MBTI: The Sodalities

Poor Shaun (from the film Shaun of the Dead)

[Image from ScreenRant]


Sodalities, along with the houses, are another way of organizing the types, one with enormous potential for growth. The word is used by social anthropologists to refer to “a non-kin group organized for a specific purpose (economic, cultural, or other), and frequently spanning villages or towns”. It’s commonly used in the Christian church to refer to groups of individuals working towards the same goal, whether spiritual devotion or good works. Where the Houses are one’s “family” or kin (the four types that share the same conscious functions, e.g. Te, etc.), the Sodalities are our “jobs,” or where we do the work of psychological growth. They are the four groups consisting of the four types that share the same complexes (e.g. INTP, ESFJ, ENTJ, ISFP). Each type in the sodality all share the same four complexes, just in different positions, just like how each of the types shares the same 8 functions, just in different function roles.

This is going to be a fairly technical and abstract article; it’s purpose is to provide an understanding of the structure of the sodalities, where they come from, why they are important, things like that. If this isn’t something that interests you that’s fine, I'm going to do a later post on the practical applications of the core complexes and how to use them. You may, however, want to go down to the section where I give an example using a movie to show how the complexes work within a sodality (“Example: Shaun of the Dead”).


Functional vs. dynamic relationships

Functional relationships refer to relations between types that share structural similarities, as in the houses for example (i.e., all four types share the same functions). An example of a functional relationship is Mirror Types. Types with mirror relationships have opposite heroine functions, e.g. thinking vs. feeling, but share the same attitude, e.g. Ti and Fi. In addition, they share the same parent and child functions. INTPs and INFPs have Ti and Fi as their dominant functions respectively, but both share Ne parent and Si child. Their similarities – dominant introverted judging, and their shared Ne/Si “arms” – make them similar in many ways. For example, both INTPs and INFPs have Se trickster, which makes them prone to run into things and generally struggle with physical reality.

Dynamic relationships, on the other hand, may or may not share functions but, more importantly, relations between these types drive conflict and growth. An example of a dynamic relationship is Attraction Types. These types do actually have the same four functions but in the reverse order of each other. Another name for these is “antipodal types” as they are opposite each other on the MBTI. When immature or unhealthy we tend to reject this type, but people of normal or better psychological development usually find this antipodal type to be very attractive. If all goes well, we usually manage to integrate this type naturally and fairly easily. An example are INTPs and ESFJs.

Other examples of dynamic relationships are antagonism types (e.g. INTP and ENTJ), and secret types (e.g. INTP and ISFP). These are the three kinds of relationships that we have with the other members of our sodality, which is why they can be so problematic… but also so powerful as catalysts for change and growth.

North-west Sodality

ENTJs and ISFPs have a relation of attraction. They aspire to the qualities of their antipodal opposite even though it scares them and they know they can never be really good at it. The same goes for ESFJs and INTPs. In the core complexes this would be the P1/P2 relationship.

ESFJs and ISFPs have a relationship of antagonism. Even though they are actually pretty good at the qualities of the other they don’t value them and have an aversion to using them. The same goes for INTPs and ENTJs. This is the P1/P3 relationship.

ENTJs and ESFJs have a relationship of secrecy. This is their blind spot, the thing in themselves that they’re not aware of. Normally it only comes out when the individual is pushed to their limit, especially if the inferior (animus) function has been attacked. In this case it manifests itself in the worst, most brutal way, threatening to burn down the world. But if you manage to integrate it, the other type is their deepest truth. The same goes for INTPs and ISFPs. This is the P1/P4 relationship.


The structure of a sodality

A sodality is made up of two pairs of antipodes (diametrical opposites) that mirror each other. In the example of the NW sodality:

• INTP and ESFJ are antipodes (opposites), as are ENTJ and ISFP. The two antipodal/attraction types have the same functions but in reverse order. 
• INTP and ENTJ mirror each other, as do ESFJ and ISFP. That is, while they have the same root functions in the same order (e.g. thinking → intuition → sensation → feeling in the ENTJ and INTP), the attitudes of each function are polar opposites (e.g. Te vs. Ti). 

