Tag: mina barimany

Mina is a psychotherapist, professor, and Jungian typologist. Dr. Barimany’s approach combines mindfulness-based cognitive therapy and cutting-edge research on consciousness development to balance psychological dispositions and expand the capacity to apply novel approaches to recurring problems

Joe Arrigo  

Mina, your work has gotten some pushback in the Type community. What sort of witchcraft have you been doing that’s causing such a ruckus right now?

Mina Barimany  

Yeah!  I want to start by saying that I didn’t necessarily get into this for the specific purpose of being contrarian, which is kind of like, you know, what you might expect from a dominant, introverted intuitive just to be a little bit, you know, out of the box, that’s kind of our thing. I think that some of the pushback I’ve gotten is sort of a result of a lot of the misconceptions that are floating around about type. And if you look at my work a little bit more carefully, my results, both from the 2017 dissertation and the stuff that I’ve been doing more recently, actually supports both Jung and Isabel Myers’ work.

You know, the main idea here is that actually, Isabel set up a set of two bipolar, two polarities, and kind of stacked them next to each other. And my work just talks a little bit about what’s in between some of that stuff linearly. So a lot of my findings actually support is about and both Jung and Isabel. So yeah, I think that’s a lot of why I’ve gotten some pushback, people are really kind of invested in this, you know, the four functions in Myers Briggs is 1-2-3-4, as if it’s sort of like a linear timeline progression of functions that you need to develop, but actually, it’s a stacking of two polarities next to one another. And that’s an energetic orientation of what’s happening. So I think that explains why.

Joe Arrigo  

Now, you have yet to publish this, right?

Mina Barimany 

Yes. Some of that is published in academia, the rest is coming.

Joe Arrigo  

Facts do not matter, like facts are important, but convincing people, you can’t just throw a standard deviation chart out. And they’re like, “I believe in type now, thanks for that information. I’m totally convinced!” That doesn’t always move the needle with people. So what are we supposed to do here? If you present the facts, the brain scans, you present your findings, and you still get pushback?

Mina Barimany  

I think the first thing that is just important to contextualize here is that anytime we’re working on anything to do with the human experience, or with the mind, what we’re trying to do is put music into words. And we’re reducing this infinitely complicated phenomenon into something that we can measure. If you’re going to measure something, you always have to remember that the things you measure are only as good as the tools you use to measure them. And so when we’re talking about empirical research, a lot of what we’re doing is just researching our measurement tools, not the phenomena itself. The problem is that you know, because we come from this Age of Enlightenment where rationality was privileged over all else, psychology is still in this very positivist paradigm of cause and effect.

I don’t think it’s just psychology, I think it’s our culture as a whole is still there. And so to that, I would say that just because you can’t measure it doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. And if you do go about measuring it, you have to remember that the map isn’t the territory. And you hold it lightly.

Joe Arrigo  

Okay, so this is perfect for an INTJ, because we’re always looking in the future and stuff like that. So what is your legacy going to be, you know, when the research is looked back upon, and people are citing it, like what are people going to say about what you’ve done for the type community?

Mina Barimany  

What I found that I have more success with is just kind of letting the path unfold before me. So like, rather than trying to create some sort of end and work my way towards that, and my energy just sort of takes me in this direction or that direction. It feels a lot more organic if I do it that way. But you know, from a more like professorial perspective or professional perspective, one of the things that I’m really intent on creating as a model that bridges traditional Western psychotherapy, and Jung and Eastern approaches to human development and consciousness growth because right now we have that same polarity that you mentioned earlier that either everybody’s a unique snowflake or everyone’s the same, and we have to reinvent the wheel with each client we need, or there’s the sort of one size fits all path for human development. And so I think type is really the middle ground, there’s because it tells us something about these sort of different epistemological approaches to life.

Joe Arrigo  

Are there types you encounter in personal/professional life that you would say that it takes a little bit more adjustment to work with, like, for example, I would say, and this is very type logically, like templated, the ESTP would be hard for me to understand right away, just because of the inversion of Ni and Se… do you have types like that? Were like, “Oh, I gotta work to make this relationship… work.

Mina Barimany  

Yeah. So a little aside here. When it comes to the work ideas of therapists, there’s an absolutely amodal type that walks through my door. So there are types that I just don’t get exposure to. Because a lot of people who come to my door are NJ’s, you know. I think SJs tend to be a language that I have to work kind of hard to sort of re-story in my mind, although I have to say that I find it incredibly playful. It’s enlightening to be around them, because it’s just the total opposite of what I’m used to, and the place that I live in my head. So, it is difficult for me to understand, like, I think the thing that, you know, as STJ/SFJs really like that, just dedication to tradition, and convention goes against everything I feel and want about, like being outside of the box and doing something new. And, you know, all that stuff.

Joe Arrigo  

I have found that the SP temperament type ‘the Artisan’, if, you know, using the Keirsey model tends to be one I wish I was better at. I wish I could just like think about a model in my head with introverted thinking and just like I can fix that I can just see it, how it works. And there are some INTJ that can do it. But I’m really bad at that. I get afraid of that.

Mina Barimany  

Yeah, well, you know, just, you know, the first part of what you mentioned and wanting to be kind of modeling that behavior… putting yourself around somebody who can model the functions you’re trying to approximate is one of the best ways that you can start to develop some of those other functions. …you were talking about like the diametrically opposed types. INTJ/ESTP have the thinking function in common there. But actually, a lot of what my research is showing is that paradoxically, these diametrically opposed types are actually more similar to each other and types that actually share a little bit more in common can be more opposite to one another energetically. So you know, this is something I’m kind of exploring in the data, but also kind of my anecdotally and qualitatively, but it makes sense because it’s paradoxical, right? That actually, a four-letter difference in type can actually have a lot of cohesion, because it’s magnetic not kind of repelling or adversarial.

Joe Arrigo  

Mina, I appreciate you coming on the show. I’ve been extremely excited for this. I have to thank you know, Dario for making the intro here.  I wouldn’t have known about your research and how to find you without him.

Mina Barimany  

Yeah. Thanks, Joe. So pleased to be here. And thank you to Dario and all of my mentors.

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