THE INFERIOR FUNCTION

INTRODUCTION

Though the theme of this paper is the inferior function, one cannot talk about it without discussing the whole problem of the four functions and sketching the superior function as well, because it is all interwoven. I presuppose that the reader is familiar with Jung’s book on the psychological types,¹ and will try to illustrate it by my practical experiences.

Psychological Types is one of Jung’s earlier books. When he wrote it and was trying to find out about the types, he was in many respects struggling in the dark; he has since made many discoveries which are to be found in his other works, and these I intend to link up. One repeatedly meets people who do not understand how typology looks in practical life. Many people who talk about types cannot even discover what their own type is, which is generally due to their lack of practical experience. Since the book was written, the idea of the four functions of consciousness, and the functioning of the conscious human personality in this fourfold way, has proved tremendously productive, and the problem of the four functions has increasingly evolved in Jung’s thought and also turns up in his thought in the religious form of the problem of three and four.

The problem of three and four, especially in the image of God, has proved so tremendously important that people tend to project the function problem onto this religious problem.

The same happens in mythological interpretation, for wherever people find quaternary symbols—say, in North American Indian mythology, where one turns to the four points of the compass or where the sand paintings are obviously of a four-fold structure—they say that that means the four functions, and they pin that concept onto the mythological theme. There are three mistakes here. First, taking Jungian concepts and attaching them with a safety pin onto mythological material is a completely sterile enterprise in itself, for it distorts basic facts. Second, it is using the concepts without thinking what they really mean and on what they are based. And third, in this special case, it is fundamentally wrong, because if you think for a moment, you realize that what we can see in mythological material is unconscious material. The Navajos, for instance, have not thought out their sand paintings and mandalas consciously; they would say that they were revealed to them, or to their medicine men. Therefore, those primitive and even evolved mythological quaternary themes are self-manifestations of the collective unconscious, so we cannot identify them with a conscious phenomenon, while the functions are modes of behavior of consciousness. We have to look at it rather in the following way.

Consciousness evolves in early childhood, as is known, from the unconscious. From our point of view, the unconscious is a primary and the conscious a secondary fact. Therefore the unconscious totality and the structure of the total personality exist in time before the conscious personality and could be looked at as in the following diagram.

Top: Fourfold structures in the field of consciousness with the ego as center

Bottom: The preconscious total quaternian structure of the personality

Consciousness in itself is a field of representations, for representations are only called conscious insofar as they are associated with the ego complex. If one says, “I know that this is so and so,” that means that this is conscious to me, it is a fact in my field of consciousness. When the functions develop in the field of consciousness—A, B, C, D in the diagram—there comes up from below, first let us say, the thinking function, which then becomes one of the main functions of the ego, which uses mainly the operation of thinking in the organization of its field of consciousness. Slowly another function appears and gradually they all—favorable conditions—appear in the field of consciousness. Thus you get a fourfold structure in consciousness which mirrors exactly the preconscious fourfold structure. We have a quaternio of functions in consciousness because there is already an inborn tendency to build up such a fourfold structure in the unconscious. Mythological products usually mirror the basic structure (the circle), but they do not represent its mirage in consciousness, so to speak. This is why if we try to pin the concepts of thinking, feeling, and so on onto mythological phenomena, we always come to grief, for we are trying to connect in a wrong way. It is as though we tried to identify the result with the cause. If, therefore, we have a fourfold phenomenon in mythology, it is better to say that it represents the general archetypal structure of the psyche, which, among other things, has produced the tendency always to develop into four functions in the structure of consciousness.

The question has often been raised as to why on earth there should be four functions. Why not three, or five? That cannot be answered theoretically; it is simply a question of checking facts and of seeing whether you can find out more or fewer functions and another typology which would be equally justified. For Jung it was a great discovery when he later found confirmation of his more intuitively conceived idea in the fact that everywhere in myths and religious symbolism there appears the problem of the fourfold structure of the psyche and that, in studying the behavior of his patients, he had apparently hit upon a basic structure of the psyche.

Naturally, the basic fourfold structure of the psyche, which means more than only the conscious functions, is generally represented, if it appears, as a purely primitive self-manifestation of the unconscious, usually as an undifferentiated quaternion. There are just the four principles more or less of the same kind: four colors, or angels, or gods, etc. The more they are connected with consciousness, the more they tend to become three animals and one human being, or three good gods and one evil god, and then you get those more differentiated mandalas where the four poles of the quaternary structure are different from each other. This is particularly so if you are dealing with material which has been worked upon a great deal consciously, when you find the classic problem of the three and the four, about which Jung has written so much. This means that when, from this basic structure, one or the other function becomes conscious, or where under optimum conditions three functions become conscious, this has the effect that the basic structure also changes, for neither in psychology nor in any other field of reality is there ever a one-sided course of action; for if the unconscious builds up a field of consciousness, the repercussion of such a change produces an alteration in the unconscious structure as well. Therefore, in dreams and mythological material you find that this basic structure also appears in an altered form, from which it can be concluded that a part of the problem of the functions has already become conscious so that, owing to the counteraction, even the basic structure has this changed or modified form. Then again there are mandalas which are to be found chiefly in the higher civilizations, such as the images of the four Evangelists where three are animals and one a human. This theme appeared previously in Egyptian mythology in the four sons of Horns, pictured with three animals and one human head, as well as the other distorted mandalas, in which there is a certain tension within the structure, generally between the three and the four in particular.

