Typing Doctor Who: Amy Pond (ENFP)

ENFPs:

Quick, ingenious, stimulating, alert, and outspoken. Resourceful in solving new and challenging problems. Adept at generating conceptual possibilities and then analyzing them strategically. Good at reading other people. Bored by routine, will seldom do the same thing the same way, apt to turn to one new interest after another.

(What is this? Read my introduction to my Typing Doctor Who series).

Well, I’ve been re-watching Doctor Who in recent weeks, and I felt the familiar sensation of affection as I reached Series 5 and 6 and got to watch my favourite fictional characters again: Eleven and the Ponds. Amy is my all-time favourite companion, and Eleven is my favourite Doctor. I already typed Eleven (as an ENTP) here, but, with Eleven and Amy fresh in my mind from my rewatching of Series 5 and 6, I couldn’t resist thinking about the type of Eleven’s iconic partner in crime shenanigans too.

Amy, by my reckoning, is an ENFP. In short, ENFPs are excitable and spontaneous free spirits. Like their thinking cousins, the ENTPs, they are energised by the exploration of possibilities and ideas. They are restless and enthusiastic, driven primarily by a need for novelty and exploration. In this way—their overt openness to possibilities and novelty—they’re similar to their sensing cousins the ESFPs (such as Clara and Rose), but, as an intuitive type, ENFPs tend to be more cerebral and intellectually-oriented than ESFPs. Beneath their extroverted enthusiastic, excitable, spontaneous exterior, ENFPs harbour a depth of feeling and passion which, in combination with the intuition and imagination they display to the world, makes them a highly idealistic, compassionate and creative type. They’re adept at inspiring and motivating others, and fluent at navigating social and emotional dynamics. They’re some of the most fun people to be around, and, once you get talking to them, make for absorbing conversationalists. Some fictional and celebrity ENFPs you might know are Robin Williams, Phil Dunphy (Modern Family), Aang (Avatar: The Last Airbender), Willy Wonka, Andy Dwyer (Parks and Recreation).

If you come to see that Amy is an ENFP, you can understand why the Doctor-companion duo of Eleven and Amy worked so well. They’re both ENxP types who lead with Extraverted Intuition: they are both extroverts energised by the perception of possibilities, the craving for novelty, the flightiness and the lust for exploration. They both have an imaginative turn of mind which manifested in the fairytale, romantic, somewhat fanciful and surreal dynamic of their Doctor-companion relationship (of which the high point was Series 5)—a dynamic which might have ascended into pure fancy and fairytale totally divorced from the reality of Amy’s (and the Doctor’s) life if not for the grounding, sensible influence of Rory, an ISFJ.

You see the tension between Amy’s respective relationships with the Doctor and with Rory in Amy’s Choice: with Rory, the down-to-earth, comfort- and stability-seeking ISFJ, Amy has a contented married life in a quaint English rural village; it’s a life Rory adores but Amy, although she seems to appreciate it (she has inferior Si after all), finds herself feeling restless and bored. Contrast with her life with the Doctor: an unreal and fantastical life of adventure, excitement and danger aboard the Tardis. It’s sort of clear which Amy prefers: her affection for the life in Leadworth is associated with her investment in her relationship with Rory, but it’s obvious she finds more appealing the life in the Tardis:

RORY: I want the other life. You know, where we’re happy and settled and about to have a baby.
AMY: But don’t you wonder, if that life is real, then why would we give up all this? Why would anyone?
…
AMY: We’re in a time machine. It can be the night before our wedding for as long as we want.
RORY: We have to grow up eventually.
AMY: Says who?

Consider, too, the way Amy as a child imagined a whole world around her “imaginary friend”, the “Raggedy Doctor”, after a brief encounter with the Doctor one night. She made toys and created stories and let her imagination run wild with the possibilities associated with the strange, raggedy man with his box who invaded her garden one night when she was a child. She imagined an idealised Doctor in her stories and fantasies, the Doctor taking on a whimsical, fairytale quality in her imagination, and imagined that he was one day going to return and whisk her away in his time machine (in spite of, maybe because of, the insistence of almost everyone that the Doctor wasn’t real). All of this—the whimsical imagination, the idealisation, the projection of emotion into fantasy—is so xNFP, and so very much like an xNFP child.

As an FP type, Amy uses Introverted Feeling—she makes judgments based on her subjective valuation of things: good, bad, right, wrong. In this way she’s similar to Clara and Rose, both ESFPs (whom I’ve previously typed), but different from her husband Rory, an FJ type who makes judgments based on considerations of group values and harmony and the feelings and needs of others. In The Almost People she spurned and acted frostily towards the (apparently) flesh Doctor because she recoiled at the idea that her emotional attachment and feelings for the Doctor could or should be transferred to manufactured clones of the Doctor. In The Girl Who Waited the elder Amy initially refused to help herself, because she and the last 36 years of her life would cease to exist, but relented when she understood that it would be cruel to Rory to deprive him of the chance to grow old with the love of his life. Amy is a passionate woman—not overtly so (FP types typically aren’t), her passion and feeling is internal, but there’s no doubt it’s there.

