Jung the Mystic by Gary Lachman

Author:Gary Lachman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2010-05-12T00:00:00+00:00

A better-known work to emerge from Jung’s crisis was Psychological Types, published in 1921, and which no doubt benefited from Jung’s observation of the members of the Psychological Club. Although the question of typology had a long history, of which Jung was at pains to inform his readers, reviewing at length the ideas of Nietzsche, Schiller, William James and others—as in Symbols of Transformation, Jung pours on the references—Jung’s central impetus for the work appears to have been “thirty pages of his Red Book,” at least according to an account given by the Dutch poet Roland Holst.18 By now Jung’s ideas on the introvert, extravert, and the four “functions”—thinking, feeling, sensation, intuition—have become part of common parlance: extraverts, we know, love parties; introverts stay at home. As often happens when specialized terminology becomes part of everyday speech, in the process they have lost much of their meaning, or have acquired so wide a use that whatever meaning they had originally has become clichéd. “Personality Tests” to determine your “type” using Jung’s terminology are as common as newspaper horoscopes; probably the most popular is the Myers-Briggs Personality Test. Extravert and introvert seem anchored in Jung’s experience of his No. 1 and No. 2; one face is turned toward the outer world, the other looks inside. Thinking, feeling, sensation, and intuition are different modes of adaptation; in each of us one is dominant, with an auxiliary mode as a “second in command.” As the terms suggest, thinkers adapt through thought, feelers through their feelings, sensation types through the senses, and intuitives through hunches and sudden insights. Jung calls thinking and feeling rational functions, as they operate through weighing pros and cons; sensing and intuition are irrational in the sense that they don’t argue or give reasons (“I think this is true because . . . I feel it’s good because . . .”) but simply are: one doesn’t decide to smell a particular odor or have a hunch. But as one function becomes hypertrophied, its opposite or complement atrophies, and so to achieve balance, an individual’s “inferior” function needs to be strengthened.

It’s also through the inferior function that the unconscious enters consciousness; hence it’s often the subject of active imagination. As the psyche is self-regulating, it invariably seeks to adjust itself, as a thermostat does the heating. So when a thinker (whose auxiliary function is either sensation or intuition) becomes too obsessed with thought and disregards feeling, the unconscious brings this to his attention, often to the thinker’s dismay: irrational moods, sentimentality, and irritability are some of the unconscious’ wake-up calls. In his thought a thinker may be as brilliant as the sun, but his feelings are generally those of a twelve-year-old. One classic example is the philosopher Bertrand Russell, who was as brilliant as they come but who never outgrew an embarrassing womanizing and was chasing skirts in his seventies.19 (Having said this, Jung comes to mind as well, and he himself recognized that feeling was his weak spot).

It’s a neat

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