Subtype Trait Structures: sp6
The identification with the aggressor and introjection of an internal persecutor, to defend themselves from external threats, entail the development of a superego that constantly feeds the feeling of guilt. This self blame is a way of controlling the world: “If it is my fault, I can do something about it.” Then, they look for punishment, as masterfully portrayed in Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, all with the hope of placating this uncontrollable self-persecution.
Unconscious behaviors sometimes lead them to “turning themselves in” to get the punishment through which they, uselessly, hope they will be forgiven and “rescued.” This neurotic mechanism leads them to search for the love of one of their parents (usually the father) through the admission of fault and inadequacy, with the goal of forgiveness. Therefore, the conservation E6 sees attaining love and appreciation through their own merits and personal value as impossible.
Seeing themselves as constantly at fault, they also feel persecuted: they project their internal persecution externally. It is a form of paranoid thinking which incurs the following: other people are always ready to catch your faults, attack you, and criticize you, and if they do not, it is only because it is convenient for them to hide their intentions at the moment to ensure they punch down the line.
Given that they demand from themselves more and more, they can’t handle that it is other people that are accusing them and they continuously oscillate between victim and accuser.
The conservation E6 has the competitive desire to take the place of the authority which tends to cause controversy. They always believe they know how things should be done while submitting to their superiors at the same time. At the same time, they love and hate the authority that they mystify.
It is hard for them to take on responsibility in negative situations (failures, conflicts, etc.) out of fear of being vulnerable and the other taking advantage of them. They accuse with the purpose of defending themselves and ensuring that others don’t accuse them.
They obsessively search to confirm what they are and what they do. The dominant fear is of failing and doing wrong; and it is so dominating that it blocks action or expression, and is as if they lacked an internal method to determine the validity of a personal choice. Prior to action, a long and troubling process leads them to ruminate with a rigidity that turns into pure inaction. The fear of judgment compromises doing, with inhibition leading them to known or comfortable goals.
In the work environment, they choose to do things they are sure of. They avoid changes in the workplace for fear of not being able to deal with them, of lacking the ability or knowledge; they do not propose things but rather hope that others do for them.
They do not like to improvise, they prefer to prepare before new situations, out of fear of ridicule. The moment of confrontation with the other is very stressful. The feeling is always that they are not ready enough. They need continual confirmation, by the people they trust in, that they are doing the right thing. When this confirmation does not come to them, they mentally review, typical of an insecure person, what they have said or done.
Their thoughts are centered on subjective content, to defend themselves from what they do not perceive clearly. But, they do not recognize having departed from absolutely subjective premises. Their primary goal is to demonstrate (especially to themselves) that their idea is valid. A “cogito, ergo cogito” complicates things to such a point that their thought eventually remains in the hands of doubt.
Doubt is connected with self-invalidation and ambivalence. They constantly devalue themselves but at the same time have a great self-concept. They feel persecuted (in extreme cases can lead to a paranoid schizophrenia). They even doubt what they doubt. They are suspicious of others and suffer from chronic uncertainty about which action to take.
They love and hate the paternal figure that represents authority. They desire to please and attack. They go through phases of contact and withdrawal: the desire for a relationship and for fusion is as strong as the fear that they will completely become vulnerable. They have not built the ability to establish clear boundaries, and they move with extreme ambivalence between their desire to satisfy their own needs and fear of losing the relationship with the other.
Due to this fear, while the E9 has given up on maintaining the difference between the self and the other therefore solving the conflict, the E6 invaded by the threat constituted by the other, withdraws to protect the self, inhibiting any kind of decision and, therefore, any action, whether it be at an interpersonal level with an external other, or at an intrapsychic level with a self understood as the essential set of emotions and needs of the other.
The issue of control is basic in childhood and adolescence both among their school peers and their loved ones. The message received is: “The world is dangerous; you are weak and influenceable and, therefore, we are the ones who will guide you because we know what is adequate for you.”
Between the psychological types described by Jung, the conservation E6 corresponds to the reflective introvert. The introvert, locked in themselves, stays clear of too much contact with external reality. This introvert is characterized by the primacy of thought: the ideas that they have of other people affect their relationships, without them realizing the distance that they are introducing into them. They have a negative relationship with the other, which comes from the indifference to rejection. Thought tends to disarm the adversary. The other is always a little neglected or surrounded by measures of caution they defend themselves from external demands with.
The conservation E6 fears that emotional manifestations of the other will overcome them. They prefer reading to overt social contact, are introspective, schedule their activities, and control their impulses and feelings.
The first psychosocial structure that the child learns, according to Erickson, is trust. With milk, the child incorporates their mother and nutrition. The derived wellness makes the surrounding objective world acceptable: this is the base upon which we base our mental world.
“I am what I get,” the kid could claim, in the sense that they trust themselves and others by the quantity and quality of the security of what they’ve received. The conservation E6 has been unable to incorporate the feeling of wellness connected to the relationship with a nutrition-bringing mother, and as a consequence, they have not been able to build this trust on security. This lack has made them insecure and fearful.
The conservation E6 was an over-protected child who did not feel accepted in their own true needs, which came with a recognition of their own less positive qualities.
If the child does not get help in their efforts of individuation to be who they are, or is pushed toward a definition of themselves that satisfies the representation of their parent over their true nature, there are two possibilities: submitting or rebelling. Or the two reactions together, which is what usually happens.
At first, the child rebels, but over time, they end up accommodating themselves to the demands and needs of their parents to avoid rejection and the withdrawal of affection, to not fall flat with disapproval, and in practice, loneliness.
In their ambivalence, the conservation E6 cannot live serenely with adaptation nor rebelliousness: both polarities are unsatisfactory for them and they live in an irreconcilable dilemma between freedom and obligation.
