A

More on Teacher Strategy 299

often responds by crawling into this little castle in the air and then closing
the gates and pulling up the drawbridge so that his tiny kingdom of order
will not be disturbed by the hordes of chaos lurking about him. Content
within his tiny domain, the Teacher person then walks around wearing the
smile of a Zen master, satisfied that he has achieved general understanding.
This reminds one of the Mercy child who „clings to his mother‟s apron
strings.‟ In the same way that the young Mercy person is shy about new
experiences, so the Teacher person can be intellectually „shy.‟ The cause in
both cases is the same—a bare storage shed combined with an inadequate
internal world. The Mercy person generally makes it past his stage of
shyness. Emotional experiences associated with his physical body barge
their way into his internal world of identification, and force him to protect
his personal identity by constructing a comprehensive internal world.
Normal life in this way suffices to fill the Mercy room, back and front,
with a deluge of the bits and pieces of experience. In contrast, the Teacher
person may never graduate beyond that initial stage of shyness. This is
because discovery of emotional significance in a general Teacher theory is
a step-by-step process of gradually weaving together bits of complexity
into an ordered fabric of integrated understanding.
This leads to a type of Catch-22 for the Teacher person. Because he
does not want his internal world of understanding to collapse, he ignores
information which is „outside of his domain‟—facts which might attack his
theory and give emotional pain to his Teacher thought. However, as long
as he continues to suppress his intellectual environment, his storage shed
remains devoid of content. Therefore, any theories which he does construct
will not have a very big Teacher emotion, because he does not have very
many individual pieces to work with, and strong Teacher feeling comes
only when many different bits of complexity are combined into an
integrated whole. The end result is that the „general‟ theory of the Teacher
person usually remains quite tiny and vulnerable.A
Therefore, we continually see the curious paradox of a Teacher
person—a natural thinker—who refuses to think. In terms of our analogy,
what point is there in his going out to the storage shed, finding a dozen
tools and putting them in order? What Teacher emotion is there in that? On
the other hand, arranging the contents of a warehouse full of various
implements would give Teacher strategy some strong feelings—now there
would be order within complexity. However, Teacher thought never arrives
at this stage if it refuses to allow anything new into the storage shed

A This tendency to restrict oneself to an area of intellectual expertise is

especially characteristic of the intellectual Contributor person, who works
with subconscious Teacher strategy. Teacher emotion, professional status,
and sensitivity to winning and losing can combine to create walls of
specialization that are almost airtight.