The different attitudes (introversion or extroversion) of these mirroring types make them pretty antagonistic to the values of the other; the other attitude feels wrong and unimportant, missing the point so to speak. This is the nature of the nemesis function. Even the antipodal function (e.g. Te vs. Fi) – a function that feels alien and scary to us – is more comprehensible. We don’t understand why anyone would want to do the nemesis function… but, as it’s a rejected part of us, it’s a thing that we actually need.

A sodality can be thought of, at its deepest level, as one person with four faces. We have ourselves (P1), the antipode or opposite of ourselves (P2), our antagonistic mirror image (P3), and the antipode of that mirror image (P4).

The ego and the antipode (P2) are reversed versions of each other, and the ego and the antagonist (P3) are mirror images of each other. Taken together, this makes one person with an internal opposite (P2), both of whom have a mirror image (P3 and P4). These four sides of the person make up one sodality.

Sodalities and Houses

This section goes further into the structure of the sodalities and how they relate to the houses. It’s not really necessary to understand the sodalities, and it’s even more abstract than the rest of this post and this is a pretty abstract post to begin with. If you’re not interested exploring the deep structure of the MBTI I suggest you skip down to the next section where I give an example of what a sodality looks like in action.

The houses, as we know, are groups of the types that share the same functions. The houses are Ash, Oak, Yew, and Rowan.

If you look at the conscious functions of the four houses you can see that two pairs – Ash & Oak, and Yew & Rowan – complete each other, the two pairs forming what is basically a full, complete set of functions. For example, the conscious functions of House Yew are Se/Ni and Fe/Ti. If you add Rowan's Si/Ne and Fi/Te you get a full set of functions: Se, Si, Ni, Ne, Fe, Fi, Ti, and Te. Ash & Oak belong to the West side and Yew & Rowan are the East.

These sides can be further divided into the four sodalities, groups which share the same core complexes; the North-west, South-west, North-east, and South-east sodalities. This naming convention - North, South, East, & West - doesn't actually mean anything, it's just the best I could come up with as I can't find a good, meaningful symbol system for the four sodalities. So, cardinal directions it is, unless and until someone can come up with something better!

The North-west Sodality is made up of ESFJ, INTP, ISFP, and ENTJ.

The South-west Sodality is made up of ISFJ, ENTP, ESFP, and INTJ.

The North-east Sodality is made up of ESTP, INFJ, ISTJ, and ENFP.

The South-east Sodality is made up of ISTP, ENFJ, ESTJ, and INFP.

I've spent a lot of time trying to figure out what the connections between the members of each of the sodalities are but it's really hard, not surprisingly. When you start uniting so many different things that have been split apart it's really hard to find what specifically unites these disparate parts. But this is a tentative theory:

Two of the sodalities – the NW and SE sodalities – appear to be initiating, while other two – the SW and NE sodalities – appear to be receiving. That is, the NW and SE sodalities want something while the SW and NE sodalities decide whether or not that thing is going to exist. When I had this revelation this is what I wrote:

NW is Yang, SW is Yin. ENTJ, ESFJ, INTP, ISFP are initiating; they do what they want. SW is receiving; they respond to what others want. They support or reject it. NW has to win SW over in order to do anything. The same with the SW and NW. The Western side desires something true, for the world to work well (Ti).

In the East, the SOUTH-east side is Yang, and the NE is Yin; SE wants something, NE responds to what they want. In the case of the East, however, the desire is moral, a desire to change the world for good. SW needs to convince NW that their desires are truly moral and good (Fi).

Yang is active and initiating; yin is receiving and supporting. Yang comes up with the idea, Yin decides whether or not that idea is going to become a reality. Yang tends to be more proactive, while Yin tends to be more reactive. What I mainly see in the Yang sodalities (NW & SE) is a strong sense of wanting. Let's look at the NW (ESFJ, ENTJ, ISFP, INTP); all four of these types are actually very goal oriented, even the normally easygoing INTP (an INTP who's focused on something is totally consumed by it.) All four are absolutely driven when they've become possessed by a goal. The Yin sodalities, on the other have, give a strong feeling of judgment. The types in the SW (ISFJ, INTJ, ESFP, and ENTP) generally seem to examine other people's goals and decide whether or not they're worthy of support, after which they work for these goals or not, or even actively resist them.

