December 17, 2021
The last newsletter was about the contrast between introversion and extraversion, two ways by which the imagination constructs the world. The contrast was made famous by one of my intellectual mentors, the depth psychologist C.G. Jung, who published an enormous book about it, Psychological Types, in 1921. But in fact the introversion/extraversion polarity is only half of Jung’s theoretical apparatus. He also defines four functions, as he calls them, that we use to navigate in life: sensation, intuition, thinking, and feeling. Like everything in Jungian psychology, these form pairs of opposites: sensation and intuition are opposing forms of perception; thinking and feeling are opposing forms of judgment. In this system, sensation means the perception of factual, objective reality, while intuition means the perception of possibilities and relationships, so the contrast is between what is and what might be. Feeling means something different than emotion or affect. As the word “judgment” implies, it means a function that makes decisions according to values or preferences or ideals while thinking makes decisions according to logic.
Every human being has all these functions, but because they conflict, each of us, for the sake of having at least the illusion of a unified personality, tends to privilege one function, subordinate two other functions into auxiliaries of that primary function, and repress the function that is the primary function’s polar opposite. For example, I am an intuitive type, as was Jung himself. Because of their repressed sensation function, intuitives, and especially introverted intuitives, have a hard time coping with the hard facts of reality, especially those involving money. Since each of the four functions combines with either introversion or extraversion, this gave Jung an eightfold typology in Psychological Types, and Marie-Louise von Franz, whom I have always thought was the most brilliant of Jung’s original circle, follows suit in The Inferior Function, a set of four lectures collected in the book Lectures on Jung’s Typology.
However, the commonest way to encounter Jung’s typology is through the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), a test devised by Isabel Briggs Myers from groundwork laid by Katherine Briggs. Given how effectively the rest of Jung’s work has been marginalized, and occasionally outright demonized, by the intellectual world, it is remarkable how the Myers-Briggs has become a staple of human resources people, counseling services, guidance counselors, and career centers. At least a third of my students seem to have taken it at some point or other. The Myers-Briggs enlarges Jung’s typology to a total of sixteen possible types by taking the auxiliary functions into account as well as the dominant and inferior. What is added is not exactly new but rather a development of implications inherent in Jung’s original scheme and occasionally noted by him in passing remarks. It is a faithful expansion of Jung’s work and not “revisionist.” And the reason for its popularity is no secret: the danged thing works, at least a lot of the time. It is least accurate for those whose allegiance is divided in one or more categories—who score equally for thinking and feeling, for example. But for those of us who are fairly lopsided, it is often squarely on target. I have read any number of descriptions of my type, the introverted intuitive who uses his feeling function in a counterbalancing extraverted way to interact with the outside world, and they are so dead on that it becomes almost funny. Friends who read them agree that they sound like verbal life drawings, by someone who had me in mind in writing the description.
But that verges upon one of the inevitable dangers of any typological system, that it will be kidnapped by what a clearly exasperated Jung referred to as “a totally useless desire to stick on labels.” This occurs in a 1934 Foreword to a new edition, in which he reacts to what he sees as very much the wrong kind of popularity:
[F]ar too many readers have succumbed to the error of thinking that Chapter X (“General Description of the Types”) represents the essential content and purpose of the book, in the sense that it provides a system of classification and a practical guide to a good judgment of human character. Indeed, even in medical circles the opinion has got about that my method of treatment consists in fitting patients into this system and giving them corresponding “advice.” This regrettable misunderstanding completely ignores the fact that this kind of classification is nothing but a childish parlor game…. (xiv)
Student comments to me over the years suggest that various counselors and the like misuse the Myers-Briggs to pigeonhole students in a reductive and coercive way. Some have been told things such as “You shouldn’t consider that career because you’re not the right type for it,” as if it were some kind of pseudo-scientific version of predestination. The students resent it, and quite rightly.
That does not mean that the Myers-Briggs, and the typology it is based on, cannot be used in more constructive ways. I have learned much from both of them myself. For example, in my early days, I assumed I must be an intuitive thinking type, since I’m an academic, and a theoretical one at that. I was surprised that I tested as an introverted intuitive feeling type, at least until I read the descriptions of the dynamics implied by the typology. Everything in Jung is opposites: however, the opposites do not just conflict but are compensatory, at least when there is no question of neurosis. My intuitive function scans the dark, mysterious inner world of the unconscious, which is anything but what the skeptical critics think of as a static collection of archetypal shapes, like a variety box of Christmas cookies. It is more like a webwork of associations, interrelations, sympathies, correspondences in dynamic metamorphosis, images and story patterns constantly dying each other’s lives and living each other’s deaths, in a famous phrase of Heraclitus. Freud’s description of the “primary process” of the unconscious is accurate despite the negative value judgment frequently attached to it. I wrote my doctoral dissertation on the early poetry of Dylan Thomas because its radically paradoxical language attempts to capture something of this transformative energy process.
