E8 : The Paladin
Type 8
From one angle, Eightness is similar to being a large animal that has no concept of its size. It traipses through your living room, tail knocking over your Ming vase on the way through, misjudging the width of your door frame — *smash* — and there they go, still moving, passing through, oblivious to much of their effect on the environment/people/objects. *clonk, clonk*
This quality of not-knowing-its-size is one reason why some 8s have initial trouble typing themselves — they project that everyone else is an equally big animal or has a similar self-concept. Their prime projection — it’s a jungle out there — keeps the underlying program-of-personal-size in full swing. Worth noting here, too, that E8 is the universal prototype for masculinity and machismo, so male 8s often end up exhibiting some of the more exaggerated versions of this fixation due to the considerable leverage of cultural/familial support for this style, which can begin fostering the characteristic repression-of-vulnerability in earliest childhood in the life an individual 8.
The point about the association of Type 8 with masculinity/machismo is also mentioned for those who may have been raised in circumstances where 8-ness (aggression/strength/vulnerability-suppression) was particularly valued (or over-valued), as this may lead to mistypings. Conversely, in their developmental stages, girls are given much more permission to express sensitivity, and hence female 8s can have some trouble seeing themselves in the descriptions of this type. Stated another way, this psychological style is phallic, so the female iterations of this type are sometimes less pronounced or less stereotypically aggressive.
An apt title for this type is “Anger instead of vulnerability”. From one perspective, 8s can be described as mistreating themselves, unconsciously, by denying their vulnerability. Rage is the substrate material of the Gut types (8, 9, 1), and they use it (unconsciously) to mobilize the will to repress whole large chunks of psyche. From E8’s perspective, the prime imperative is that sensitivity and vulnerability be pushed away into perfect non-existence. Of course, the Gut’s attempts at implementing such massive hemispheric repressions are ultimately untenable and doomed to failure…but the ideal remains a constant and there’s much more success here at such denial (a kind of willed blindness) than can be pulled off by the Head and Heart types.
This idea becomes illuminated when considering the metaphor of the Gut as a sensory device…or more to the point, when contrasting in symbolic space how many of the five senses are located in the Head, and considering the Heart’s capacity for subtle receptivity and intricate reactivity. Comparatively, the Gut is flying blind in the subterranean. Gut instinct / gut response is to “know” and take action from a primordial space of pre-Thought/pre-Feeling, if you will. An underlying consciousness that’s localized in the Gut implies a psyche working with bigger and more raw chunks of psychic material, less undermined and impeded by the granularity of the Head and the spindly tuning of the Heart…and is therefore, among other things, less hamstrung in the progress toward its neurotic goals of self-repression, targeted at specific areas of psyche, per each Gut types’ inherent bias.
Anger-instead-of-vulnerability has 8s taking revenge on the World in some way, because in order to be strong, the Eight has sold his/her innocence to the Devil, so to speak, and the World has to pay for that sacrifice. Because they feel they had to offer up their innocence (weakness, neediness, submissiveness, susceptibility to feelings of guilt), if anyone appears as an opponent, it becomes a matter of justice to the 8 to confront and punish, partly in retribution for the 8’s killing of their own vulnerability.
Moving about in the world, 8s are mainly unconscious thinkers. They’re instinctively counterphobic, as compared to E6’s more conscious counterphobia. Thinking about oneself and one’s worries is largely in the subconscious, or perhaps is the work of the reptilian/mammalian brain in 8s. Compared to the other types, their fears are generated less by conscious thought; fears here are mostly instinctual, less susceptible to influence by rational deliberation.
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