Every day I encounter (and perpetuate) the casual use of pop-psychological terms to describe personality types - we talk about left-brain-y vs. right-brain-y people, attachment styles, Enneagram types, drama triangles, introversion and extroversion… But how much do such frameworks help us to constructively understand ourselves better, versus simply justifying our foibles? How illuminating are they for understanding resonance or conflict in relationship, the things that trigger or befuddle us about other people?

River Kenna is, for these purposes, an Intuitive. I try to pin him down on his favourite personalty type framework, but it turns out he holds them all pretty lightly, orienting first and foremost towards an intuitive grasp of Gestalt. Analysis is only good for filling in the gaps, a working theory of mind helpful to the extent it facilitates the “prosthetic empathy” that is available on perceiving another’s innocence. It’s that way around, he would argue, that we really understand anything at all.

This is a suitably meandering conversation. We talk about our culture’s fixation with “left-braininess” and the tendency to rationally check intuitions, but fail to intuitively check rationalisations; the “existential kink” of recurring relationship patterns; and the benefits of having some understanding of one’s own psychological and attachment vulnerabilities when interfacing with other minds (including AI).

One insight that I found particularly helpful: there is something extremely connective about understanding another’s core fear. Even if it is not one’s own primary fear, it’s usually possible to recognise and sympathise with a vulnerability, more than the impulses or convictions that might be downstream from it. It might not make a person one finds irritating more congenial, but it potentially creates a way to understand and humanise them.

Music outro credit: “Ooh Child” — MILCK

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