This hermetic, centripetal kind of intuitive consciousness is not, to put it mildly, very accessible to the outside world. My compensatory bridge to that world is an extraverted feeling function that takes the form of a kind of empathy. However abstruse my subject matter, I am at all times intensely aware of the need to answer the question “So what? Why does this matter to common life and ordinary people?” It is this that makes me a teacher, and also a kind of intellectual do-gooder, wanting to make the world a better place through transforming its vision by any means possible, including the one you are reading right now.
Moreover, rightly used, the typology can generate not just self-understanding but understanding of others, particularly others whose types are radically different from our own. I heartily recommend von Franz’s lectures on The Inferior Function: she has wonderful exemplary anecdotes about various people that are lively, insightful, and sometimes quite funny, whatever you think of the theory they are supposed to illustrate. One is about a sensation type who suddenly becomes fanatically stingy:
When one tried to find out where this sudden stinginess originated…one noticed that he produced any number of dark possibilities in life: he might have an accident and be unable to work and support his family; something might happen to his family; his wife might have a long illness; his son might fail in his studies and need more years than usual; his mother-in-law, a very rich woman, might suddenly get furious with him and leave her money to another family instead of his, etc. (19)
What was happening was that the man’s repressed intuition was generating all kinds of possibilities, but, as von Franz comments, “This is typical of negative inferior intuition. Only the dark possibilities are envisaged” (20). This made me do a double take when I read it: it is a devastatingly accurate characterization of my father, an extraverted sensation type, and thus my exact opposite. I have always described my dad as, when he was still alive, the most anxious man I ever met, and yet in the back of my mind, I now realize, was a puzzle. My father faced actual dangers and crises with admirable calm: he was both physically and morally courageous. It never occurred to me that he became periodically possessed by an inferior intuition that generated totally improbable possibilities that had for him a more powerful negative charge than any actual danger would have had.
I remember an argument that began when he insisted that I unplug my toaster when I was not using it because he had read that the mechanical lever that raises and lowers the bread can fail, fall, and start the toaster when you aren’t home, burning the house down. I not only thought this unlikely but was in a mood to rebel against his need to control me and everyone around him, so I lost it. When people get into a shouting match over a toaster you know that the combatants’ repressed and therefore “inferior” functions have been activated. As von Franz says,
Another typical aspect of the inferior function, which is also connected with its unadaptedness and primitiveness, is its touchiness and tyranny. Most people, when their inferior function is in any way touched upon, become terribly childish: they can’t stand the slightest criticism and always feel attacked.
In the hands of a good interpreter, this is the type of insight that the typology can provide, the kind of real, down-to-earth insight we get from a good novel, not a kind of pop-psych labeling system.
But, if not a labeling system, what was Jung aiming for? He describes his intent quite explicitly in that same Foreword: “What I have attempted in this book is essentially a critical psychology” (xiv). The word “critical” is being used here in a sense that was established by Kant in the 18th century. Kant called his three major books “critiques.” A critique is a prior examination of whatever suppositions may be preconditioning and biasing our intellectual inquiry. Kant did not invent the concept: it shows itself a century earlier when Descartes declares that he will begin by doubting everything that it is possible to doubt in order to arrive at a truth not based on false assumptions, however widespread those assumptions happen to be. But it is Kant who is the real beginning of modern thought, and the source of the modern dilemma, because he abandons Descartes’ belief that it is possible for human beings to arrive at an unconditioned truth, a truth free of all prior assumptions.
Kant accepts the subject-object model of experience, in which a subject, or ego, Latin for “I,” confronts a world of objects, a world that is objective to itself. Data about objective reality arrives through the senses, but Kant does not accept the empiricist view that the senses are only passive, neutral conduits conveying information. Rather, the mind constructs external reality by processing the flux of sense data in terms of certain a priori categories of understanding. The chief of these are time and space, but there are others, including causality. We perceive objects in an objective world interacting causally because the mind is pre-structured to interpret sense data in those terms. In short, the mind is not a tabula rasa, a blank slate written on by the senses. On the other hand, Kant does not deny that there is an external world, of which we are informed by our senses: his view is a compromise between the empiricism of someone like Locke and the Idealism of someone like Berkeley, for whom reality is entirely a mental creation.
