You do not have an inferior function, it has you.
C. G. JUNG
Pentheus, Lycurgus, the crew of the pirate ship—none of them could control Dionysus. The flow of life cannot be bound by ropes or rules. In the same way, we cannot ultimately control or deny within ourselves the inherent freedom of this ecstatic archetype. It will always burst forth: This is its nature.
We must seek, then, not to refuse the ecstatic experience but to welcome it. We may be uneasy about this welcome, because we are inviting something we do not fully comprehend and over which we have the least control. This part of us that is least in control Jung calls the inferior function, and it is here we will finally contact our untapped Dionysian energy.
The Four Functions
We have spoken throughout this book of the realms of thinking and feeling, sensation and intuition. Now it is time to explore these terms in more depth and see how they relate to the Dionysian experience.
According to Jungian psychology the human personality has four aspects, or functions, set in two opposing pairs. The first pair is thinking and feeling; the second pair is intuition and sensation. The first pair is rational, the second irrational.
Thinking concerns rational intellectual functioning, what we think about things. Feeling has to do with our values, how we feel emotionally about a situation. Intuition implies a nonverbal, irrational perception of ideas, outcomes, and situations. Sensation has to do with nonrational, sensate perception of the physical world of objects—their sizes, shapes, colors, smells, sounds. Jung explained the four functions in this way:
The essential function of sensation is to establish that something exists, thinking tells us what it means, feeling what its value is, and intuition surmises whence it comes and goes. Sensation and intuition I call irrational functions, because they are both concerned simply with what happens and with actual or potential realities. Thinking and feeling, being discriminatory functions, are rational. Sensation … rules out simultaneous intuitive activity, since the later is not concerned with the present but is rather a sixth sense for hidden possibilities, and therefore should not allow itself to be unduly influenced by existing reality. In the same way, thinking is opposed to feeling, because thinking should not be influenced or deflected from its purpose by feeling values, just as feeling is vitiated by too much reflection.
Very early in life we get the first function going—just the first small beginnings of consciousness. When the first function is established, a second function is added. In our culture this happens around early adolescence. Then, when we can stand it, a third function is added. And that brings us to the ordinary, everyday kind of consciousness in which most of us live.
We each “specialize” in one function, the one that comes most naturally. This is called our superior function. The opposing one of the pair, that which is least in our control, is called our inferior function. (This is a greatly simplified explanation. It is important to remember that no one exemplifies these functions as clearly in real life as it is possible to do in theory.) Each of us has all the aspects to some degree, and through their complex interplay we each express our unique personality.
Which Is My Inferior Function?
It is tempting to make the model continue in an orderly fashion and think that our fourth function, the inferior function, will soon turn up and everything will be just fine. Theoretically, if all four functions were conscious, one would be an enlightened being. But as much as we would like this to happen, it rarely does. I often hear people who are familiar with the system say, “I’m working on my fourth function. I’ve almost got it now.” Unfortunately, no such thing happens. We do not get functions one, two, three, and four in on orderly manner. The advent of the fourth function is usually a total disaster—at least from the standpoint of the ego, whose very existence seems to be threatened.
The fourth function is the representation of the unlived life we still contain. Because we have never dealt with it head on, when it comes rushing in, it naturally scares us out of our wits! We feel totally at sea. Our ego is no longer running the show, and we no longer have the modicum of control for standard behavior that we thought we had when only the three functions were conscious. Usually this happens around the age of forty-five, but most people delay it considerably past that—it takes a lot of maturity and experience to handle the sudden appearance of the wholeness in oneself.
The natural question at this point is, “How can I tell which is my inferior function?” I am sorry to tell you that in answer to this question Dr. Jung once replied, “How can you find a lion who has just swallowed you?”
The chief characteristic of the inferior function is that it is out of control. Because we have not lived it very much, it still contains all its primal energy. When we have drained away much of its energy, the superior function grows thin and is no longer adequate. Then the inferior function, with all of its unlived energy, comes rushing up.
We usually specialize in one of the four qualities. We will probably make our living with it, and may even be well known for it. If you have a superior sensation function, you are at ease with the physical world. You know the size, shape, color, texture, and location of the objects and beings around you without having to think about them consciously. Intuition, then, is your inferior function. You are most comfortable with concrete explanations. You may have a terribly difficult time handling the unknown, populating the future with the out-of-control figures of your intuition.
Any repressed material in our personalities automatically begins to revolve around our inferior functions. For example, let’s look at the thinking type. Most people will understand this type, because it is the dominant one in our fact-oriented society. Thinking types make informed opinions about situations—good or bad, right or wrong. If you are a thinking type, when you toss and turn at three in the morning you’re subjected to your inferior function, which is feeling. The whole orgiastic, out-of-control, vague-yearnings-for-tropical-paradise quality comes rushing up by way of your inferior function.
Feeling types have rational perceptions on the emotional level and will judge things comfortable or uncomfortable, wonderful or awful, according to how they feel at the moment. If you are a feeling type you probably torture yourself with an orgy of poor-quality thinking in Dionysian form. You may construct utopias and gardens of Eden three times a week—but they come down as easily as they go up!
Intuitive types perceive the total situation nonrationally—its background, present, and likely outcome. They do this without consciously thinking about it. If you are intuitive you form general impressions, abstract ideas, rather than concrete detail, and you will have sensation as your inferior function. I once knew an architect who was wonderfully intuitive. Unfortunately, this led him to build an absolutely beautiful bookstore with curved walls in which no bookshelves could ever be satisfactorily installed. Don’t ever try to earn your living with your inferior function!
