Your psychological type does not remain static and unchanging through the whole of your life. There is something within all of us - whether we call it the unconscious, the Self, or the soul - which strives toward balance and completeness, and which tries to integrate into our lives all those qualities or inner characters which have been neglected or undervalued. At certain important junctures in life, it is as though some central core, deeper and wiser than the conscious "I", draws us into conflicts which enable us to develop our weaker areas, so that we can become more complete as human beings. Thus you will find that, incorporated in the following paragraphs about your psychological type, are some suggestions about how you might facilitate this inner movement toward a more balanced perspective on life. Life does this for us, sooner or later. But sometimes it is more rewarding and less problematic if we cooperate with the process.

Romantic vision and the gift of imagination

You are one of the world's true romantics, for your intensely active imagination must always inject into ordinary circumstances an aura of meaning, potential and purpose without which you find daily life inconsequential and sometimes suffocating. The great strength of your nature lies in your well-developed relationship to the creative power of the unconscious, which allows you to look into the future and envisage potentials which are not immediately apparent in the present. Because of this, you tend to see opportunities which others miss. You have a habit of living mostly in the future, always looking toward the next project and the next stage of the journey. Yours is a temperament which will never stagnate, because whatever you have accomplished, it is experienced not as a final achievement but as a temporary stage on the way to something bigger, better, more enriching and more meaningful.

Another strength in your character is your ability to appreciate the connections between apparently disparate facts and circumstances, and to see a story or a hidden pattern which others might ignore. You often have an instantaneous grasp of all the important factors in a situation, and can leap with a kind of hunch or "sixth sense" to a conclusion which is usually extremely accurate yet which you may not always be able to explain logically. You may or may not literally gamble with money, but you are probably willing to back your stronger hunches with effort, and therefore often obtain rewarding experiences or material gains through means which others would not dare to try. There is a quality of liveliness and colour about your interpretations of life which makes all your experiences seem like worthwhile lessons. Bad times cannot keep you down for long, for the next opportunity is always just around the corner. Mere security with no future creative possibilities is a kind of death to you, and you will often abandon your efforts just when they are about to bear fruit because it is the challenge and the journey, rather than the goal, which excite you most.

The romantic vision rejects life's limitations

However, because of your emphasis on the imaginative and intuitive side of life, you run the risk of forgetting worldly limits. You tend to be on rather poor terms with day-to-day reality and its responsibilities and demands, because these thwart the vision that means so much to you. You may resent the boredom of a routine job, feeling secretly that you are entitled to something more special and glamourous; or you may dislike having to bind yourself to domestic obligations because these stop the flow of the imagination. You may also resist having to select one thing to which you must apply yourself, preferring to feel that you have many potentials open in the future; and this could result in you becoming a "jack of all trades" who dabbles in everything and produces nothing lasting. This is the "one day when I grow up..." syndrome, which may be appropriate in youth but which begins to feel rather uncomfortable with the passing of the years.

You tend to neglect your body, or drive it too hard. You may forget at times to rest and eat sensibly; and the world of mechanical objects may seem personally inimical to you because things constantly break down and need attention and fixing. Having your time filled by tasks like servicing the car and doing the monthly accounts can make you extremely irritable. But the more you ignore this side of life the worse it tends to get, and there will not always be someone else there to clean up the mess which you leave behind. Your lack of attention to your body may result in problems with your health, not because you are intrinsically unhealthy in fact, you are probably blessed with a strong and energetic constitution - but because any living thing, including the flesh of which you are made, resents neglect and may retaliate with a message of its own. You are inclined to be ill at ease with your body because you have not befriended it, and thus tend toward hypochondria, or an obsession with "mastering" the body through strenuous diets and exercises which might be more punishing than helpful because they are excessive.

You will sooner or later need to make better friends with the physical world. This effort can be rewarding and exciting because your sensual nature, although often repressed or neglected, is powerful and capable of great intensity and pleasure, and your uncannily accurate intuition can also be applied to practical matters to ensure your success. Any achievement of a material kind can be enormously rewarding to you, and you possess a rare capacity to respond to nature and to the beauty of the physical world - if you will only stop running away from what you call "lower" or "unimportant". In very personal matters such as sexual expression your unease with the body can also make you shy and awkward, and here too there might be a promise of much greater fulfilment if you can allow yourself to experience the powerful demands of the instincts which you sometimes fear. Your perception of physical reality may be too negative, and it is possible that family attitudes in your early life have contributed to your undervaluing of yourself in this realm of life. If you can learn the art of being an ordinary mortal in a sometimes unromantic world, then your unusual and powerful imaginative gifts will always bring you new adventures as well as earning you concrete rewards.

The power of reason combines with the gift of fantasy

You possess unusual intellectual gifts to support and enhance your rich imagination. You may be a profound thinker, with a grasp of higher and broader concepts and an intuitive feeling for symbols and connections between systems of thought; and you could excel in spheres such as psychology, anthropology, history and artistic fields, where good powers of articulation and organisation must be combined with imagination and vision. You may also be adept at business activities where speculative abilities and planning for future trends are required, and you are often a very successful gambler with untried new ideas and untested resources. Your imagination, although powerful and constantly active, never runs wild into chaos, but is always supported by clear rational thought. Therefore, you are one of those rare people who are not only able to leap to conclusions through the uncanny irrational power of the intuition, but can also explain yourself if necessary with a logical and coherent structure of thought.

However, your greatest challenge in life remains the problem of relating to the mundane world, and your capacity for systematising your intuitions into a coherent plan or structure may further divorce you from the "banal" world of the body and of material objects and responsibilities. Because you place considerable value on your reasoning capacities, you may try to analyse your way out of your essential fear of ordinary life through generalised systems of ideas - preferring to believe that you are preoccupied with higher and more important things. You may also use your mental and imaginative abilities to defend yourself against the threatening world of intimate relationships, where you often find commitment to be a problem and where you can only deal with unpleasant or demanding emotional encounters through a species of mental gymnastics where you reduce your own and the other person's feelings to an intellectualised debate about abstract principles. You need to learn to form a better relationship to your feelings, so that you respond more sensitively not only to the needs of others, but also to your own. This can help you to learn which of your many potentials might really make you happy and which you need to select to give you some stability and sense of accomplishment in your ordinary life. Then you can begin to earth your marvellous imagination and vision in concrete terms without so much resentment of the time and effort required, and without so much fear of being trapped by relationships and by daily routines. Thus you can make choices with a better appreciation of what might personally fulfill you at different stages of your life.