The Kantian paradigm is an elegant solution to the problem of the subject-object split, avoiding the problems of both empiricism, which minimizes if not eliminates the subject, and Idealism, which eliminates the object. But it is a solution that is itself a new problem, the problem that modern philosophy, indeed all modern thought, has been trying to overcome for the past two and a half centuries. If Kant is right, we do not know external reality, the “thing in itself” in Kantian lingo. We only know the form in which reality appears to us after it has been pre-structured by the mind’s a priori categories. Moreover, it becomes evident that not all minds pre-structure experience in the same way. At this point, we may substitute “imagination” for “mind,” for it is the imagination that constructs reality, and not all imaginations are alike. Blake said, “As the Eye, Such the Object,” but by “Eye” he meant mind’s eye, the imagination. He also said, reflecting his experience as a painter and engraver, that “The fool sees not the same tree as the wise man sees.” Blake solved the epistemological dilemma by rejecting the Kantian paradigm and returning to a Romantic version of Idealism in which the imagination creates reality ex nihilo, as it were, and rejects the subject-object paradigm altogether as an illusion. Jung retains the more conservative perspective of Kant, fearing that the more radically visionary point of view, the idea that the mind totally created reality, brought with it the temptation to the kind of megalomania that he called “inflation.”
Psychological Types is a companion piece to Jung’s breakthrough book The Psychology of the Unconscious (1912, English translation 1916), whose theme is the descent quest into the depths of the unconscious, beneath the personal and into the collective or archetypal. Psychological Types complements this by constructing an ego psychology, only one in which the ego’s perceptions are pre-structured by unconscious factors: introversion, extraversion, and the four functions. These are Jung’s versions of Kant’s a priori categories (although he also, at a later point, described the archetypes of the collective unconscious as a priori forms of the imagination).
Stylistically, the book has two aspects, personal and intellectual. It began, as its early pages make explicit, in an attempt to understand the differences between Jung’s system and Freud’s after their huge blow-up resulting in Jung’s expulsion from the Freudian movement. In Jung’s view, Freudian psychology is extraverted, reducing the unconscious to nothing but the outcome of various external factors such as family dynamics and social conditioning, minimizing the autonomy of the ego and reducing human motivation to the pleasure principle, the desire to unite with the object. By contrast, the psychology of Alfred Adler is introverted, reducing everything to the ego’s will to power over both the external world and other people. Although Jung was himself introverted, he did not want his psychology to be caught in this reductive either-or. He sought to construct a system capable of showing extraverted and introverted psychological theories as valid, yet one-sided, capable of being comprehended within a wider perspective.
The result is what Northrop Frye called an anatomy, “a vision of the world in terms of a single intellectual pattern.” Readers who approach Jung’s Psychological Types from the practical-application standpoint of the Myers-Briggs are likely to be bewildered and disoriented until arriving at the “General Description of the Types” on page 336. The book’s first half sweeps through Western cultural history from the Classical world to Jung’s own time. Yet it does not appear so eccentric when compared with other examples of its type, including Frye’s own Anatomy of Criticism. One of the great anatomies is Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (1st edition 1621) of which Frye says, “Here human society is studied in terms of the intellectual pattern provided by the conception of melancholy, a symposium of books replaces dialogue, and the result is the most comprehensive survey of human life in one book that English literature had seen since Chaucer, one of Burton’s favorite authors” (Anatomy of Criticism, 291-92). The correspondence is exact, for the melancholic is one of four temperaments in the Renaissance psychological typology of the four humors. Do we really need all of Jung’s enormous cultural-historical apparatus? Should we view it detachedly as a somewhat desperate attempt to disguise the book’s real purpose as an argument with Freud? That is the kind of view taken by the typical biographer, and Jung has suffered more than most from biographers, with their journalistic impulse to reduce intellectual and artistic achievement to the “personal angle.”
But Jung does not deny the personal angle: that is in fact the book’s point, the problem with the biographers being only that their treatment of it is so simplistic. He accepts the implications of the Kantian argument. There is no Olympian standpoint, no “truth” or “reality” that is not a human and therefore limited imaginative construct. He is quite lucid about this in the opening pages of Psychological Types, saying dryly that “nowadays most of us are convinced that an objective psychology must be founded above all on observation and experience. This foundation would be ideal if only it were possible” (8). Why is it impossible? Because science is not the mere description of facts but the inference of certain laws from those facts, and “This aim goes beyond the empirical by means of the concept, which…will always be a product of the subjective psychological constellation of the investigator…The effect of the personal equation begins already in the act of observation. One sees what one can best see oneself” (9). Therefore, the demand that the observer “should see only objectively is quite out of the question, for it is impossible. We must be satisfied if he does not see too subjectively” (9).
One way not to see too subjectively is to enter imaginatively into other perspectives, without falling into a kind of helpless relativism. Easier said than done, yet it is on a basic level what we try to teach undergraduates when we teach critical thinking—thinking that incorporates a critique of one’s own presuppositions along with those of our opponent. On a more ambitious level—too ambitious, some might say—it is what I tried to do in The Productions of Time, with its fourfold scheme of multiple literary and mythical perspectives contained within the Jungian symbol of the mandala.