The Inferior Function Under Pressure
You may tax your superior function to the limit, and it will always see you through. But you must protect your inferior function at all costs, because it goes wild under pressure. Let me give you an example.
I went out with a friend of mine, a solid sensation type, to help him buy his first car. My inferior function is thinking—thinking, in fact, is a nightmare for me. What looks like thinking is intuition sort of pulled over the void to cover up the hole. This seems to work pretty well, and I’ve produced reasonably good products. But it’s not thinking in the sense that it would be if thinking were a conscious faculty.
So there we were, looking for a car. Two more dissimilar people I could hardly imagine! I was busy with my intuitive and feeling faculty and I said, “Well, let’s see. Now we’ll go to a car dealer and find out what a new car costs, then we’ll go look in the newspaper for ads, then we’ll watch on the street as cars go by, then we’ll have to decide whether we have to buy new snow tires or wait until fall …” And I was in the middle of all this when I heard my friend moan with despair. “Robert, stop! I can’t stand it! We’re going to the Volkswagen dealer and we’re going to buy a car, and not one more word out of you!”
All these possibilities bubbling out of my intuition just floored him. He couldn’t stand it. So we went straight to the Volkswagen dealer, and I didn’t say a word about any other kind of car, or about snow tires. He drove the car home and he wouldn’t speak to me for twenty-four hours. These are signs of the inferior function being overtaxed. Yet it is precisely from this rubbed-raw, vulnerable part of oneself that the splendor of God will find its way to you.
The God Connection
Carl Jung says that the inferior function is always one’s God connection. He can come no other way. We have him effectively barred on every other front, but we can’t keep him out through the inferior function because we have no control there. It is as though we were keeping a bull in a pen of which we owned only three sides. We keep those three sides in good repair, with the gate always locked securely. But the fourth side is owned by a neighbor who doesn’t care about the bull and never keeps the fence up. Because we have no control over this side of the fence this is the hole through which the bull will come rushing out.
Like the bull, the inferior function will come rushing out. Unlike the bull, however, we do not have to run away from it. The point is not to run away from our inferior function. We must work with it and endure it if we are to retrieve the Dionysian quality of ecstasy that lies within it.
Suppose you have intuition as your superior function. You work well with ideas, abstractions, airy thoughts, possibilities. Sensation, then, is your inferior function. You have two left feet and any number of thumbs when you enter the world of sensate things and mechanics. If you want to engage your inferior function you might spend a Saturday afternoon building a birdhouse in your backyard—a project which will undoubtedly involve at least one mashed thumb, several bandages, and a product of doubtful quality. But the exposure to your inferior function will awaken in you a kind of ecstatic quality you rarely encounter in the more usual departments of your life. It is in such things that the Dionysian faculty makes itself known.
The inferior function frequently has a compulsive quality about it. When we engage in fanaticism, or find it necessary to put extra vehemence into an argument, or find ourselves doing or saying things we know to be destructive, then we are off into a dangerous inflation. We are experiencing the compulsive nature of the inferior function.
This is acutely painful, but it is precisely here that we can reclaim the Dionysian spirit if we will do the inner work required to bring this element into relationship with our better-differentiated faculties. What good could come out of Nazareth? The best and highest good. In the same way our best spiritual development can come from our most inferior nature.
How Dionysus Enters Through the Inferior Function: A Dream
I once had a dream of great impact that illustrates the way in which Dionysus enters through the inferior function. Here is my dream:
A boy had been drowned in a river and we were to recover his dead body. We were instructed to find him using only our feet. We could not use our hands or any other faculties. I waded out as far as I could go, but I could not find the body with my feet. Finally, I tilted my head back so that I could go just a little deeper, and I stumbled right onto the dead body. With some maneuvering, and without using my hands, I got the drowned body out of the river, into the house, and onto the bed. Then, for the first time, I saw that the boy emitted a light, as if he had a halo around his body. To our astonishment the boy sat up and began speaking words of great wisdom. At that moment someone whispered, “Here comes his mother. This is going to be harder on her than finding him dead.”
This dream speaks directly of my inferior function. It is represented by my feet, the lowest part of my body. This is the only faculty through which I can restore that lost part of my personality represented by the drowned boy. It was probably about the age of the drowned boy that I lost touch with my own Dionysian world through the training I was subjected to from my fundamentalist Anglo-Saxon environment. Only through my inferior function could I recover the boy, bring him into consciousness, and rediscover the radiant and winsome quality that he represents. The closing words hint that this can be done only at the expense of the mother complex, the wish to return to childhood, in myself.
Some years later I discovered another level of meaning in this dream. In Christian symbolism it is officially possible to enter a Gothic church only through one of the west doors, under one of the two spires. The choir has no doors, although the north and south transepts do. But none of these may be used for official entry. Why? The Gothic church represents the body of Christ. His head is the choir, his arms are the transepts, the crossing in his navel, and the west towers are his feet. It is only through the feet that the heavenly element may enter the body—never, never through the choir, his head. For this reason the bottoms of the feet are called the soles, or “souls,” of the feet—it is through this part of the body that the soul enters or leaves. This is yet another eloquent observation that it is only by way of our inferior function that the heavenly element can enter. There is no other way.
When you consciously invite Dionysus in through your inferior function, with your conscious ego as welcoming host, you will begin to experience new and vivid insights you never believed possible. In the next part of this book we shall learn some psychological ways to help us do this.