In the East the situation is similar, but where the West is interested in finding the truth – even the ISFP's search is for truth, the truth found in true beauty – the East seems to be searching for moral truth, that which is truly moral. What should we do as a society? Rather than searching for that which is true, the East searches for that which is correct, like Buddhism's Eightfold Path (right view, right resolve, right speech, right conduct, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, and right samadhi.) The types in SE say “THIS IS CORRECT!” while those in the NE ask themselves if it is, indeed, correct. If they agree they support it, and take it upon themselves to live this path and promote it. Even the INFJ, which on the surface seems to be a source of morality, is actually the receiver; INFJs absorb the morality of those they surround themselves with. They need the morality of others in order to truly be moral, not simply moralistic.

This probably has something to do with the fact that the primary contradiction of the NW and SE sodalities (Yang) is between the two judging functions, while the primary contradiction of the SW and NE sodalities (Yin) is perceiving. The types of the Yang sodalities have thinking and feeling as their “spine.” This is the term John Beebe coined to refer to the main axis of a type, the line that runs from hero/ine to anima/us (the axis connecting the parent and child is called the “arms”). In the Yin sodalities, however, the spine goes from intuition to sensation. The main task of Yang is to unite heart and mind, to express the will of the Universe. The main task of Yin is to unite the spirit with the body, the soul of God with the world, to manifest the Universe's will. Yin is the fire of the engine, Yang is the spark that sets it off. I believe this leads the types of the NW and SE sodalities to want to act on the world, while the SW and NE sodalities decide whether or not they're going to accept what the world brings them.

This isn't to say that types in the Yin sodalities never initiate, or that Yang sodalities never receive, just that generally the NW and SE sodalities seem driven by their desires, while the SW and NE sodalities seem to generally judge, support and take on, or reject others' desires. Or that types in the East never think, or those in the West never feel. This is a high level, bird's eye view of the types' overall orientation to life. Also, this is a verrrrrrrrry preliminary theory. A lot more work is going to be needed to prove or disprove it.

Finally, if we overlay the houses back on the diagram it looks like this:

This is the deep structure of the MBTI, and the relations between the various types of the MBTI. There are further structural relationships that I won’t go into here (and more I’m sure that I haven’t figured out yet). The types aren’t just random collections of personality traits. They aren't even just the functions that make up their type. They have a deep connection with the other types of the MBTI, mirroring and opposing each other, clashing and combining, seemingly full of chaos but with a deep, underlying order.


Example: Shaun of the Dead

Shaun's and Yvonne's groups

Shaun of the Dead is a horror comedy about a bumbling, aimless electronics salesman trying to keep his family and friends alive during a zombie outbreak. Shaun is your unheroic anti-hero, very much like Homer Simpson in his ability to mess up his life. The characters are:

One of the great things about works of fiction – movies, TV shows, books, what have you – is that the characters are, if the story has any “juice” to it at all, often representations of various sides of the writer’s personality, or at least various sides of a personality maybe not necessarily the writer's. Characters in fiction are, with few exceptions, far more simple and less internally contradictory than real, actual people. And that’s what makes the stories so satisfying; watching how these various “personalities” interact with each other, and hopefully come to a positive resolution, resonates with something in us. In the same way that dream figures are parts of the dreamer, the various characters are essentially parts of one total person.

In this movie Shaun has several conflicting relationships. There’s his relationship with his two roommates: Pete, who is the adult of the house, who has a real job and a car that he drives to his very responsible and adult job every day; and his good-for-nothing, video game playing, weed smoking best friend Ed. The two men are two sides of the protagonist’s personality: the serious, hard-working grown-up and the lackadaisical, fun loving shlubby Peter Pan.

As Shaun’s still kind of stuck in boyhood his relationship with his anima is also not quite worked out either. In one scene he forgets it’s his and Liz’s anniversary and ends up giving his long-suffering girlfriend the bouquet he’d actually bought for his mother (Liz sees the card of course and this is the final straw where she finally breaks up with him.)

