Discover your Dominant Jungian Function
If you know your Myers-Briggs personality type, you can figure out your dominant and secondary Jungian functions fairly easily.
The first thing you need to know is that only the middle two letters of your type refer to Jungian functions. The 2nd letter (S or N) refers to your main perceiving function and the 3rd letter (T or F) refers to your main judging function.
| 1st | 2nd Perceiving function |
3rd Judging function |
4th |
| I | N | F | P |
| Ne Secondary |
Fi Dominant |
One of these functions is used primarily in an extroverted way and one is used primarily in an introverted way. In other words, you tend to use one more in the outer world and one more in your inner world. If you are a J, you extravert your judging function and if you are a P, you extravert your perceiving function.
In the example to the right, because the person is a P, the Inutuition function (N) is extraverted and thus the Feeling function (F) is introverted. We use the symbols Ne and Fi to indicate this.
The last step is to figure out which one of the two functions is your dominant one. For this we use the 1st letter. If you are an E, your extraverted function will be dominant and if you are an I, your introverted function will be dominant. Here, since the person is an I, the dominant function is Fi (introverted feeling) and the secondary function is Ne (extroverted intuition).
The Jungian notation for INFP would therefore be Fi Ne (the dominant is always listed first). To check whether or not you figured things out correctly for your type, you can refer to the chart on the left.
You'll notice that if you consider only the dominant functions, the 16 types turn into only 8 types. These 8 types were the original psychological types that Carl Jung developed, years before Isabel Myers and Katharine Briggs developed the Myers-Briggs system.
The 8 Jungian functions & their uses
Introverted Sensing (Si) | the ability to remember the details of past experiences and sense perceptions |
Extroverted Sensing (Se) | the ability to experience the sensory details in what is happening right now |
Introverted Intuition (Ni) | the ability to sense the meaning behind events and symbols |
Extroverted Intuition (Ne) | the ability to recognize possibilities and patterns in real situations |
Introverted Thinking (Ti) | the ability to categorize ideas into logical systems and frameworks |
Extroverted Thinking (Te) | the ability to organize external reality in logical ways |
Introverted Feeling (Fi) | the ability to evaluate based on one's inner value system |
Extroverted Feeling (Fe) | the ability to evaluate based on what is good for others or expected by society |
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