The Handbook of Jungian Psychology: Theory, Practice and Applications

by Renos K. Papadopoulos

Introverted feeling, by contrast, can only feel the archetypal image of a situation. It cannot see it.

Perhaps we all get into our introverted feeling when we are depressed.

The extraverted functions, as Jung has already been quoted as informing us, tend so completely to merge with the object as to identify with it. They often end up without adequate distance from the stimuli that are presented to them.

In the case of extraverted feeling, these are the feelings – that is, the emotions and prejudices – of others, and often of society at large, so that the personality of a person strongly identified with this function ‘appears adjusted in relation to external conditions. Her feelings harmonize with objective situations and general values’ (Jung 1971: 356).

Similarly, extraverted thinking tends to become enamoured of established ideas, frequently neglecting the duty to think freshly about what is being expressed and the language that is really appropriate to it.

this most characteristic function of the Enlightenment period

Extraverted sensation, as a cognitive process, seeks ‘an accumulation of actual experiences of concrete objects’ (Jung 1971: 363)

Extraverted intuition can become so engaged with the possibilities of its objects that for the person strongly identified with this function, it is ‘as if his whole life vanished in the new situation’ (Jung 1971: 368).

As long as a function is undifferentiated, moreover, it cannot be deployed in the conscious manner of a directed mental process that is truly under the control of the ego, and capable of being applied to tasks and goals: Without differentiation direction is impossible, since the direction of a function towards a goal depends on the elimination of anything irrelevant. Fusion with the irrelevant precludes direction; only a differentiated function is capable of being directed. (Jung 1971: 425)

One way to understand what Jung meant by individuation is the progressive differentiation of the various psychological functions of consciousness. For, as he puts it elsewhere in the Definitions section, ‘Individuation is a process of differentiation (q.v.) having for its goal the development of the individual personality’. It is ‘an extension of the sphere of consciousness, an enriching of conscious psychological life’ (Jung 1971: 450). Since Jung also believed that individuation, i.e., the development of consciousness, is a natural process, he felt that there was a way to describe its orderly unfolding in all of us, and he used his idea of psychological types to offer certain developmental guidelines. These guidelines have been mostly ignored outside the narrow circle of those who are interested in the theory of psychological types, but they are most important, as they hold the key to much of what happens in psychotherapy when a personality starts to develop. Jung believed that we all get a head start in individuation through a natural tendency to differentiate at least two function-attitudes out of our total potential complement of eight.3 The two function-attitudes that most naturally tend to differentiate early in our development of ego-consciousness will not be the same for each individual. Because they develop so early, they appear to be innate, although later ‘falsification of type’ as a result of environmental influences can distort the individual’s typological be...

Jung found that ‘[f]or all the types met with in practice, the rule holds good that besides the conscious, primary function there is a relatively unconscious, auxiliary function which is in every respect different from the nature of the primary function’ (Jung 1971: 405–406).

typologically speaking, there are at least sixteen kinds of people.

Jo Wheelwright (1982) concluded that the first two functions would have the same attitude with respect to extraversion and introversion.

Isabel Briggs Myers, on the other hand, took Jung’s subsequent statement, that the auxiliary function is ‘in every respect different from the nature of the primary function’, to mean that the auxiliary must differ from the superior function in attitude (I. Myers and P. Myers 1980: 18–21).

It should be noted that Jung took for granted that most consciousnesses are so undifferentiated that even the auxiliary function is rare...

‘inferior’ function to which he gave a special status, as a source of problematic, ‘touchy’ reactions because of its especial closeness to the unconscious. This inferior function is ‘the function that lags behind in the process of differentiation’ (Jung 1971: 450).

Often a source of shame, the inferior function is conceived of as being carried by the anima in a man, and the animus in a woman, in contrast to the superior function, which is identified with the persona.

The inferior function will always be the other pole of the typological axis (whether rational or irrational) on w...

Moreover (and here there is more agreement in the Jungian tradition) if the superior function is introverted, the inferior function will be extraverted; and if the superior is extraverted, the inferior function will be introverted.

The axis between the superior and inferior functions is what I have called the ‘spine’ of personality.

Although types were carefully studied by many of the analysts who were trained directly by Jung, including Meier (1959), Henderson (1970) and Wheelwright (1982), the most important development of psychological types within analytical psychology came from Jung’s close associate, Marie-Louise von Franz (1971/1998), who systematically studied the inferior function for each of the types.

She also clarified the relation of the inferior function to Jung’s transcendent function, pointing out that if the inferior function is made conscious, then the relation to the unconscious changes and the personality is unified (see also Beebe 1992: 102–109).

No one, however (and Jung also says this), can simply take up the inferior function directly and develop it. Not only does it tend to ‘stay low’ (E. Osterman, personal communication, 1972), it cannot be approached effectively until the first three functions have been differentiated.

Noting that the superiority of the leading function derives from its association with the hero archetype, I went on to identify the archetypal figures that carry the other three functions in the hierarchy that Jung and von Franz established.

