Guest post by Occam’s Chainsaw, INTJ

Supernatural

Te: Dean always wants to follow a well-known pattern, as though he was solving all cases ‘by the book’. Dean always makes a detailed plan, which he uses later to catch the monster he and his brother are chasing. He rationally structures the world around him, all the while concentrating on efficiency. He likes to control his environment, which he also did even back when he was a little child—he would always tell Sam what to do, how to behave, what to believe, etc. Out of Sam and Dean, Dean is better at behaving like a leader due to the dominant Te in his stack, because it treats everything objectively. It is only confronted by Sam’s Fe, which is a function focusing on creating harmony and treating everyone equally—hence Sam’s role as the moral compass of the team. (Dean’s Fi thinks a little maiming and creating fake IDs aren’t to be punished.) He isn’t the type to believe in anything until he’s seen empirical evidence to prove its correctness, e.g. he refused to believe in angels until Cas came with his wings to introduce himself to the hunters. Dean is also popular for his sarcastic nature.

Si: Dean’s auxiliary function urges him to stick to his own traditions, memories, and well-known methods. The reason he is so absorbed with continuing where John left off is also etched to his aux Si. He doesn’t want to leave the ‘family business’, and this is also one of the reasons why he and Sam argue so much; Dean always comes up with their dad’s point of views, while Sam always retorts with things like following his own goals. The stark difference between their Ni and Si is the root of the majority of their fights. Because of the Si, Dean thinks of their father as a role-model/hero due to the Si’s tendency to create personal (subjective) perceptions of the past.

Ne: Dean is always the one to look for a new job. He sees the potential in all of the possibilities, and he always seeks excitement when he’s searching. The rarer the case, the better, because it brings him brand new things to deal with. He wants to try out new things, but since his Si is superior, he does so within an already well-known area—which is his job. This may appear as Se to most people, but in reality, this is SiNe: Ne accumulates the new experiences so that Si will have more and more things to compare to. Dean also values his experiences more than sudden hunches that come out of the blue, like once he said, “I think I’ve been hunting for long enough to trust such a feeling”, which suggests a lower N in his stack.

Fi: Dean fiercely protects his feelings, and never talks about them, he instead just says “nah, I’m fine”. He has extremely intense emotions, but before allowing them to come to the surface, he looks for a place to hide to be alone when his emotional side overtakes him. Since Sam reeks of Fe, he always easily annoys his bother when trying to get him to have a pep-talk with him. For instance, when John died, they talked about dealing with the loss: Sam suggested they talked about it openly, but instead of doing so, Dean opted to destroy a car with a metal stick. It shows that he has very intense emotions, but he has a hardship dealing with them.