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Can the dominant function be under developed compared to the aux?

2324 Views 19 Replies 9 Participants Last post by  Dora
I was reading the ENTJ descrption on Personality Page (Portrait of an ENTJ) and found the following statement interesting:

ENTJs are very forceful, decisive individuals. They make decisions quickly, and are quick to verbalize their opinions and decisions to the rest of the world. The ENTJ who has not developed their Intuition will make decisions too hastily, without understanding all of the issues and possible solutions. On the other hand, an ENTJ who has not developed their Thinking side will have difficulty applying logic to their insights, and will often make poor decisions. In that case, they may have brilliant ideas and insight into situations, but they may have little skill at determining how to act upon their understanding, or their actions may be inconsistent.
What I found most interesting was the bolded part of the quote. It has always been my understanding that our dominant function was the one that came most naturally to us, thus I assumed that it would always be the strongest, always. However this statement seems to imply that it is possible, at least in some cases, for the dominant function to be under developed compared to the aux function.

Is it possible for an aux function to be (or seem) more developed than a dominant function?
Has anyone observed this in their experience with typology?
Is this just an ENTJ phenomenon? Or could this happen with other types as well?

Any insight, thoughts, opinions, etc are appreciated.
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I know that was just speculation, but this may be what happened to me as a teen. To be fair, I also suffered mental illness so that could've been the cause of my withdrawal.

To the OP, my answer is that this can certainly apply to MBTI, but it cannot apply to Cognitive Function theory. The statement you bolded is exactly the issue I've had up until recent years. To the untrained eye, I appear ENTP-ish apparently. If I were to predict my behaviour in JCF terms, I may currently be beginning to express my tertiary Se.
When you say "up until recent years" do you mean for your entire life (or as much as you can remember)? Or that there was a time when you didn't have this issue, then had it for a number of years, then came back out of it?

Also, if you do mean your entire life, how did you arrive at ENTJ for your type? It seems to me that someone who would have difficulty applying logic to their insights (or just information they are gatering) would be an introvert. So I'm curious as to how you realized that your dominant function was extraverted and not introverted because to me it seems the most logical conclusion based on that pattern would be that your dominant function was introverted. Yet this is apparently not the case for you.
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