When they have to choose between what they are, between their project, put out ahead by their own efforts, and others’ projects, which is presented with guarantees of maximum support, the conservation E6 accepts the easiest solution: other’s proposals.
They give up a super important need in this way: realizing their own efforts. At the root of this, they feel a very strong hostility that, unable to manifest it, comes back against themselves in the form of blame. To be accepted, they activate adequate behaviors, like obedience, goodness, and solidarity. These are hard to attain if they are countered with other needs, like a natural selfishness or the need to be oneself, even with that aspect’s own accompanying miseries.
They “eliminate” unacceptable impulses that, in spite of everything, they struggle to carry out. The fear that they can overcome this self-censoring is what we call “anxiety.” In other words, the E6 puts their mind to a self-idealization whose dominant traits are perfection, and feelings of omnipotence and omniscience. In this manner, they make the illusion that they’ve outgrown self-hatred and conquered others’ approval. That they have overcome the base conflict between their need for self-realization and others’ needs.
In Karen Horney’s description of neuroses, we can see this E6 in the conciliatory personality, whose style of conflict resolution is resignation, particularly in tending to renouncing with submission. The neurotic “resignation” restricted the field of action connected with their own desires.
They can renounce all ambition for success, in that it implies effort and, additionally, the danger of being imprisoned by others’ expectations and responsibilities. They prefer to cultivate intense imaginative activity and fear their elevated ideal of themselves, while they delay the necessary action to make things reality. They tend to be convinced of chasing what they want, which they don’t really know much about. They lose the orientation of action because they do not have contact with desire, nor with its implied emotional aspects. This leads the conservation E6 to a detachment leading them to occasional inertia in the plane of action.
The submissive resignation causes extreme neurotic worry about conflict and punishment. The mechanism of projection is evident through the way they invest others into co-action and hostility instead of recognizing their difficulty to be “free” and themselves.
The conservation E6 is one type who can fall victim to inertia, paralyzed in all aspects of their life. To drain the anxiety at the root, they feed a spooky omnipotent world that does not reveal an authentic position of independence. And with submission they do not take action but rather maintain an ultimate defense stemming from their internal world.
Selfishness and Stinginess
The conservation E6 houses the “crazy” idea that material and emotional resources are scarce and that they can always lack basic things, with a threat toward their own survival. From this erroneous perception, they derive their worried, and “selfish,” attitude with only some material things and emotional relationships.
This selfishness is manifested in an attitude of always putting themselves before others, out of a reaction of fear that they will never be up to the challenge faced. In general, this fear is not conscious, and when it is, they become very ashamed of it and see it as something that should not happen.
The way of thinking in conservation E6 is always oriented to the past or the future. It is essential to the need for security to predict anything that could happen and to be in a situation to face difficulties, and directly proportional to the distrust in their capacity to do so.
Thinking about the past, in itself, is essential to the maintenance of control over possible errors committed through the feeling of guilt, with the goal of corrective action and finding safety. The feeling of guilt is, additionally, a defense mechanism against pain, from which they cannot be abandoned.
Feeling comes after thought, which conditions it. As Hegel claims: “If emotions are not coherent with thought, that is bad for emotions.” They control, above all, the emotions that could cause conflicts with people significant to them. It is hard that they allow themselves a moment to not think about anything, unless they get validation that it is ok. When this happens, this “not thinking or doing” is very pleasant for them.
Their thoughts are seemingly logical, but only on a superficial level; in their deepest core, they are undefined and cloudy. This allows them to not define themselves to other people, a strategy which maintains their absence of deep commitment, and avoids confrontation and conflict. In reality, emotions controlled like this come back strongly and dysfunctionally when thought no longer allows a solution to problems.
The conservation E6 is very inhibited, in both instinctual impulses and aggression. Their hesitant character is a vacillation between their impulses and an equally intense fearful inhibition that stemmed from a fear of the father or, more widely, authority figures, and has led to a strong superego.
They tend to have the personality, which can last a lifetime, of a “good kid”: someone who ensures they live according to ethics and others expectations, with an ingratiating attitude, often smiling.
Very different from the schizoid E5, who is a true loner, this character’s timid nature is more like a type of stepping aside out of fear of annoying someone or out of insecurity, but truly yearns for closeness, and satisfies their need for emotional support with a few close relationships.
It is always a laborious process for the conservation E6 to make a decision, or even move: due to their fear of change, it is easier for them to lengthen a situation than to keep moving forward and confront a new challenge. This deliberate slowness, together with the tendency to create a fog to obscure the clarity of things, make them less agile. Like the “fool” in fairy tales who, for fear of making their own decisions, is often manipulated.
This type is much more of a dreamer than a doer, substituting reality with fantasy. A certain inefficiency is the other side of their inclination toward their internal life and noble ideals.
The inhibition of emotional expression makes them a hypersensitive and fantasizing character, blocking them from action and instinctual spontaneity.
For a strategy oriented toward controlling commitment, dreaming of fusion with another is more functional than a tangible relationship, which would bring confrontation.
The conservation E6 has always felt like a stowaway: someone who got on board without a ticket: in their family, in love, at work. They are the disinherited heir, the wife abandoned at the altar, the laid off worker. It is as if the shadow of these possibilities never abandoned them, ever present.
The conservation E6 is always alert, looking for signs and indicators of hidden meanings (opposite of the E3 who wants to have everything under control). They reflect too much!
They also like instructions. As dutiful distrusters, they resolve conflicts trusting in logic. While the E7 uses intellect as a strategy, the E6 shows a fanatic loyalty to reason. To feel confident, they adopt the strategy of searching for problems: they must have them in order to solve them.