I would like to give a brief sketch of the pattern of the four functions in Jungian psychology. Jung first differentiated two attitudinal types: the extravert and the introvert. In the extravert, the libido habitually flows consciously toward the object, but there is also an unconscious secret counteraction back toward the subject. For the extravert the hidden move toward the subject is usually an unconscious factor. In the case of the introvert, the opposite occurs, for he feels as if an object would constantly overwhelm him, so that he has to continually retire from it, for everything is falling upon him, he is constantly overwhelmed by impressions, but he is unaware that he is secretly borrowing, or lending, psychic energy to the object through his own unconscious extraversion.

Expressed briefly, that represents the difference between the extravert and the introvert and then, if you take the four functions of sensation, thinking, feeling, and intuition, each of which can be extraverted or introverted, you get eight types: extraverted thinking, introverted thinking; extraverted feeling, introverted feeling; and so on.

Before we move on to practical examples, I would like to characterize the inferior function in its general behavior. You can say that all superior functions in an individual, whether in one case it is thinking and in another feeling, have a tendency to behave in a certain way, and the inferior function in an individual, irrespective of which it may be, has a general type of behavior. The behavior of the inferior function is wonderfully mirrored in many myths and particularly in many fairy tales, where there is a very widespread pattern of the following structure. A king has three sons. He likes the two older sons, but the youngest is regarded as being stupid or a fool. The king then sets a task in which the sons may have to find the water of life, or the most beautiful bride, or chase away a secret enemy who every night steals the horses, or the golden apples out of the royal garden. Generally the two elder sons set out and get nowhere or get stuck, and then the third saddles his horse and everybody laughs and tells him he’d better stay at home by the stove, where he belongs, but it is he who usually performs the great task. This fourth figure—he is the third son, but the fourth figure in the setup—has, according to the myths, different qualities. Sometimes he is the stupidest or the youngest, sometimes he is a bit clumsy, and sometimes he is a complete fool.

There are different versions, but he is always in some such category. In a beautiful Russian fairy tale, for instance, he is looked upon as a complete idiot, and the two elder sons ride out on wonderful horses from their father’s stable, but the youngest takes a little shaggy horse and sits on it the wrong way round—with his head toward the horse’s tail—and goes off, derided by everybody. He is, of course, Ivan, the Russian hero, the one who inherits everything. The story of the fool or the idiot sometimes occurs taken out of the general setup of four figures, so that he is the hero from the very beginning. Then there is the theme of the thumbling, or the cripple, or very often of the soldier who has deserted or has been wounded and discharged from the army and who is lost in the woods, where the great adventure starts. Or there may be a poor peasant boy who becomes king or inherits the kingdom, and in all these, from the very beginning of the story, you know that it concerns something more than the four functions, for the fool is an archetypal religious figure, embracing more than only the inferior function; he implies a whole part of the human personality, or even of humanity itself, and would represent what remained behind and therefore still has the original wholeness of nature, so that it has mainly a religious meaning. But in mythology, as soon as the fool appears as the fourth in a group of four people, we have a certain right to assume that he mirrors the general behavior of an inferior function.

I have often tried, in interpreting fairy tales, to go further into detail and to call the king the thinking and the fourth son the feeling function, but in my experience, that does not work. You have to twist the material and play some dishonest tricks if you force the material like this. So I have come to the conclusion that we cannot go so far, but must just say that in mythology such a third son, or such a fool, simply represents a type of the general behavior of the inferior function, whichever it may be; it is neither individual nor specific, but a general structure. That is quite correct, for if you study individual cases, you will see that the inferior function tends to behave after the manner of such a “fool” hero, the divine fool or idiot hero, who represents the despised part of the personality, the ridiculous and unadapted part but also that part which builds up the connection with the unconscious totality of the person.

