Arthur Conan Doyle
Arthur Conan Doyle is INFP. He qualified in medicine at Edinburgh, built Sherlock Holmes out of his teacher Joseph Bell, became one of the highest-paid writers of the age, and then threw Holmes off a waterfall in December 1893 because he wanted to write historical novels instead. The public would not have it and he brought him back. After the First World War he gave the rest of his life to spiritualism, defended the Cottingley fairy photographs in print, and also got two innocent men out of prison.
Who Was Arthur Conan Doyle?
Arthur Conan Doyle was born on 22 May 1859 in Edinburgh and died on 7 July 1930 at Crowborough in Sussex. He studied medicine at the University of Edinburgh from 1876 to 1881 and took his MD in 1885. The teacher who mattered was Joseph Bell, a surgeon whose party trick was deducing a patient's occupation and history from observation before they had spoken, and Doyle later wrote to him that it was most certainly to him that he owed Sherlock Holmes.
A Study in Scarlet appeared in 1887, and from 1891 the short stories ran in the Strand Magazine, twenty-four of them, making him one of the best-paid authors alive.
Why did Conan Doyle kill Sherlock Holmes?
Because he wanted to be a different writer. He had produced seven historical novels between 1888 and 1906 and considered them plainly superior to the detective stories, and Holmes was consuming the time and the reputation he wanted for them. So in December 1893 he sent him over the Reichenbach Falls with Professor Moriarty, and the public reaction was closer to bereavement than to disappointment. He held out for eight years before The Hound of the Baskervilles in 1901, and then wrote Holmes stories until 1927. After the deaths of people close to him around the First World War he committed publicly to spiritualism from about 1916 and spent the rest of his life on it, including defending the Cottingley fairy photographs as genuine in The Coming of the Fairies in 1922; they were later admitted to be cut-outs. He also used the Holmes method in earnest twice, investigating the convictions of George Edalji in 1906 and Oscar Slater in 1928, getting both men exonerated and contributing to the creation of the Court of Criminal Appeal in 1907.
How INFP Processes the World
Every INFP operates through the same hierarchy of cognitive functions. Here is how that stack maps onto how Arthur Conan Doyle actually thinks, decides, and acts.
Arthur Conan Doyle: What the INFP Profile Explains
Conan Doyle is dominant Fi, which is a strange thing to say about the creator of the most famous reasoning machine in literature until you notice that Holmes is the thing he kept trying to escape. His own account of his career is consistently about what he valued rather than what worked: the historical novels were the serious writing, the detective stories were a distraction, and he acted on that private assessment by killing the character who was making him rich. Almost nobody does that.
The auxiliary Ne is where Holmes actually comes from. Doyle took Joseph Bell's diagnostic manner and asked what else it could be applied to, and the answer - crime, and a whole new genre - is a piece of lateral extension rather than a piece of observation. The same faculty produced The Lost World, the historical fiction, and a working life that ranged across forms restlessly.
Why did he believe in the fairies?
Because Fi decides what is true on the basis of what it needs to be true, and inferior Te does not supply the correction. He had lost people, spiritualism offered them back, and he committed to it with the same absoluteness he brought to everything else - and then defended two obviously faked photographs of paper fairies in print against people who could see they were faked. The tertiary Si is the counterweight and it produced his best work: the Edalji and Slater cases are Doyle actually doing what Holmes does, with real evidence, real patience and two innocent men at the end of it.
Arthur Conan Doyle: INFP Letter by Letter
He worked prolifically and privately, and his most consequential decisions - to kill Holmes, to commit to spiritualism - were arrived at internally and then announced to a public that had not been consulted and did not agree.
He took a surgeon's diagnostic habit and turned it into an entire literary form. His range across historical fiction, science fiction, detective stories and polemic is the mark of a mind that keeps asking what else this could be.
He killed his most profitable creation because he did not respect it, and gave his last fifteen years to a belief that cost him credibility, because he had decided it was true. The Edalji and Slater campaigns were taken up for the same reason.
He would not be held to one thing. Medicine, then fiction, then a killed character, then a resurrected one, then a new career as a spiritualist lecturer - the shape of the life is a man reopening every question he had supposedly settled.
Why Arthur Conan Doyle Is INFP, Not ISFP or INFJ
ISFJ is sometimes suggested because of the Victorian sense of duty and the campaigning. The difference is where the causes come from. An Si-Fe man works from established obligation and social expectation; Doyle repeatedly took up positions that were personally chosen and publicly costly, including a spiritualism that damaged his standing badly, on the grounds that he believed them.
INTP is occasionally proposed on the strength of Holmes. But Holmes is not a self-portrait - Doyle disliked him, killed him, and resented what he did to his career. The author's own decisions were made on conviction rather than analysis, which is why the man who invented deduction could be taken in by two schoolgirls with a camera.
The INFP Personality
Values-driven and deeply internal. INFPs hold firm ethical convictions that are entirely their own and rarely up for debate. They are not passive - their gentleness conceals a strong will about what matters.