Friends, I am not satisfied that I have made my point. The only way I think I can do so, make the idea crystallized and concrete, is to give a direct, personal example. I don't like to do this, I prefer to remain remote. Believe me, I do not intend to make a habit of blubbering on about my personal minutiae.

Okay, I have found that throughout my life I always "got on," as they say in Britain, best with either the very old or the very young. I do a bit of substitute teaching and I always prefer to run a class of first, second, or third graders, ideally third grade and below. At the opposite end of the spectrum, I have always had the greatest affinity for senior citizens.

I have come to believe this is due to the structure of my basic INFJ personality type: introverted, intuitive, feeling, judge; and as such, I am what is called a dominant intuitive. This means that my primary conceptual and perceptual approach to understanding the world is intuitive, a qualitative as opposed to a quantitative, five senses-based,"just the facts, mam," methodology.

To my way of thinking, both youngsters and seniors - structurally, as communities - they are primarily intuitive based. Youngsters come before the need for practicality (sensing, (S) as it is designated in Personality Typing) and seniors come after the necessity for practicality.

If my skill with computers were greater I would provide a link to another website where you could read all about Personality Typing, which is fascinating stuff. But I don't so let me just say that, according to the system of Personality Typing, there are sixteen personality types based on four questions.

Where do you use the majority of your energy? the inner world [introverted (I)] or the outer world [extroverted (E)]?

What kind of information do you naturally perceive? Objective facts, details, things that can be seen, heard, smelled, tasted, and touched [sensing (S)] or patterns, implications, abstractions, and the like [intuitive (N)]?

How do you make decisions? [based on your personal feelings about a situation, personal values [feeling (F)] or logical, impersonal analysis of facts and data [thinking (T)]?

How do you prefer to live life? a spontaneous, open-ended way, leaving your options open [perceiving (P)] or in a more structured, systematic, formatted way [judging (J)]?

There's much more of course, but the relevant part for our purposes is the fact that I am a dominant intuitive and what I think that means for my relatability to youngsters and senior citizens. Over the years, these interactions have produced aggregate tendencies in my personality, or aspects within which I think of as the 'Little Boy' and the 'Old Man,' both of the INFJ variety, of course.

These, the old man and the little boy, I think of as my avatars. Certain kinds of women bring forth my little boy aspect - expressed through a thirty-something adult but of the INFJ variety. Other kinds of women bring call out the old man in me - as expressed through an adult not yet reached middle age.

I think of them as the maximum concentration of some of my best traits, tendencies, and characteristics. I love those guys, my avatars, and I love it when I get the chance to be those guys. Therefore, I am prone to fall In-Love with women who summon those avatars.

Now we see that if you flip a coin and it lands on its edge, one can see how a man might find himself in the position of actually being In-Love with two or more women at the same time. Leaving aside morality, we can infer that this is the ontological dilemma bigamists often find themselves in.

So, none of the women with whom Narcissus came in contact with summoned his avatar(s). What he was looking for in the lake is the avatar of his Self that remained locked within him, tragically unexpressed. What does it mean when singers sing of being prisoners of love, when they say that you have the "key to my heart," and so on and so forth. They are unconsciously expressing the truth of this, that all of us, in a sense, must remain a prisoner within ourselves until the right person comes along and releases us, summons forth our avatar, making me love her because and as she releases an aspect of my-Self, which I love.

wingedcentaur