There is something else to be guarded against, and that is that in the many myths where the foolish third son finds the water of life or the golden bird, or overcomes the dragon, or brings home the beautiful princess, inherits the kingdom, and so on, one is very much tempted to interpret him as the bridge to the unconscious, because the above are all symbols of what we assume to be in the unconscious. However, we must not forget that the whole mythological process represents everything in the unconscious, nor that for an introvert the unconscious very often appears outside! Therefore, it is quite right to say that the third son, or the fourth figure in the setup, makes the bridge to the unconscious, but this must not imply that the unconscious is always experienced as being “within,” for that only applies to an extravert, as the inferior function has the opposite attitudinal type of the conscious function. An introverted thinking type will have inferior extraverted feeling, while an extraverted intuitive will have inferior introverted sensation, and so on.

One can say that the inferior function always makes the bridge to the unconscious, and in the case of an introvert it is generally by moving toward an unconscious projection which appears outside. So it could be said that the inferior function is always directed toward the unconscious and the symbolic world, but that it is not directed either to the inside or the outside; the latter varies individually. If the inferior function of an introvert moves outside, then it means that the outer realm will acquire a symbolic quality for that person. For instance, an introverted thinking type has an inferior feeling function, so the movement will be toward outer objects, that is, to other people; but such outer people will have a symbolic meaning for the person, being carriers of symbols of the unconscious. The symbolic meaning of an unconscious fact appears outside, as the quality of an outer object, prima vista. But if an introvert, with his habitual way of introjecting, says he need not telephone Mrs. So-and-So, for she is just the symbol of his anima and therefore symbolic, and the outer person does not matter, for it only happened that his projection fell there, then he will never get to the bottom of his inferior function or will never assimilate it as a problem. This is because the feeling of an introverted thinking type is generally genuinely extraverted, and with such a trick he simply tries to catch hold of his inferior function by means of his superior function and pull it inside. He introjects at the wrong moment so as to maintain the predominance of his superior over his inferior function. An introvert who wants to assimilate his inferior function must relate to outer objects, but bearing in mind that they are symbolic. He must not, however, draw the conclusion that they are only symbolic and that therefore outer objects can be dispensed with. That is a very lousy, dishonest trick which many introverts play with their inferior function. Naturally extraverts do the same thing, only the other way round. Therefore it must not be said that the inferior function is directed inward, or turned toward the unconscious within, but that the inferior function is directed toward the unconscious, whether the latter appears on the inside or the outside, and that it is always the carrier of symbolic experiences, which may come from within or without.

In the case of extraverts, I have often seen that the unconscious appears directly from within either as a vision or a fantasy. In that way I have often been impressed by the fact that extraverts, when they come to their other side, have a much purer relationship to the inner world than the introvert. I have even been quite jealous! I have seen what a naive and genuine and pure relationship they have to inner facts, for they can have a vision and take it completely seriously at once, quite naively! In an introvert, it is always distorted by his extraverted shadow, which throws doubts on it. Thus it can be said that if an extravert falls into his introversion, it will be specially genuine and specially pure and deep. That is why usually extraverts are so proud of this that they boast loudly that they are great introverts. They try to make it into a feather in their cap—which is again typically extraverted—and thereby ruin the whole thing! But actually, if they do not spoil everything with vanity, extraverts can have a much more childlike, naive, pure, and really genuine introversion than introverts. Introverts, for their part, if they wake up to their inferior extraversion, can spread a glow of life and make their surroundings into a symbolic festival better than any extravert! An introvert can give outer life a depth of symbolic meaning and the feeling of life as a magical feast of some kind, which the extravert cannot. If an extravert goes to a party, he thinks that everybody is marvelous and is ready to say: “Come on, let’s get this party going!” But that is simply a technique, and the party never really reaches magical depth, or does so very rarely; it remains on the level of amiable surface. But if an introvert can come out with his extraversion in the right way he can create an atmosphere where outside things become symbolic: drinking a glass of wine with a friend becomes something like a communion, and so on. With the introvert it is linked with the outer, just as with the extravert it is really within, if he breaks through to the other side.

In Psychological Types, Jung speaks of the general impoverishment of extraverted and introverted thinking attitudes when these begin to wear out. He says:

While the extravert really denies himself in his complete dispersion among objects, the introvert, by ridding himself of each and every content, has to content himself with his mere existence. In both cases the further development of life is crowded out of the domain of thought into the region of other psychic functions which had hitherto existed in relative unconsciousness. The extraordinary impoverishment of introverted thinking in relation to objective facts finds compensation in an abundance of unconscious facts. Whenever consciousness, wedded to the function of thought, confines itself within the smallest and emptiest circle possible—though seeming to contain the plentitude of divinity—unconscious phantasy becomes proportionately enriched. . . .²

