Welcome to the Lenore Thomson exegesis wiki.
Lenore Thomson is the author of Personality Type: An Owner's Manual, a book that takes the Myers-Briggs personality type system back to its roots in Jungian psychology. Or perhaps redefines Myers-Briggs as a vocabulary for analyzing politics and public discourse. We don't really know. On this web site, we try to figure out what she's saying. You're invited to help (see below).
The Main Propositions
Our Difficulties
Terms With Nonobvious Meanings
The Function Attitudes
Personality Type
The 16 Types
Argument vs definition/exploitation
Parliament of Attitudes
Cocooning-vs.-Conforming Exegesis
Game-Board Exegesis
Negotiation Exegesis
Saints-and-Politicians Exegesis
Place-Your-Stakes Exegesis
Gear-Shifting Exegesis
Philosophical Exegesis
Truth-and-Language Exegesis
Orienting
Semiotic Attitude
Semiotic Attitudes
Semiotically Disoriented
Political Correctness
Checks and Balances
Introverted Intuition and the Meaning of Music
Art and Perception
Attitudes from the Horse's Mouth
Genus Problem
Not Personality
Tea Leaves And Tarot Cards
Tertiary Temptation
Developing the Secondary
Inferior Function
Type From Scratch
What Can INPs possibly teach ENPs about time management?
I Can Always...
Life Strategies
George Cuvier
Eric Berne
Jo Coudert
Miss Manners
George Costanza
Louis Farrakhan
Fargo
Taxi Driver
Daria Morgendorfer
Larry Groznic
Jim Anchower
Jean Teasdale
Lenore Thomson's book is simply written, filled with examples and analogies from popular TV shows like Star Trek and The X Files. Even so, it can be maddeningly difficult to understand. She touches on a wide range of deep and broad topics from ancient philosophy to Sufism to contemporary pop culture. She seems to have something very definite in mind by the many terms with nonobvious meanings. She never really quite defines them, though, and it's difficult to pin down her meaning.
Lenore is the first popular author to go into depth about what the function attitudes are, and she turns Myers-Briggs from a system of personality classification to a path of personal growth, something like the Enneagram. Her book might also be a vocabulary of mental heuristics, a unified view of many conflicting strands of philosophic thought (perhaps what Carl Jung intended), and an analysis of how and why people's rhetorical expectations sometimes clash. We don't really know quite what to make of her book--hence this web site.
This wiki is a place where we explore what Lenore Thomson is saying by trying to put it into our own words--exegesis. The text on this wiki is written by anyone who cares to post, and edited and rewritten by anyone who cares to edit and rewrite. We welcome all Lenore-related ideas: what's posted here is not necessarily correct, it's not checked or approved by Lenore Thomson, and it's not necessarily any clearer than Lenore's original writing. If you find what looks like an internal contradiction here, it probably is. We make no attempt to be consistent; we're looking for many different angles on Lenore's stuff. The only Lenore-related topic we're not interested in is judgements of whether her ideas are right or wrong. We leave that to the reader. [Then it's up to the reader to judge whether a particular judgement is right or wrong!!! -- Robert Evans]
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This wiki is hosted by Ben Kovitz.