Elliott Smith MBTI Personality Type
Personality
What personality type is Elliott Smith? Elliott Smith is an INFP personality type in MBTI, 4w5 - sp/sx - 469 in Enneagram, RLUAI in Big 5, EII in Socionics.
I am a huge skeptic of the de facto typing of depressed artists as INFPs, but I think Elliott Smith is one of the ones we’ve gotten right. He’s not an INFJ, but I respect that take. Yes, he may have done a lot of people-watching to inspire some of his songs, but everything ultimately tied back his own emotions. He lacked the ideologies of an Ni dom, rarely trying to bestow any message onto others except when he felt directly victimized by a power structure (ie his record label). He was primarily focused on his feelings and his relationships with other people, and channeled these feelings into mini narratives that are intuitive and insightful (Ne) but aren’t linked to any Ni-type ideological frameworks. Most of these characters, one must acknowledge, are very similar to him and view the world with a very similar attitude—this points towards Fi emotional projection rather than Fe emotional absorption. It’s very clear that he saw reflections of himself in characters that were “losers” or “hopeless”. The fictional aspects that do occur I think can be perfectly explained through Ne imagination. (Oh and…these fictional pieces make up the minority of the songs in his catalogue; everything else is very obviously about his life.) He studied philosophy in college, as he was genuinely interested in finding meaning and expressing the abstract. His emotional honesty pulled things back to earth, so I understand the ISFP votes, but Elliott biographically really did seem to get stuck in Fi-Ne-Si thought patterns when trying to solve his addictions and traumas, often getting stuck in the meaning of what’s happening while overlooking the reality of it. He also retained that genuine INFP shyness/innocence that INFJs are too decisive to have and ISFPs are too grounded to have—no matter how many gritty situations he put himself in. He really was an INFP dreamer with ADHD and depression who wrote about subjective emotional experiences and got lost in creative daydreams. And he also happens to be great.
Biography
Steven Paul "Elliott" Smith (August 6, 1969 – October 21, 2003) was an American singer, songwriter, and musician. Smith was born in Omaha, Nebraska, raised primarily in Texas, and lived for much of his life in Portland, Oregon, where he first gained popularity. Smith's primary instrument was the guitar, though he was also proficient with piano, clarinet, bass guitar, drums, and harmonica.
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