Ekaterina Filatova¶
Ekaterina Filatova (April 2nd, 1938 March 14th, 2015) was one of the early Russian socionists from St. Petersburg, Russia who helped to popularize socionics. She was known for publication of several socionics books, as well as her collection of photographs of people of different sociotypes. It should be noted that Ekaterina Filatova did not herself use visual identification (“V.I.”) to diagnose the types of the people in her books. Upon taking pictures and documenting types, she started to notice some similarities between people of the same type and has commented that within each type there are several groupings of people who look most similar, which could be due to subtypes. Some western readers have interpreted this to mean that she was promoting V.I, which is not correct. Ekaterina Filatova self-typed as TIM EII.
Biography¶
Ekaterina Filatova obtained her education as a physicist, graduating from the Physics Department of LGU as a candidate of physical and mathematical sciences. She then worked in Novosibirsk Institute. In 1996, she moved to St. Petersburg.
Filatova is the author of one of the most popular books in socionics by both the number of copies sold and by popularity among the readers. This book was written in simple and accessible language and is one of the most easily accessible introductions to the basics of Socionics, which prompted a lot of positive feedback from her readers. When it comes to creation of new socionics theories, she has not made any significant contributions. (Being of type EII, competing with ILEs in creation of new models and complex theoretical approaches to socionics was rather difficult.) Instead, Filatova has compiled and recounted the ideas of other socionics, and by this she has become one of the best and most successful popularizers of socionics.
Filatova was also the first the start taking and collecting photographs of people that she has previously typed. She has built this collection of photographs since 1991: first typing people and then saving their picture. Eventually she started noticing similarities in their external appearance that were too frequent to be only incidental, and an unusually frequent number of “twins” within the same type - people who looked very similarly. Further treatment and development of this observation were conducted in works of Ruslan Stepanov and Timofei Duhovskiy.
In 2011, Filatova was awarded the title of doctor of philosophy in subject of socionics by the International Council of Socionics Research and Development.