This is just an example of the great trouble Jung took to describe how the slow overdoing of the superior function leads to its neurotic degeneration. He also alludes to a fact which plays a great role, namely that in the case of a person who has not been analyzed, the inferior function intrudes into the superior and falsifies it. Here, for instance, he describes what happens when introverted thinking is overtaxed. There was a marvelous demonstration of this some time ago in the case of a professor of philosophy who made an attack on the psychology of the unconscious in a Zurich newspaper, the Neue Zürcher Zeitung. He is a pupil of Heidegger and an absolute demonstration of overtaxed introverted thinking. This has the effect of his being unable to assert anything more than that life is an ontological phenomenon of existence! He enriches his statement with a few more impressive adjectives, but that is what it amounts to! This one thought, that “existence really exists,” expresses a divine plentitude for him, as it also had for Parmenides, and he cannot cease reassuring us about such existence for several pages. And then he says, “But the unconscious would be an uncanny theater of marionettes and ghosts.” There you have an absolute illustration of what Jung says: “The unconscious phantasy becomes proportionately enriched by a multitude of archaically formed facts, a veritable pandemonium of magical factors.” That is exactly what this professor expounded in his articles—that the idea of the unconscious was awful, it was just a theatrical pandemonium, and then he saved his conscious position by saying that it simply didn’t exist, it was just an invention of the psychologists! That was a beautiful practical illustration of what Jung, in the sentences quoted, says. In addition to what Jung says there, if you overdo one of the conscious attitudes, not only does it become poor and lose its fertility, but also the unconscious counter-function (in a thinking type it would be feeling) encroaches upon the main function and falsifies it. That was obvious in this professor’s article, which shows that feeling was really concerned in enlightening mankind as to the absurdity of the idea of the psychology of the unconscious. He entirely lost the objective style to which we are accustomed in scientific discussion, and he felt himself to be a prophet whose mission it was to save mankind from some evil poison, so one saw that his whole moral or feeling function contaminated his thinking. His thinking became subjective instead of objective, and it was obvious that he had not even read the literature on the psychology of the unconscious, not even the main books! He was simply deeply concerned with saving mankind from such a poisonous doctrine.

Another way in which the inferior function often intrudes upon the superior is visible in the very down-to-earth, realistic introverted sensation type. Sensation types, whether introverted or extraverted, are generally quite good in their relationship to money and in not being too extravagant, but if such a type overdoes this, then his inferior intuition becomes involved. For instance, I knew a sensation type who became madly stingy and could practically not move about in life any longer because—well, in Switzerland everything costs something! When one tried to find out where this sudden stinginess originated—hitherto he had been just moderately stingy like most people in Switzerland—one noticed that he produced any number of dark forebodings: 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 is usual, his mother-in-law, a very rich woman, might suddenly get furious with him and leave her money to another family instead of to his, et cetera, et cetera. Those are instances of the dark fears of what might happen, which is typical for a negative inferior intuition. Only the dark possibilities are envisaged, but he did not face the fact that he had such melancholy expectations of the future, but the first appearances of his inferior intuition instead reinforced his sensation in a wrong way by making him stingy. Life no longer flowed because everything was falsified by the invasion of the inferior intuition. Thus, when the time comes for the development of the other functions, there are generally several phenomena: the superior function degenerates like an old car which begins to run down and get worn out, the ego becomes bored with the superior function, because everything you can do too well becomes boring, and beyond that, the inferior function, instead of appearing in its own field, tends to invade the main function, giving it an unadapted, neurotic twist. One is thus confronted with a neurotic mixtum compositum of a thinking type who can’t think any longer, or a feeling type who no longer shows any agreeable feeling. Then there is a transitional stage where people are neither fish nor flesh nor good red herring, but just awful! Formerly they were good thinkers, but they can’t think anymore and they have not reached a new level. It is therefore very important to know one’s type and recognize what the unconscious is now up to, for otherwise one is caught from behind.

The differentiation of types actually starts in very early childhood. For instance, the two attitudes of extraversion and introversion can actually be seen in a child of one or one and a half, though perhaps not always very clearly. Jung once told of a child who would not enter a room before it had been told the names of the pieces of furniture in the room—table, chair, and so on—after which it would move toward an object in the room. That is typical of a definitely introverted attitude, in which the object is terrifying and has to be banished or put in its place by a word: a propitiating gesture by which the object is made known and cannot misbehave, for a table must remain a table, so that you can walk toward it. In such little details, if one knows how to look for them, one can observe the tendency toward introversion or extraversion in a very small child. The functions naturally do not show so early in all cases, but by the kindergarten age you can usually observe the development of a main function by a preference for some occupation, or the child’s behavior toward another child; for children, like adults, tend to do frequently what they can do well and not to do the things that they cannot do well. Probably most of you did as I did with your schoolwork; if you were gifted in mathematics, you did that first and left whatever you were not good at till the end and never first did the things which you disliked, which is something very few people do, for the natural tendency is to defer doing or to push off onto other people the thing in which you do not feel superior. By such natural behavior the inborn one-sidedness is increased more and more. And then comes the family attitude in which the boy who is very intelligent must study later on, or the child who is gifted in practical matters must become an engineer, so that the surroundings reinforce the existing one-sided tendencies, the so-called “gifts.” There is thus an increase in the development of the superior function and a slow retardation of the other side of the personality. This is an unavoidable process and even has great advantages. Many people just fit into this pattern, and you can tell their type at once, but others may be very difficult to define. Even the people themselves have trouble in finding out their own type, which is very often due to the fact that they are distorted types. This is not a very frequent occurrence, but it does happen in cases where someone would naturally have become a feeling type or an intuitive, but was forced by the environment to develop another function. Suppose a boy is born as a feeling type in an intellectually ambitious family. His whole surroundings will exert pressure upon him to become an intellectual, and his original possibility as a feeling type will be thwarted or despised. Usually, in such a case, he is unable to become a thinking type—that would be a step too far—but he might well develop sensation or intuition, one of the auxiliary functions, so as to be relatively better adapted to his surroundings, for his main function is simply “out” in the milieu in which he grows up.

