I think this is essentially how Jungian analysts use type with their analysands. Figure out who the person thinks they are (ego) and who they are trying not to be (shadow) and you get a pretty good picture of the whole. The problem with the inferior is that you have to be very judicious in approaching it because it is often so heavy and loaded with emotion. You can't just go there, you have to take the roundabout route to get there. You can't just call out a Si-dom, for example, as having ridiculous intuitions about things because they might likely say "fuck you" and rail off a bunch of bad shit that has happened or whatever. Same with calling a Te-dom out as being slightly narcissistic or pointing out the authoritarianism of a Fi-dom. Because they don't see themselves that way you have to be creative with bringing it up otherwise the tendency will be for them to just project that as "not me" and "only other people do that."

 

In socionics that goes into intertype relationships between types there have been proposals that certain types would be better at counseling each other than others. In supervision relations, if the psychotherapist is the supervisor then the patient will unconsciously strive to accept his advice and act as requested instead of balking and resisting. Dual partner can not only understand your issues but deliver explanations that are easily digestible by you, while having quasi-identical psychotherapist would make the therapy progress slower.

 

Also I should point out that many Jungian analyst have not found to type to be particularly helpful with patients at all other than maybe providing a basic framework for how the person might respond or look at things in a general way. Most issues in psychoanalysis revolve around something deeper.

 

Some people's life issues, at least in a superficial sense, seem to arise from failure to grow through type dynamics. I know an ENFP in his upper 40s who is still childlike because he hasn't grown much beyond Ne, and an ENFJ in his 50s who won't allow himself to grow beyond Se since his cult religion would disapprove. And so on, with many people I've known. It doesn't work for everyone, but for some it could give an indication as to where deeper digging should start.

 

I think the perception functions would be really, really hard to work with in therapy, because they belong to the arbitrary and what meaning you make of it in a Gestalt way - nothing predictable and formulaic, unless they coincide with a person's motives in such a way for the sake of predictability. In fact, these types are quite mysterious in terms of understanding how they psychologically "tick" in terms of functions, due to the "irrational" nature of perception - I mean, it's easy to assume that everyone here has seen people clearly who embody inferior function patterns in terms of the judgment functions (e.g. inferior Fe, inferior Fi, inferior Te, inferior Ti), but with perception doms, the inferior often might not even stand out as much as their judgment functions (since judgment is rational and easy to predict, make assumptions about), so often, what's an issue of their inferior might appear like an issue of judgment as well. And since everyone lives the same kind of perception in a fundamental way anyhow (e.g. sensation, duh), weeding out what belongs to type in these types can be really tough. Judgments, on the other hand, just more clearly have their origins in the individual - with perceptions, it's hard to gauge how they interact with the individual's psychology, which might accidentally lead to a misappropriation of their problems to their judgment functions, since you would have to focus on these to work your way back to the things they "see" and react to on this more "aesthetic/existential" basis.