)

First, some slightly weird things I've found in my reading hobby these days:

• there are only 16 types in MBTI, and if you're reading a niche topic that attracts INTJs...well, chances are...you are going to come across INTJ authors
• i admit i tend to like writing by people who think like i do, even if we may disagree in parts
• the deeper i understand my own personality, the more i find their approaches and styles remarkably noticeable in more specific ways, not just the general "aha, INTJ." these turn into helpful little notes that apply to my own life pretty easily.

so, some examples in the reading list recently:

...in Martial Arts History:

• martial musings by robert w. smith

smith analyzes 20th-century martial arts with the standard intj "i spent 40 years studying this niche topic and now i will correct everyone else's poor technique" thing.

(and i wonder - did INTJ Se-style "realism" sensitivity lead to today's MMA-style evangelism in the martial arts? Smith definitely rides those rails in different ways, but very early in the history of MA here in the States)

the book is very thorough, highly opinionated, but also very readable and IMO better in its offerings of little historic vignettes & character sketches than almost any other aspect

smith was also a CIA intelligence officer so that's interesting in its way as well

what i learned / reflected on: intj character sketches can be even inadvertently god-like at times, especially IF the intj can get past the overpowered character-Critic voice and lean into the concrete beauty of the person-as-thing / person-as-particular-force-of-nature approach that Se can offer

...in Middle Ages History:

• the popes and science by james j. walsh

(note: i'm not catholic and am in fact a formerly-religiously-active person, who used to write a religious apologetics blog, but i was drawn in by the writing - see personality notes above)

walsh responded to the historical narrative that the catholic church hated science and concluded "actually, your data is wrong."

looking at his other works, i would actually lean toward Walsh being intp, but there is a lot of overlap with INTJ style in this text, so much so that i had to wonder if he was raised by, or around, an intj. (if this is disappointing news, please substitute the life and works of the very-INTJ Jean-Jacques Rousseau here...)

it's a detailed, systematic debunking effort driven by that "nah fam" take, showing a classic debater's love for muh-historical-accuracy over mainstream consensus

what i learned / reflected on: as mentioned, from the standpoint of a post-religious INTJ myself, OF COURSE i ended up nearly interpreting this activity as some stoic "you can take the pain, READ IT" torture device for myself at first.

i also immediately noticed i had used some of the same tactics to establish my own apologetic positions, in the past. "skip forward! skip forward!" admitting to a bit of a cringe there personally.

but then i kind of asked, "but what is it about this?" there's some real beauty in the text. so for me it's a reminder that discarding a system as a whole was never really the route i took out of religion in the first place - learning to lean into the details, the nuance, the facets of the experience was a powerful gift. and I will keep reading his stuff. it's nice & comfy to read in a big way.

...in Military Infrastructure History:

• dew line doctor by gareth howard

howard writes about being a medical officer in the arctic isolation of the distant early warning line.

I admit that I'm a long-time DEW Line fanboy and I keep some old documentaries on the topic to watch when I'm bored. Pretty sure it's some Ni metaphor, that sort of thing.

managing logistical issues and surviving extreme isolation while maintaining clinical efficiency - an intj dream vacation of sorts? it's a cool book in that way.

what i learned / reflected on: he was inventive and had fun while documenting little sketches among the people up there. maybe out of some sliiight envy at not working in that environment (hot summer here instead) - i asked myself - OK so maybe building an app isn't super adventurous, but are there those angles to parts of it? especially with some of the persons involved? maybe so! still thinking about that overlay.

...and a Bonus:

• way of the peaceful warrior by dan millman

it's been over 20 years since i first read this (fairly famous) book, but i dipped in again, and watched Dan's TedX talk.

the book was originally recommended to me by a very cool therapist, and today i can only wonder, "was this his go-to for INTJ clients???" i mean that therapist was slick. he had manga on the shelves and everything.

while the spiritual "change your life" thing reads a tiny bit more didactic & unipolar-life-order-ish to me these days, at a time when we have so many different models to overlay and every reason to use their strengths together - the core theme is really about a re-awakening. i like that energy.

also in his TedX talk, he did that Se-informed thing where he casually does a handstand on a chair, at age old-as-whatever. AND he had the balls to say "Just do it." OK OK we get it man. haha

what i learned / reflected on: he published a daily routine that he still does every day. I wondered more about my daily routine. it's always been a bit hazy and whim-driven, but it's probably worth another look. Maybe in the name of Si development even.

that's it for me.

how about you? read anything interesting lately, whether the author was INTJ or not?

end thx for reading if you made it this far

we had an earthquake where i live today, not a big one but it was all i could think about while trying out bforartists

Created in ~2003 using Art of Illusion

notes in comments

notes in comments

Just some shots of this trail & garden mod as I finish it. Adding a photo from testing, when it still needed to be sharpened more.

title

Questions in comments, thanks all

hope you all had a nice weekend. double warrior scout + tomahawk XL-152 jumbo trapper, just cleaning these two up a bit today