To end with a note about ENFPs, they’re a magnetic personality who inspire and captivate others with their energy, spontaneity, excitement, ingenuity and charming lack of inhibition. They’re some of my favourite people in the world—my best friend in high school was an ENFP, and I’ve also, er, found myself inexplicably attracted to people and characters of this personality type (he says blushingly). Maybe that’s why I took such an immediate and deep liking to Amy Pond, who will forever remain my all-time favourite companion, and one of my favourite fictional characters. Amy is undoubtedly a fantastic ambassador for this type, and ENFPs should be proud to count her among their number.

Typing Doctor Who

So there’s not much going on in the world of Doctor Who at the moment. No new episodes until Christmas, and the next series won’t be on our screens for at least another 12 months. The new companion should be announced imminently, and I’ll do a post about that when it happens, but, otherwise, there’s not much for this blog to do at the moment in terms of Doctor Who-related content.

I want to keep this blog active during these dark, Who-less times, though. Apart from devoting more attention to non-Who topics to make up for the dearth of Doctor Who material, I’ve also decided to embark on a project that I’m sure many of my readers will find interesting and which I’ve no doubt will keep me busy and engaged on this blog.

So, recently I’ve become very interested in MBTI (Myers-Briggs Type Indicator). For those who don’t know what it is, MBTI is a very well-known theory of personality types. The theoretical foundations were laid by psychologist Carl Jung, which were later developed and expanded upon by Katharine Cook Briggs and Isabel Briggs Myers (thus “Myers-Briggs”). It’s by a good length the most popular “personality type” theory (it’s certainly the most accessible to laypeople), and, although it’s not really rigorous, scientific psychology, as far as I know it’s generally accepted among psychologists as a legitimate and useful, albeit limited and rudimentary, theory.

You might have worked out where I’m going with this. It’s popular among lay enthusiasts of the MBTI to attempt to work out the personality types of fictional characters. I’ve become so engrossed in this theory that I find myself silently typing not only every fictional character I watch or read about, but also every person I meet. I find it a very fun mental exercise, and it helps me understand how others work and how they’re different from me. Inevitably, I’ve thought about the MBTI types of the characters of my favourite TV show, and I thought you all might be interested in knowing my thoughts and my reasoning.

So that’s what I’m going to be doing with this blog (among other things) over the coming months. Hopefully, at least once a week (if I have time), I’ll do a post about a Doctor Who character and their MBTI type, giving my reasoning behind why I’ve typed them the way I have. You needn’t worry—this isn’t going to be a set of impenetrable, arcane, theory-heavy pseudo-academic discussions: MBTI by its very nature is a very simple and accessible and easy-to-understand theory, which is part of the reason it’s so popular. And, of course, I’ll try my best to keep my posts as readable and relevant as possible.

As general disclosure, I’ll say that I’m by no means an expert on MBTI, but I have a decent amateur’s understanding of the theory (which is what at least half the people who run MBTI Tumblr blogs have). But I don’t claim that my typings will be definitive, they’re just my best estimations using what mastery of the theory that I have (which is the best anyone can do when you’re dealing with made-up characters anyway). I certainly invite those with a more thorough understanding of the theory to share their thoughts and feel free to disagree with my conclusions.

This is just an introductory post—my next post will be my first character typing. But here’s a teaser of what’s to come: some of the characters I’ve typed and which I’ll be writing about:

• Twelfth Doctor — INTJ
• Clara Oswald — ESFP
• Eleventh Doctor — ENTP
• Amy Pond — ENFP
• Rory Williams — ISFJ
• Tenth Doctor — ENFP
• Ninth Doctor — INFP
• Fourth Doctor — ENTP
• Etc.

Stay tuned!

Some resources:

For the uninitiated, although I’m going to make these posts as readable to those completely ignorant of MBTI as possible, it still might be useful to have at least some basic grasp of the theory. It’s not difficult to understand at all.

• Here is a brief basic overview of MBTI.
• Here is a slightly more in-depth overview of the cognitive functions (which are the fundamental underlying theory of MBTI—yes, it’s more than just the four letters).
• And, if you’re interested in working out your MBTI type, this is probably your best resource. Regarding quizzes, MBTI quizzes are fun to take, but they’re not the most accurate or reliable way of working out your type, simply because the nature of the theory actually makes it quite difficult to test accurately with an online quiz. If you can’t be bothered learning the theory and want to take a quiz, try to take a few different quizzes and see if your results are consistent.