This kind of doubling occurs when the unconscious is trying to differentiate – to separate out psychological contents – to see what they really are in order to unite them on a higher level. This is essentially the process of psychological growth. It is, in fact, the exact process going on within the sodalities of the MBTI. Growth for Shaun might look something like this:

As he leaves his immature, childish anima in the form of his mother for a mature anima (Liz) this allows him to grow into his mature, adult self, one that’s capable of taking care of things; in other words, to “become a man.”

We separate out the parts from the undifferentiated whole, and then spend the rest of our lives trying to unite them on a higher level, but without losing the differentiation we worked so hard for. It’s through this process of differentiation and reunification that progress is made, both personally in our own lives but also for society as a whole. When an individual succeeds in this they bring all of society with them, and the more people who succeed at it, the stronger, and further, the societal advance is.

The two main couples of the sodality are Shaun and Liz, and his old friend and former fellow DJ Yvonne and her boyfriend Declan. In the movie the two groups meet as they’re both trying to find the best place to survive the zombie apocalypse. Our group, of course, has probably made a terrible choice, being the Simpson’s-like inept boneheads that they are. The two groups run into each other going in opposite directions and, when they part, there’s a wonderful scene where you see that the two groups are literal mirrors of each other.

[“Stock Character Scene - Shaun of the Dead,” posted by beepboopfukcyou (YouTube)]

The two couples – Shaun & Liz, and Yvonne & Declan – form a sodality that looks like the image below: Shaun as the protagonist, Liz as his anima, Yvonne his shadow anima, and Declan, Yvonne’s boyfriend, as Shaun’s shadow ego. Let’s look at the North-west sodality in this example.

Shaun is the INTP, his antipodal/attraction is ESFJ, his antagonist is ENTJ, and his secret ego is ISFP.

He (P1) has a relation of attraction with Liz (P2). Yvonne (P3) is the antagonistic, shadow anima that shows him up. Declan (P4) is his quiet (and probably superior) other self.

So this is how the sodalities are structured, and how each complex relates to each other within the sodality. Watch the movie if you want to find out how everything works out – it’s really great so you should definitely check it out!

This was a fairly esoteric article. I really did try to make all of this make sense and I hope I achieved that goal. This post is more focused on the structure of the sodalities. In the later ones I’ll go more into how to work with the core complexes of the sodality.

Below is a chart of all the sodalities and their types. Clicking on the image will make it larger.

Links

The Cognitive Functions
The Function Roles
The Houses
The Core Complexes
How to type
Working with the MBTI
My MBTI story


Other resources

CS Joseph, “Who are the INFJs?”(YouTube)

Power corrupts

Jesus washing the disciples feet, 16th century

(Image from Wikipedia)

Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority; still more when you superadd the tendency of the certainty of corruption by authority.

~ Lord Acton

The effect of power and publicity on all men is the aggravation of self, a sort of tumor that ends by killing the victim's sympathies.

~ Henry Adams


So, lately I’ve been obsessed with podcasts about con artists, cult leaders, and serial killers. They all seem to share the same basic qualities – basically, psychopathy – and I keep seeing similarities in corporations and those who run them. I think I’m compelled to explore this side of humanity because I’m trying to work some shit out re: the negative animus and the dark side of the Self, or Evil.

One key that recently fell into my lap was the fact that power itself changes the brain, killing empathy. This explains a LOT. One thing I’ve noticed in many of the podcasts I’ve been listening to is that, even when the cult leader or whatever isn’t a psychopath or a narcissist in the beginning, and even though may have had the best of intentions, as soon as they get power everything changes.

Last year, I worked with a senior executive — let’s call him Steve — who had received feedback from his boss that he was wearing the power of his new title in an off-putting way. Steve’s boss told him that he had developed a subtle way of being right in meetings that sucked all the oxygen out of the room.  No one wanted to offer ideas once Steve had declared the right answer.  Since his promotion, Steve had become less of a team player and more of a superior who knew better than others.  In short, he had lost his empathy.”