Distorted types have advantages and disadvantages. The disadvantage is that from the very beginning they cannot quite develop their main disposition, which therefore remains a bit below the mark they would have reached had they developed in the one-sided way. On the other hand, they have been forced ahead of time into doing something which in the second half of life they would have had to do anyhow. In analysis, one can very often help people switch back to the original type, and they are then able to pick up some other function very quickly and reach a developed stage, for the original disposition is a help in that direction. They are like a fish which now can return happily to its water.

What determines the original basic disposition is not known. Jung, in a brief description at the end of Psychological Types, says that it has probably a biological basis. He points out, for instance, the two ways in which an animal species adapts to reality: either by propagating tremendously with a very small defense mechanism, for example in fleas and lice or rabbits; or by building up the defense mechanisms tremendously, as in hedgehogs or elephants, among which propagation is reduced to a relatively small extent. Thus already in nature there are two possibilities for dealing with outer reality: either you defend yourself against it, keeping it off while building up your own life by putting up a defense against the overwhelming reality, or you pour yourself, so to speak, into it and overcome or conquer it in that way—which also corresponds with the sex and power drives. The basis is one of these two. That would be an introverted and an extraverted functioning in the biological realm.

When Jung brought out his book on types, not much had been published on animal behavior, but if you study modern books you will see that among the animals, in most patterns of behavior, there is a mixtum compositum of inner and outer factors. Thus some aspects of animal behavior come more from within, that is, come into play without any outer stimulus, while other animal behavior depends more on outer stimuli. It is known that the higher anthropoid apes are incapable of performing the sexual act unless they have observed another ape and learned in that way, whereas with other animals, without ever having seen animals of their species mating, the inner urge is sufficient. But if in a zoo the higher apes are brought up without ever seeing a companion mate, they remain ignorant in this way, just as a human being does. Therefore it is obvious that the behavior of an animal in part depends on an outer factor and in part is conditioned by an inborn disposition and that there is a mutual interaction between inside and outside factors.

There is also sometimes an uncertainty in animal behavior. Experiments have been made by incubating storks’ eggs, allowing the eggs no contact with the social group. When birds produced from such eggs are released at the time they should fly to North Africa, those bred of eggs whose group fly over Yugoslavia will fly over that country, and those produced from eggs of birds that fly over Spain will fly over Spain to Africa—which proves that they rely completely on the inner inborn disposition which tells them how to reach Africa. But if a stork bred from the Yugoslav group is put with the birds that fly over Spain, the bird will fly with them and not follow its inborn disposition. This shows the two possibilities very clearly: being influenced by outer factors, by the social influence from outside, or simply following the inborn disposition.

Another big question always is whether when an animal performing the sexual act, or fighting or feeding, is just following an urge or acting like an engine, or does it have something like an inner representation? Adolf Portmann gives a special example which shows that while an animal is acting instinctively, it can have inner representations of what it does. Ideas and representations are dangerous words that zoologists try to avoid, but they do admit that in the so-called mind of an animal are inner pictures. Experiments have been made with a lonely bird in a cage which had no opportunity to put into practice its natural instinct to fight. Another bird of the same variety was introduced into the cage, and the two enjoyed a big fight. This is vitally important for a male animal; it contributes to his well-being if he can fight with another male of his species. After a while the enemy was removed from the cage, but much later the bird repeated the whole fight with an imaginary bird in a corner of the cage, obviously having an image of the other bird in its so-called mind. There is an analogy—though human words are dangerous, and Portmann stammers when he gives this example—but we can certainly say that there is a preform of what we would call an inner representation—a memory picture. It is just as one does oneself sometimes: one has a fight with someone and then on the way home one goes over the whole thing with this person in one’s mind.