I have concluded that the auxiliary function is carried by a stable parental figure (usually a father in a man and a mother in a woman) and the tertiary function by an unstable child figure, given to cycles of inflation and deflation (puer aeternus in a man, puella aeterna in a woman). Although von Franz spoke broadly of the fourth, inferior function as ‘the door through which all the figures of the unconscious come’ (1971/1998: 67), I have identified the fourth function, experienced by the ego as a problematic aspect of itself, not with the shadow, but with the anima and animus.

I have identified the fourth function, experienced by the ego as a problematic aspect of itself, not with the shadow, but with the anima and animus.

It is the other four functions, I believe, that constitute the shadow of the first four, a shadow accentuated by the process of differentiation that allows the first four to ...

someone with superior extraverted thinking and auxiliary introverted sensation will have introverted thinking and extraverted sensation strongly in shadow,

From this perspective, even the inferior function has a shadow:

In this way, I was able to conceptualise a first typology of the shadow (although Naomi Quenk (1993), not long after, produced her own typological model of the shadow in the book Beside Ourselves). According to the model of typology I have developed (Beebe 2004),

specific archetypes carry the shadows of the first four functions: the Opposing Personality (carrying the shadow of the Hero), the Senex or Witch (shadow of the Father or Mother), the Trickster (shadow of the Puer or Puella), and the Demonic/Daimonic Personality (shadow of the Anima/Animus).

My model implies that development of all eight function-attitudes will involve a significant engagement with each of the archetypal complexes,

In integrating one’s typology, the issues associated with each archetypal complex must be faced, exactly as in classical individuation, which has been conceived as the progressive integration of the collective unconscious through engagement with a series of archetypal figures.

Recognising correlations between functions and complexes in an individual patient can be very helpful to the therapist, especially when encountering markedly altered states of mind in patients. At such times the therapist can often help to re-establish ego strength in the patient by speaking the language of the patient’s superior function rather than mirroring the typological idiom of the possessing complex (Sandner and Beebe 1995: 317–344).

In less florid, but nevertheless demanding, borderline and narcissistic conditions, function-attitudes that are in shadow for a client can be associated with archetypal defences of the self, and it advances therapy to understand their precise character (Beebe 1998b).

este articulo está en el libro de Ann Casement Post-Junguians Today (1998)

Although in the 1940s Jo Wheelwright, together with his wife, Jane Wheelwright, plus Horace Gray and later John Buehler, produced the first paper-and-pencil type test, the Gray-Wheelwrights Jungian Type Survey (JTS), and did pioneering research with this instrument (Mattoon and Davis 1995), it was really the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) developed by Isabel Briggs Myers and her mother Katherine Briggs, who were not Jungian analysts, that put standardised type testing on the map internationally. The MBTI, developed in earnest from 1942 and finally licensed in the 1960s, has become one of the most popular psychological instruments in the English-speaking world and is starting to be used in translation in other countries (see Quenk 2000 for an up-to-date description).

the Association for Psychological Type, which has more than 4000 members, hosts conferences sharing experience and research based on the use of the MBTI, and there are similar organisations in other countries.

There is also a version of the MBTI test for children, the Murphy-Meisgeier Type Indicator for Children (MMTIC).

Myers also is responsible for the terms ‘judging’ and ‘perceiving’ as less loaded synonyms for ‘rational’ and ‘irrational’, although the test itself confines its J and P descriptors to the characterisation of the leading extraverted function.

the MBTI Manual suggests that the auxiliary, tertiary and inferior are all opposite in attitude to the dominant.

Type is still a ‘hard sell’ among many analysts. A study published by Plaut (1972) revealed that less than half of Jungian analysts use type in their clinical work.5 Those who do often rely on test results rather than clinical observation to establish the ‘type diagnosis’. Many of these analysts are unaware that the Association for Psychological Type considers it unethical to type someone simply on the basis of their results on the MBTI, which is after all only an ‘Indicator’.

(Sharp’s (1987) book is an excellent remedial primer.)

Many do not really understand the difference between introversion and extraversion as processes in the self. (This is helpfully addressed in Lavin’s (1995) article.)

One place type theory has taken limited, but promising, hold in clinical work is in the area of couple th...

The terms ‘extraversion’ and ‘introversion’ were apparently adapted from Binet’s terms ‘externospection’ and ‘introspection’ (Binet 1903, cited by Oliver Brachfeld in Ellenberger 1970: 702–703).

Beebe, J. (1984) ‘Psychological types in transference, countertransference, and the therapeutic interaction’, in N. Schwartz-Salant and M. Stein (eds) Transference/Countertransference. Wilmette, IL: Chiron.

——— (1998a) ‘Toward a Jungian analysis of character’, in A. Casement (ed.) Post-Jungians Today. London: Routledge.

Este artículo lo tengo en ese libro de Ann Casement

Benziger, K. (1995) Falsification of Type. Dillon, CO: KBA.

Groesbeck, C. (1978) ‘Psychological types in the analysis of the transference’. Journal of Analytical Psychology, 23(1): 23–53.