I've been reading a pair of books by Jonathan Haidt:
The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom: Jonathan Haidt: 9780465028023: Amazon.com: Books
The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion: Jonathan Haidt: 9780307455772: Amazon.com: Books
Jonathan Haidt is an academic and experimental psychologist at the University of Virginia who works in the field of "positive psychology". Positive psychology is the study of the human mind in those cases where nothing is especially wrong: no psychoses, no overwhelming anxiety, no need for intense therapy, no need to "fix" anything. Interestingly, Jung and in particular his work psychological types is an example of positive psychology, but ever since Freud's and Jung's works were mostly rejected by academia in an effort to make psychology more scientific, psychology has largely focused on what goes wrong with the mind and has tended to assume a common understanding of how the human mind works normally.
In The Happiness Hypothesis, Haidt presents an interesting picture of the human mind. The human mind is divided, and not in just only one way. It is split between mind and body, between new and old, between controlled and automatic. It is even split between conscious mind, the limbic system (emotions), and gut (the autonomous systems directly dealing with maintaining metabolism) - the Enneagram's mystical theory doesn't seem to be too far off from reality in this case.
There are lots of different ways we can categorize how the mind is split, and along with the ways that align with Enneagram typology, there are all the Jungian perspectives as well, where there is definitely a conscious mind and an unconscious mind.
Haidt introduces his own analogy of the mind, the one he has found most useful for explaining/studying the kinds of things he has found. A classical version of this analogy would be reason vs passion, where you have a charioteer (reason) constraining and directing horses (passion), and the ideal of this classical analogy is the ultimate superiority of reason, where reason brings one closer to the gods, and passion brings one closer to the animals.
Haidt believes that while the metaphor is apt, the idealization is not. Ultimately, reason is NOT in control of the passions. A better analogy is an elephant with a rider.
The elephant isn't stupid. It's very smart. It is very, very good at doing elephant things, and it has a huge "library of routines" that not only take care of eating/sleeping/breathing, but also handle complex things like relating to other elephants (humans, actually). The elephant has only two limitations. For one, it is rather short-sighted. Only the present moment and the last few moments really matter to it. Its other limitation is that it cannot speak. It has no words for what it has to say. It can think and feel and observe and react, but conscious communication is beyond it.
The rider is also very smart, and it is extremely good at doing a lot of things that the elephant is bad at. It is very far-sighted. The rider can see how the past affects the present, how the present affects the future, and how that which is nearby affects things far away, and how things far away can affect us right here. It can also talk. Talking is very useful for talking with other "riders", who also know how to talk. Moreover, the rider can use logic and reason, write books, contribute to the total knowledge of humanity and so on. There is one critical thing that the rider CANNOT DO, however.
The rider cannot "control" the elephant.
If you can imagine an actual elephant and rider for a moment, the rider isn't pushing or otherwise forcing the elephant to do anything. The elephant does what it does on its own. The rider can direct the elephant, and the elephant might comply. The rider can train the elephant to react in particular ways, and so on.
The rider and elephant can be mostly in sync, where each understands the other and they accomplish things together that neither could alone.
The rider and elephant can be very out of sync, where the rider has one idea and the elephant has quite a different idea. This is why it is easy to decide to go on a diet (the rider's choice), and so easy to eat too much in spite of that (the elephant's choice).
This dimorphism of the human mind can be used to understand a lot of "normal" psychology. Why perfectly reasonable people can do unreasonable things. Why some people seem to have it all together and others don't. How we can have huge blind spots and be complete hypocrites. Why it's so hard to change habits.
I think this dimorphism imperfectly maps to Jungian functions. (Keep in mind I'm bastardizing the functions by doing this mapping at all, this isn't typology so much as a way to take your understanding of typology and apply it to this perspective.) In particular I think the elephant represents the unconscious mind directly: all of those thoughts and feelings that we KNOW and UNDERSTAND, but we can't figure out how to say. The rider does his/her best at translating these things, but the rider isn't the elephant, and the translation is lossy. Therefore, I would say that the rider is represented by the Extroverted functions: the functions that indicate how you interact with the world. Conversely, the elephant is represented by the introverted functions.
This mapping has some interesting consequences (remember this is a bastardization of functions, not classical function theory). The main implication is that Fi, Ti, Ni, Si are all tapping into the elephant's understanding of things. It is the elephant that has that innate understanding of logic for an IxTP. It is the elephant that has a broad and abstract intuition for Ni doms. And so on.
The elephant is NOT STUPID. The elephant is YOU. (More or less. ;) )
The elephant represents a very significant (and perhaps the most significant) portion of your understanding of the world.
And the elephant mostly resides in your unconscious mind. How's that for a puzzle?
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I'll be posting more in this thread, gradually covering a lot of the material I've been reading of late. I have to say that these books really "clicked" for me. The models/analogies here make sense of a lot of things that didn't otherwise make sense, that you'd have to just shrug and accept something nonsensical as true.
Of course, the point of posting this is to generate discussion.
Have you read either of these books? If so, what do you think? Do you think my reading is off base?
If you haven't read these books, what do you think of the elephant/rider analogy? Do you see this pattern in your own life?
Future posts will expand on things like mental blind spots, hypocrisy, how you "train the elephant", how love and attachments work, how we react to adversity, and other topics. In the long run, this will turn into a discussion of the psychology of morality, where Haidt offers a very different vision of how morality is learned and understood than has been the case in modern scientific psychology, and eventually leading to a discussion of how this psychology of morality affects how politics and religion plays out (the topic of the second book). If you have any preferences for which topic(s) I cover first, let me know.