Another difficulty in defining one’s own or other people’s type is that if people have already reached the stage of being bored with their main function, they very often assure you with absolute sincerity that they belong to the type opposite what they really are. The extravert swears that he is deeply introverted, and vice versa. This comes from the fact that the inferior function subjectively feels itself to be the real one. It considers itself the more important or genuine attitude, so a thinking type, because he knows that everything in his life matters from the feeling aspect, will assure you that he is a feeling type. Therefore, when one is trying to find one’s type, one must never ask, “What matters to me most?” but rather “What do I habitually do most?” An extravert can be constantly extraverting but will assure you, and will mean it, that he is deeply introverted and only concerned with the inner world. That is not a deception, it is how he feels, for he knows that although it may be for only a minute a day, in that minute in which he introverts he is close to himself; there he is real.

Also in the realm of the inferior function one is overwhelmed, one is unhappy, one has one’s great problem, one is constantly impressed by things, and therefore, in a way, the intensity of life is very often much greater in the realm of the inferior function, especially if the superior function is already worn out, so that naturally one tends to define one’s own type wrongly. Practically, it is more helpful when one wants to determine type to ask what is the greatest cross for the person, where is his greatest suffering, where does he feel that he always knocks his head against obstacles and suffers hell? That generally points to the inferior function. Many people, moreover, develop two superior functions so well that it is very difficult to say whether the person is a thinking-intuitive or an intuitive with good thinking, for the two seem to be almost equally good. Sometimes sensation and feeling are so well developed in an individual that you would have difficulty in ascertaining which is the first, but does the intuitive-thinking person suffer more from knocking his head against sensation facts or from feeling problems? Here you can decide which is the first, with the other a well-developed second function.

I presuppose here that Jung’s schema of the types is known, in which the two rational functions, thinking and feeling, are opposite each other, and in the same way intuition and sensation, as shown in the following diagram.

Very often someone will say naively that he is a thinking type and is now going to develop his feeling—what an illusion! If you are a thinking type, you can first either go to sensation or intuition; that is your choice, naturally influenced by disposition. Then you move to the opposite of the two secondary functions and lastly to the inferior one, but you cannot cross directly to the opposite function. The reason is very simple and is that they exclude each other completely; they are incompatible. Take the example of a staff officer who has to plan the evacuation of a town’s population in the best possible way under given conditions. Unfortunately his own wife and children are in the same town. If he gives in to his feelings, he won’t develop a good rational plan. He must simply obliterate them from his mind and tell himself that it is now his job to plan the evacuation as well as he can, and he will think of his own feelings as sentimentality—that is, he will depreciate them in order to free himself. Or else he will make a double decision in which all the others have to go one way and his family another, which is unfair; but it is a fact that in certain situations in life, feeling and thinking are quite incompatible and only one of the two can operate. One cannot make a straight jump from one to the other, but can assimilate thinking with sensation, or have them functioning relatively together very easily, and one can combine the other two very easily, so that in the jump from one auxiliary function to the other you will not suffer as much as if you had to jump to the opposite function, because when one has to move from intuition to sensation, one can still use one’s old thinking as a judge, and when intuition and sensation fight like mad, one can detach from that fight by thinking.

Let us take as a practical example a thinking type who primarily couples his thinking with intuition. The philosopher Nietzsche is such a case. One is quite uncertain as to whether he had very good thinking or very good intuition; the latter is the greater in his case, but the two are very well combined and move together. Kant would also be rather on the thinking-intuition side. Such a philosopher, if he wants to enlarge his field of awareness, could bring in facts. Generally a philosopher, after in youth having evolved (the introvert draws it all from within) a certain concept of his ideas, will then have the need to check his theoretical and intuitive ideas with facts. There he will get into a certain tension between his intuition and the side with which he looks at facts, because the two do not move together either, but he will not be in complete hell, because, if the tension gets too bad, he can always detach from the situation and decide by his thinking; only when it comes to the opposite function has he to give up. The root of his former ego attitude toward life is excluded. Thus you cannot jump directly, but if you must make the leap, it is helpful if you have already developed the two auxiliaries, which do not fight so much within you, before you have to sacrifice the main function. Naturally, all your life you are knocked from one to the other, but although you can be knocked for momentary functioning into another field, that is not what is meant by assimilating or developing another function.

If I analyze a thinking type, I never push him into feeling at once; I see that the other functions are assimilated first. It is a mistake to forget the intermediary stage, for that does not work. Take, for instance, a thinking type who falls madly in love with a completely inappropriate person because of his inferior feeling. If he has already developed sensation, which implies a certain sense of reality and a certain amount of intuition—the capacity to smell a rat—then he will not fall into complete nonsense. But if he is a one-sided thinking type and he falls in love with an inappropriate person and has no sense of reality and no intuition, then there will happen what is so beautifully depicted in the film The Blue Angel, where the professor becomes a circus clown in the service of a vamp, because there have been no intermediary fields where he could catch himself—he is just knocked over by his inferior function. But if his analyst could see to it that, while he has not yet much feeling, at least he has developed a certain sense of reality, then he can overcome the difficulty with that intermediary function. I think that is something to keep in mind if one is an analyst—that one can never jump to the inferior function. Of course life does it, for life does not care! But the analytical process should not go that way and normally does not do so, if one follows the intimations given in dreams; for one sees that the tendency of the process is that the development should be in a serpentine movement, the normal way in which the unconscious tries to get up the inferior function.