“Why does this sort of shift in behavior happen to so many people when they’re promoted to the ranks of management?  Research shows that personal power actually interferes with our ability to empathize…. [P]eople who have power suffer deficits in empathy, the ability to read emotions, and the ability to adapt behaviors to other people. In fact, power can actually change how the brain functions…

- Lou Solomon, "Becoming Powerful Makes You Less Empathetic"

Power literally rewires the brain:

Subjects under the influence of power, he found in studies spanning two decades, acted as if they had suffered a traumatic brain injury—becoming more impulsive, less risk-aware, and, crucially, less adept at seeing things from other people’s point of view… [W]hen he put the heads of the powerful and the not-so-powerful under a transcranial-magnetic-stimulation machine, he found that power, in fact, impairs a specific neural process, “mirroring,” that may be a cornerstone of empathy. Which gives a neurological basis to what Keltner has termed the “power paradox”: Once we have power, we lose some of the capacities we needed to gain it in the first place.

- Jerry Useem, "Power Causes Brain Damage"


I suspect what’s going on is possession of the ego by the archetype of the Self. The ego (the center of the conscious personality) is already a miniature version of the Self (the center the entire psyche, conscious and unconscious). The Self is the archetype of wholeness, completion, and the carrier of the sacred. Because of this the ego always tries to push itself and it’s agenda forward, at the expense of the rest of the personality, the way that a person with an inflated ego tries to push themselves and their agenda forward at the expense of everyone around them. The cure for inflation, for the possession of our ego by the Self, is service and humility, or humiliation, the deflation of the ego.

I've seen abuse of power happen, and experienced the lure of power myself despite my strong efforts to resist. Other people treated me as special and I began to believe it… One thing I notice in hindsight is that I stopped wanting to hear any criticism from people I perceived as not supporting me. Now I see that my very resistance to the criticism was an indication that there was a problem that deserved close examination. My emotions - anger, fear, pride - got in the way of my willingness to engage in self-examination, even through a 360! Today I remember what Spiderman says: "With great power comes great responsibility." I focus more now on how I can serve others, rather than what I can achieve [emphasis mine].

- Julie Erickson, commenter in "Becoming Powerful Makes You Less Empathetic"


The above bolded sentence is the cure for the mental disorder caused by power. I think it’s interesting that the shadow ego of the ENTJ, the type with the greatest tendency towards traits we think of as pychopathic (lack of empathy, drive to succeed regardless of their effect on others) is the service oriented ESFJ. I don’t think this coincidence. Here is a short description of ESFJs:

ESFJs who have had the benefit of being raised and surrounded by a strong value system that is ethical and centered around genuine goodness will most likely be the kindest, most generous souls who will gladly give you the shirt off of their back without a second thought. For these individuals, the selfless quality of their personality type is genuine and pure.

- Personality Page, ESFJ


ESFJs are powerful and love structure, just like ENTJs, but they are service oriented. This focus on how I can serve others, rather than what I can achieve is a key to not losing our damn minds when we get a little power. The other and related key is humility. By putting ourselves lower rather than above others – by stressing the service element of leadership – we not only rescue ourselves from possession, our power actually serves to make the world a better place.

Now before the feast of the passover, when Jesus knew that his hour was come that he should depart out of this world unto the Father, having loved his own which were in the world, he loved them unto the end… He riseth from supper, and laid aside his garments; and took a towel, and girded himself. After that he poureth water into a basin, and began to wash the disciples' feet, and to wipe them with the towel wherewith he was girded… Know ye what I have done to you? Ye call me Master and Lord: and ye say well; for so I am. If I then, your Lord and Master, have washed your feet; ye also ought to wash one another's feet. For I have given you an example, that ye should do as I have done to you.

- John 13:1



References

Corporation as Psychopath, Martin Brueckner
The Corporation (the full movie on YouTube)
21 percent of CEOs are psychopaths. Only 21 percent?, Gene Marks
Becoming Powerful Makes You Less Empathetic, Lou Solomon
Power Causes Brain Damage, Jerry Useem
Foot washing, Wikipedia

Reference: Power Causes Brain Damage

If power were a prescription drug, it would come with a long list of known side effects. It can intoxicate. It can corrupt. It can even make Henry Kissinger believe that he’s sexually magnetic. But can it cause brain damage?

