The Ecstatic Soul

A New Look at the INFJ Personality

By: Renaud Contini

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

Among the personality types, the INFJ stands out as a genuine mystery. The most intuitive of the intuitives, he looks like a thinker among feelers. Introverts mistake him for an extrovert. Realists mistake him for an idealist. Dreamers think he is too rational, yet the truly rational types see in him an obscure, emotional mystic. He is a prophet for some, an abstract loner for others.

After all these years, the INFJ is still misunderstood. Worse, he does not even understand himself. When he tries to grasp his material body, he loses all sense of the material. When he directs his attention to concepts, he misses the intimacy of sense perception. The metaphysical predicament of the INFJ is that he dwells at the crossing between intuition and sensation, thinking and feeling. Everyone and yet no one: this is how he experiences himself.

On the surface, the INFJ personality is a paradox. This book attempts to solve the paradox and uncover the true nature of the INFJ, using the method of existential phenomenology. It will be of interest to INFJs, as well as to anyone with an affinity for the work of Carl Jung, philosophy, psychology, and typology-based theories of personality.

Finally, The Ecstatic Soul is the manifesto of Jungian Existentialism, foreshadowing a new movement in personality theory.

Renaud Contini is a writer and philosopher based in Dublin. He holds a PhD in Intellectual History from the National University of Ireland. He is the author of the novella The Interview, published in 2020. The Ecstatic Soul is his first book of psychological nonfiction.

Heady - even for an INFJ

Listening to this felt like listening to a doctoral candidate present a paper to their peers. I kept looking for something I could put to use and found very little. Among personality typologists, though, this may be just what you want -- fresh insights from a peer.