We may complement Jung’s psychological theorizing with two other kinds of typologies, in recognition of the psyche’s inextricable relationship with two other factors, the body and language. The Renaissance theory of the four humors that Burton draws upon for Anatomy of Melancholy was based on the premise of Hippocrates that a preponderance of a certain bodily fluid or “humor” led to a certain type of temperament. A preponderance of blood produced a “sanguine” personality; a preponderance of phlegm produced a “phlegmatic” or cold-fish personality; a preponderance of yellow bile produced a “choleric” personality; a preponderance of black bile produced a “melancholic” personality. The very fact that all four words have become part of the English language indicates that the theory has something to it, not to mention the fact that we all know people with such temperaments. Shakespeare knew them too: Hotspur is choleric, Falstaff sanguine, Hamlet melancholy. The fourfold scheme even falls into Jungian-style binaries: choleric/phlegmatic and sanguine/melancholic, complete with Jungian enantiodromia or reversal of opposites. Falstaff’s merriment has a tendency to slip into melancholia as Hamlet’s melancholia has a tendency to turn manic. We know too much about the psychosomatic feedback loop between mind and body and its role in depression (our word for melancholia) to dismiss the theory out of hand. Likewise we are too obsessed with body image and its relationship to identity to dismiss the Sheldonian theory of body types—ectomorph, mesomorph, and endomorph—that had a vogue in the 50’s and figures in Robertson Davies’ novel The Rebel Angels, where it is linked to Jungian concerns.
The relationship between mind and language has been the subject of incessant speculation for half a century now, and the number of theories about how the mind is structured by, even created by language are too great to number. I will budget myself to mentioning one that has a startlingly unexpected relationship to Jung’s typology of the four functions. In the first half of his second book on the Bible, Words with Power, Northrop Frye unfolds an elegant scheme of five modes of language: the descriptive, conceptual, rhetorical, imaginative, and kerygmatic.
The first four form a close parallel to Jung’s functions. Frye is speaking of modes of language that have achieved cultural ascendency in successive historical periods, but modes of language express forms of human experience and thus have an implicit psychological dimension along with their social and historical implications. Thus, Frye’s descriptive or factual mode of language is a natural vehicle for Jung’s sensation function; the conceptual mode is obviously the vehicle for the thinking function; the rhetorical or ideological mode has a relationship to the feeling function, which judges according to values or ideals; and the poetic or imaginative mode has a natural relationship to the intuitive function. The kerygmatic mode is spiritual, and comparable to Jung’s “transcendent function” that unites the other four on a higher level. The correspondence is the more remarkable given the fact that the chance that Frye intended it is pretty much zero.
The purpose in multiplying typologies in this way is to become more aware that, as Blake said, anything possible to believe is an image of truth, even as we recognize that no way of sensing, intuiting, thinking, or feeling is going to give us the whole truth. The whole truth is beyond the human condition, and Jung would have agreed with the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan that we never achieve “wholeness” but are rather “constituted by a split”—a four-way split to Jung’s way of thinking. This means that we will never integrate all four functions, as von Franz’s wonderful lectures bluntly assert: “When one has succeeded in developing three functions, in locking three of the four doors, the problem of the fourth door still remains, for that is the one that is apparently meant not to be locked. There one has to suffer defeat in order to develop further” (68). I, who once titled an essay “From the Defeated,” find this deeply meaningful. For me, von Franz is the feisty Wise Woman telling it like it is: “The inferior function is the ever-bleeding wound of the conscious personality” (68). You will never solve it, and relief from its agon, its agony, is blissful but momentary. “To be crucified between the superior and inferior functions is vitally important” (46). Yet it is possible to have an experience, transient and yet decisive, in which “the problem of the functions is no longer relevant; the functions have become instruments of a consciousness which is no longer rooted in them or driven by them. It has its basis of operation in another dimension, a dimension that can only be created by the world of the imagination. That is why Jung calls this the transcendent function” (78). The traditional name for it was grace.
References
Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. Ed. by Robert D. Denham. Vol. 22 of The Collected Works of Northrop Frye. University of Toronto Press, 2006. Orig. publ. 1957 by Princeton University Press.
Frye, Northrop. Words with Power: Being a Second Study of “The Bible and Literature.” Ed. by Michael Dolzani. Vol. 26 of The Collected Works of Northrop Frye. University of Toronto Press, 2008. Orig. publ. 1991 by Harcourt-Brace Jovanovich.
Jung, C. G. Psychological Types. Transl. by R.F.C. Hull. Vol. 6 of The Collected Works of C.G. Jung. Bollingen Series XX, 1971.
Von Franz, Marie-Louise. The Inferior Function. In Lectures on Jung’s Typology.
Spring Publications, 1971.