When various lawmakers lit into John Stumpf at a congressional hearing last fall, each seemed to find a fresh way to flay the now-former CEO of Wells Fargo for failing to stop some 5,000 employees from setting up phony accounts for customers. But it was Stumpf’s performance that stood out. Here was a man who had risen to the top of the world’s most valuable bank, yet he seemed utterly unable to read a room. Although he apologized, he didn’t appear chastened or remorseful. Nor did he seem defiant or smug or even insincere. He looked disoriented, like a jet-lagged space traveler just arrived from Planet Stumpf, where deference to him is a natural law and 5,000 a commendably small number. Even the most direct barbs—“You have got to be kidding me” (Sean Duffy of Wisconsin); “I can’t believe some of what I’m hearing here” (Gregory Meeks of New York)—failed to shake him awake.

What was going through Stumpf’s head? New research suggests that the better question may be: What wasn’t going through it?

The historian Henry Adams was being metaphorical, not medical, when he described power as “a sort of tumor that ends by killing the victim’s sympathies.” But that’s not far from where Dacher Keltner, a psychology professor at UC Berkeley, ended up after years of lab and field experiments. Subjects under the influence of power, he found in studies spanning two decades, acted as if they had suffered a traumatic brain injury—becoming more impulsive, less risk-aware, and, crucially, less adept at seeing things from other people’s point of view.

Sukhvinder Obhi, a neuroscientist at McMaster University, in Ontario, recently described something similar. Unlike Keltner, who studies behaviors, Obhi studies brains. And when he put the heads of the powerful and the not-so-powerful under a transcranial-magnetic-stimulation machine, he found that power, in fact, impairs a specific neural process, “mirroring,” that may be a cornerstone of empathy. Which gives a neurological basis to what Keltner has termed the “power paradox”: Once we have power, we lose some of the capacities we needed to gain it in the first place.

That loss in capacity has been demonstrated in various creative ways. A 2006 study asked participants to draw the letter E on their forehead for others to view—a task that requires seeing yourself from an observer’s vantage point. Those feeling powerful were three times more likely to draw the E the right way to themselves—and backwards to everyone else (which calls to mind George W. Bush, who memorably held up the American flag backwards at the 2008 Olympics). Other experiments have shown that powerful people do worse at identifying what someone in a picture is feeling, or guessing how a colleague might interpret a remark.

The fact that people tend to mimic the expressions and body language of their superiors can aggravate this problem: Subordinates provide few reliable cues to the powerful. But more important, Keltner says, is the fact that the powerful stop mimicking others. Laughing when others laugh or tensing when others tense does more than ingratiate. It helps trigger the same feelings those others are experiencing and provides a window into where they are coming from. Powerful people “stop simulating the experience of others,” Keltner says, which leads to what he calls an “empathy deficit.”

Mirroring is a subtler kind of mimicry that goes on entirely within our heads, and without our awareness. When we watch someone perform an action, the part of the brain we would use to do that same thing lights up in sympathetic response. It might be best understood as vicarious experience. It’s what Obhi and his team were trying to activate when they had their subjects watch a video of someone’s hand squeezing a rubber ball.

For nonpowerful participants, mirroring worked fine: The neural pathways they would use to squeeze the ball themselves fired strongly. But the powerful group’s? Less so.

Was the mirroring response broken? More like anesthetized. None of the participants possessed permanent power. They were college students who had been “primed” to feel potent by recounting an experience in which they had been in charge. The anesthetic would presumably wear off when the feeling did—their brains weren’t structurally damaged after an afternoon in the lab. But if the effect had been long-lasting—say, by dint of having Wall Street analysts whispering their greatness quarter after quarter, board members offering them extra helpings of pay, and Forbes praising them for “doing well while doing good”—they may have what in medicine is known as “functional” changes to the brain.

I wondered whether the powerful might simply stop trying to put themselves in others’ shoes, without losing the ability to do so. As it happened, Obhi ran a subsequent study that may help answer that question. This time, subjects were told what mirroring was and asked to make a conscious effort to increase or decrease their response. “Our results,” he and his co-author, Katherine Naish, wrote, “showed no difference.” Effort didn’t help.

This is a depressing finding. Knowledge is supposed to be power. But what good is knowing that power deprives you of knowledge?