Another difficulty of the early stages, when one is developing one’s main function but not yet touching the problem of the inferior function, consists in the tendency in families to distribute the functions: one member is the family introvert and another becomes the family’s practical engineer and a third the family’s seer and prophet and so on, and the others happily give up because one member can do it so much better, so why bother if you are beaten from the start! This sets up wonderfully vital groups which function well and only get into trouble when they fall apart. There is a very strong tendency in most families, and also in other groups, to solve the function problem by distributing the functions and relying on the good function of the other. In marriage, as Jung pointed out, one tends to marry the opposite type, and then again one is, or so one thinks for the moment, freed from the disagreeable task of confronting one’s inferior function. That is one of the great blessings and a source of happiness in the early stages of a marriage, when suddenly the whole weight of one’s inferior function is gone and one lives in a lovely blessed oneness with the other and every problem is solved! It is only if one of the partners dies, or the need arises in one of them to develop the inferior function instead of just leaving those sections of life to the other, that the trouble starts. But very often in the early stages of the marriage this symbiotic solution is chosen and people are not aware of what they are doing.

The same happens again in the choice of analysts. Frequently people choose the opposite type as analyst. For instance, the feeling type cannot think and so admires a person who can think, and so he looks for an analyst with a strong thinking function. But that is not to be recommended, because if you are always with someone who knows it all so well, you just get discouraged and give up completely and just leave all the thinking to the other. You feel very happy because now thinking is taken care of, but this is no good. Jung, for instance, always liked to send people with the same blind spots to each other, because, he said, if two idiots sit together and neither can think, then they will get into such trouble that at least one of them will begin to think! It doesn’t matter whether it is the analyst first or the patient! It would, of course, be the same with the other functions; the person just sits and hopes that the other will do it. Then something might happen! If one goes to the opposite type, this is something to be borne in mind, and the analyst, who should be the more responsible, should be especially careful not to display his superior function too much. He must then, against his real feeling, constantly pretend that he does not know, or feels incapable, or has no idea, and so on. He has to give up his superior function in order not to paralyze the first shy attempts his analysand might make in this field by discouraging them through his superiority. The same holds for an intuitive. The intuitive generally gets into trouble over his monetary affairs so completely that if he finds a partner who takes that in hand and does the budgeting of the income and the filling out of income tax forms for him, he will never become the hero who says: “No, I cannot do it, so I must learn, please leave it to me!” He will sigh with relief and throw it all onto the sensation type’s desk and feel very happy, and then he will never get any contact with reality. You see this kind of partnership in analysis and in family life and also in primitive tribal life, where the medicine man is usually the introvert-seer of the intuitive type, who takes care of relationship with the future and the germinating of ideas and possibilities. Then there is the sensation type, who is the good and efficient hunter or scout, while the chiefs, belonging to the feeling and rational types, keep order with either the feeling or thinking function. Then nobody else needs to develop anything; people just rely on those tribal main functions of consciousness while they remain in blissful unconsciousness.

It also happens that people push off the inferior functions onto servants. In countries where there are still servants, that is done with the greatest joy! The servant is a fitting symbol for the inferior function, and naturally people tend to hire someone who can do the things they cannot and who are willing to do the things they wish to get rid of, and they will choose the servant with that view in mind. Secretaries also can perform the same function, and in this way you can shelve the problem of developing the retarded functions; but then you have other troubles, for the whole thing remains in projection, and the servant behaves to the employer as the inferior function behaves to the superior function: he apparently submits, but secretly he tyrannizes you! People who cannot cook or even sew on a button are tyrannized by a maid, who, by virtue of the fact that she can do these things, decides everything. She cannot be gotten rid of because the employers would be lost without her, thus they are tyrannized from the outside just as they would be from their own inner inferior function. Many so-called social problems are really the projected problem of the inferior function, which frequently is represented in dreams under the guise of people from the simple layers of the population, or the laborers. The unconscious uses them as a simile, to show that the inferior function has remained on that level; but people do not understand this and project, for they despise and fear the laborers at the same time. You can say that anyone who is not at ease and acquainted with his own inferior function is socially maladapted. He cannot get on with the simple people and will tend to have trouble or oppress them, because secretly he fears them. Naturally, in social setups where there are racial minorities, there is an even greater tendency on the part of the majority to project the inferior function. Then there even arises the beautiful symbolic fact that the inferior function is, so to speak, of another race, really very different from oneself; it feels strange and different from what one is, so that a person of another racial background is an appropriate hook on which to hang the projection, and that troubles social relations to a great extent. Therefore, developing one’s inferior function is, in a way, also a social obligation. Until one has done this and dealt with one’s inferior function, one will tend toward one-sided and asocial behavior because that is the original form. Take the four castes of India, for instance: you just distribute certain functions and then keep out of trouble yourself and keep your one-sidedness.

