There are people who need a constant sense of a mass, group Flow, of swirling energy, of “the buzz”. And you may have noticed that this buzz never ends. Nothing ever ends at all: not a project, not a wedding, not sex on a first date. Which is why they are named after the word “let-down”. They are also the “stringer-along”, they are also the frustrating personality type, from the word “to frustrate” (everyone around them). These are people who let others down again and again. And since they are Karlssons-on-the-Roof with a little propeller running non-stop in a certain place, let us give them a merrier name: the Life of the Party, or the live wires. From the epithets alone you have probably guessed who is meant.
If you enjoy action films like “Die Hard” with Bruce Willis and “Speed” with Sandra Bullock, if you remember the frantic Doc Brown played by Christopher Lloyd in “Back to the Future”, if you howl at Ivan Okhlobystin bellowing as Doctor Bykov in the series “Interns”, and on top of that you watch comedians like Ivan Urgant — then you have got it: these people are the best grinning comics, always ready to burst out laughing.
In terms of the structure of the psyche and of the nervous system, the Life of the Party is an extravert in an active position with the Ego type “the Cognition System” and a violated right “to achieve”
- Extraverts — meaning that contact with people matters to them enormously. It is for the people around them to come and tell them how good they are, how clever, how they are the very best of all — and (as the Life of the Party sees it) they are duty-bound to do so. Seeing other people react matters to them. Otherwise it all feels somehow unclear...
- As people in an active social position, they will not merely wait for a public response but actively demand one. They use provocation, in particular, to draw out a response and a reaction to themselves. What is more, at their call even the dead will rise from their graves and run... somewhere! The main thing is that they should be close by and running.
- The Ego type of the Life of the Party is the Cognition System. That is, they can be called logicians, logical personalities who... experiment first and then think about what it was all about. Although there is no time left for thinking either, because one has to dash off at once and go on experimenting.
And so the Life of the Party ends up with a sticking point, and it will not only amuse you. They achieve, and they cannot stop at what has been achieved. What dominates in them is the need for constant movement, for the buzz, for change and more change. And that is why
the frustrating type is marked by constantly frustrating everyone around them.
And this is practically the only personality type that gets away with it. Schizoid “Free Spirits”, for instance, also let people down, but they are resented for it: people get angry, irritated, go to war. The frustrating type does exactly the same thing in exactly the same words, and nobody holds it against them. One theory is that people simply do not have time to.
On the other hand, there is always a purpose behind the let-down. Schizoid “Free Spirits” and frustrating “Life of the Party” types look very much alike at their peak, when both are carried away. The schizoid lets people down mostly to assert himself, whereas the frustrating type, frustrating everyone through his actions, wants rather to shift them all off dead centre so that the buzz gets going — and what comes of it we shall see later.
Better still, not to look at what came of it at all: the next thing already needs starting.
Accordingly, the Life of the Party has an irresistible urge to be the initiator, to start the buzz. And at the same time they find it hard to see anything through, because accepting results gives them enormous trouble. And they fear results of any kind: positive as much as negative, their own as much as other people's.
The action is everything, the result is nothing!
Results are devalued all the time, because a result means no movement: it is all over, and one has to keep kicking, kicking, kicking. “What, you're dead already? Then let's get decomposing, quickly!”