The sunniest possible spin, it seems, is that these changes are only sometimes harmful. Power, the research says, primes our brain to screen out peripheral information. In most situations, this provides a helpful efficiency boost. In social ones, it has the unfortunate side effect of making us more obtuse. Even that is not necessarily bad for the prospects of the powerful, or the groups they lead. As Susan Fiske, a Princeton psychology professor, has persuasively argued, power lessens the need for a nuanced read of people, since it gives us command of resources we once had to cajole from others. But of course, in a modern organization, the maintenance of that command relies on some level of organizational support. And the sheer number of examples of executive hubris that bristle from the headlines suggests that many leaders cross the line into counterproductive folly.

Less able to make out people’s individuating traits, they rely more heavily on stereotype. And the less they’re able to see, other research suggests, the more they rely on a personal “vision” for navigation. John Stumpf saw a Wells Fargo where every customer had eight separate accounts. (As he’d often noted to employees, eight rhymes with great.) “Cross-selling,” he told Congress, “is shorthand for deepening relationships.”

Is there nothing to be done?

No and yes. It’s difficult to stop power’s tendency to affect your brain. What’s easier—from time to time, at least—is to stop feeling powerful.

Insofar as it affects the way we think, power, Keltner reminded me, is not a post or a position but a mental state. Recount a time you did not feel powerful, his experiments suggest, and your brain can commune with reality.

Recalling an early experience of powerlessness seems to work for some people—and experiences that were searing enough may provide a sort of permanent protection. An incredible study published in The Journal of Finance last February found that CEOs who as children had lived through a natural disaster that produced significant fatalities were much less risk-seeking than CEOs who hadn’t. (The one problem, says Raghavendra Rau, a co-author of the study and a Cambridge University professor, is that CEOs who had lived through disasters without significant fatalities were more risk-seeking.)

But tornadoes, volcanoes, and tsunamis aren’t the only hubris-restraining forces out there. PepsiCo CEO and Chairman Indra Nooyi sometimes tells the story of the day she got the news of her appointment to the company’s board, in 2001. She arrived home percolating in her own sense of importance and vitality, when her mother asked whether, before she delivered her “great news,” she would go out and get some milk. Fuming, Nooyi went out and got it. “Leave that damn crown in the garage” was her mother’s advice when she returned.

The point of the story, really, is that Nooyi tells it. It serves as a useful reminder about ordinary obligation and the need to stay grounded. Nooyi’s mother, in the story, serves as a “toe holder,” a term once used by the political adviser Louis Howe to describe his relationship with the four-term President Franklin D. Roosevelt, whom Howe never stopped calling Franklin.

For Winston Churchill, the person who filled that role was his wife, Clementine, who had the courage to write, “My Darling Winston. I must confess that I have noticed a deterioration in your manner; & you are not as kind as you used to be.” Written on the day Hitler entered Paris, torn up, then sent anyway, the letter was not a complaint but an alert: Someone had confided to her, she wrote, that Churchill had been acting “so contemptuous” toward subordinates in meetings that “no ideas, good or bad, will be forthcoming”—with the attendant danger that “you won’t get the best results.”

Lord David Owen—a British neurologist turned parliamentarian who served as the foreign secretary before becoming a baron—recounts both Howe’s story and Clementine Churchill’s in his 2008 book, In Sickness and in Power, an inquiry into the various maladies that had affected the performance of British prime ministers and American presidents since 1900. While some suffered from strokes (Woodrow Wilson), substance abuse (Anthony Eden), or possibly bipolar disorder (Lyndon B. Johnson, Theodore Roosevelt), at least four others acquired a disorder that the medical literature doesn’t recognize but, Owen argues, should.

“Hubris syndrome,” as he and a co-author, Jonathan Davidson, defined it in a 2009 article published in Brain, “is a disorder of the possession of power, particularly power which has been associated with overwhelming success, held for a period of years and with minimal constraint on the leader.” Its 14 clinical features include: manifest contempt for others, loss of contact with reality, restless or reckless actions, and displays of incompetence. In May, the Royal Society of Medicine co-hosted a conference of the Daedalus Trust—an organization that Owen founded for the study and prevention of hubris.

I asked Owen, who admits to a healthy predisposition to hubris himself, whether anything helps keep him tethered to reality, something that other truly powerful figures might emulate. He shared a few strategies: thinking back on hubris-dispelling episodes from his past; watching documentaries about ordinary people; making a habit of reading constituents’ letters.

But I surmised that the greatest check on Owen’s hubris today might stem from his recent research endeavors. Businesses, he complained to me, had shown next to no appetite for research on hubris. Business schools were not much better. The undercurrent of frustration in his voice attested to a certain powerlessness. Whatever the salutary effect on Owen, it suggests that a malady seen too commonly in boardrooms and executive suites is unlikely to soon find a cure.

Jerry Useem, Power Causes Brain Damage (The Atlantic, August 2017)

"What a Shaman Sees in a Mental Hospital"

Studying mainstream psychology as a Jungian is an exercise in frustration; it's maddening to see how messed up and crazy modern day psychology is! It's one of the fields that is the most possessed by Apollonian excess... and one of the most damaging. It's so unbelievably sad how much pain is created, by the very people who really want nothing more than to help people! Such a heart-breaking tragedy.

At any rate, I ran across this article and thought it was enlightening and fascinating. "In the shamanic view, mental illness signals 'the birth of a healer,' explains Malidoma Patrice Somé. Thus, mental disorders are spiritual emergencies, spiritual crises, and need to be regarded as such to aid the healer in being born." Our tendency to institutionalize our healers, rather than help them rebirth through their crises, is undoubtedly a large part of the reason that our society is destroying itself. Here's an excerpt:

What those in the West view as mental illness, the Dagara people regard as “good news from the other world.” The person going through the crisis has been chosen as a medium for a message to the community that needs to be communicated from the spirit realm. “Mental disorder, behavioral disorder of all kinds, signal the fact that two obviously incompatible energies have merged into the same field,” says Dr. Somé. These disturbances result when the person does not get assistance in dealing with the presence of the energy from the spirit realm.

One of the things Dr. Somé encountered when he first came to the United States in 1980 for graduate study was how this country deals with mental illness. When a fellow student was sent to a mental institute due to “nervous depression,” Dr. Somé went to visit him.

“I was so shocked. That was the first time I was brought face to face with what is done here to people exhibiting the same symptoms I’ve seen in my village.” What struck Dr. Somé was that the attention given to such symptoms was based on pathology, on the idea that the condition is something that needs to stop. This was in complete opposition to the way his culture views such a situation. As he looked around the stark ward at the patients, some in straitjackets, some zoned out on medications, others screaming, he observed to himself, “So this is how the healers who are attempting to be born are treated in this culture. What a loss! What a loss that a person who is finally being aligned with a power from the other world is just being wasted.”

Another way to say this, which may make more sense to the Western mind, is that we in the West are not trained in how to deal or even taught to acknowledge the existence of psychic phenomena, the spiritual world. In fact, psychic abilities are denigrated. When energies from the spiritual world emerge in a Western psyche, that individual is completely unequipped to integrate them or even recognize what is happening. The result can be terrifying. Without the proper context for and assistance in dealing with the breakthrough from another level of reality, for all practical purposes, the person is insane. Heavy dosing with anti-psychotic drugs compounds the problem and prevents the integration that could lead to soul development and growth in the individual who has received these energies.

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“Unless the relationship between the living and the dead is in balance, chaos ensues,” he says. “The Dagara believe that, if such an imbalance exists, it is the duty of the living to heal their ancestors. If these ancestors are not healed, their sick energy will haunt the souls and psyches of those who are responsible for helping them.” The rituals focus on healing the relationship with our ancestors, both specific issues of an individual ancestor and the larger cultural issues contained in our past. Dr. Somé has seen extraordinary healing occur at these rituals.

Taking a sacred ritual approach to mental illness rather than regarding the person as a pathological case gives the person affected–and indeed the community at large–the opportunity to begin looking at it from that vantage point too, which leads to “a whole plethora of opportunities and ritual initiative that can be very, very beneficial to everyone present,” states. Dr. Somé.

- Stephanie Marohn, "What a Shaman Sees in A Mental Hospital" (Waking Times)