To the general outlines of the inferior function also belongs the fact that the inferior function is generally slow in contrast to the superior function. Jung calls it infantile and tyrannical. This slowness is in fact one of the great troubles of the inferior function, which is one reason why people hate to start work on it, for the reaction of the superior function comes out quickly and well adapted while many people have no idea where their inferior function really is. For instance, thinking types have no idea whether they have feeling or what kind of feeling it is. They have to sit for half an hour and meditate as to whether they have any feeling about something, and if so what it is. If you ask a thinking type what he feels, he generally either replies with a thought or gives a quick conventional reaction, and if you then insist on knowing what he really feels, he does not know, and pulling it up from his belly, so to speak, can take half an hour. Or if an intuitive fills out a tax form, he needs a week where other people would take a day. He simply cannot do it, or if he does it accurately, he takes forever. I know an introverted intuitive woman—to go with her to choose a blouse! Never again! It takes an eternity, until the whole shop is mad! But it cannot be speeded up, and it does not help to get impatient. It is terrible, and naturally that is so discouraging about developing the inferior function, because one has not the time.

Sometimes people have two very highly developed functions and both the others are very undeveloped. That happens where a very strong, impulsive temperament gets the development of the main function going very much. You can say that that is the disadvantage of efficiency. Lazy people never have such strongly divided functions as efficient people, so lazy people have their points—for themselves! They never overdo the one-sidedness, the efficiency of the main function, and then naturally the other functions are not quite as far down. There is also another point which one must never forget: this theory of functions does not say anything about the qualitative level. For instance, one sensation type may not be a particularly efficient or practical engineer, while another sensation type might be very highly differentiated. The total qualitative level of the personality can be very different, and there are many thinking types who do not become Einsteins, though thinking is their main function. So if we say this is such-and-such a type, it refers only to the habitual functioning and not to its quality.

The quality level seems to be a given thing. There is an old saying that you can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear, but on the other hand, it is very dangerous to judge practically from the beginning by saying that this chap will never go very far, or will not develop very much. Sometimes quite surprising things occur. It is very difficult to judge the level practically, but I would say there is such a thing as a level which cannot be transcended and which is more or less inborn.

Sometimes by an analytical treatment you can improve the general level unexpectedly. But then you can never prove scientifically that you have done so. You can just as well say that that level was there and was only hampered in getting out. You cannot solve the question. By the outcome you can say that analysis can develop the qualitative level, or that it was there and the process has only removed the obstacle.

Today we make too much of I.Q. tests. I would say that there is also a “feeling I.Q.” The French have an expression which speaks of the intelligence du coeur—the intelligence of the heart. There are people who cannot think but who have a tremendous intelligence of the heart and so in general are considered highly intelligent, but their intelligence dwells in the heart, so to speak. Women very often have this intelligence of the heart and put a very intelligent husband right in their pocket with it. The same goes for intuition and sensation. They all can be highly intelligent, or rather dumb! That is why we prefer to speak of the differentiation of functions, rather than of the I.Q. of a person.

GENERAL FEATURES OF THE INFERIOR FUNCTION

There are some general qualities which characterize the inferior function, whatever it is. One of them is that the inferior function is not adapted to society. One such aspect is, for instance, its slowness. Assimilating it, and even letting the inferior function come up, takes a great amount of time. If a feeling type wants to think, he will sit eight hours to write two pages—if as much as that. If a thinking type wants to realize his feeling, he has to meditate for hours until he feels what he feels, for he does not even know what he feels, but has some strange kind of nervous sympathetic reactions in the lower part of his body and has to meditate upon these a long time till they come up as a kind of feeling. If you ask a thinking type what he feels, generally he will shoot a lot of conventional answers at you, but when you ask him what he really feels, he is absolutely stunned and says he does not know! If you leave him stewing for a long time, he will slowly realize what he really feels. The same is true for sensation when it is the inferior function, which is why, when intuitives begin to work on their inferior sensation, they get tremendously stiff and overly pedantic, and they have to be extraordinarily accurate in a terribly slow way. This cannot be helped; it is a stage which cannot be skipped. If people just lose patience again and say to hell with it, that they have sat the whole day and that’s the result, it means they give up and that is hopeless, for it simply means that they cut the fourth function out and replace it by some kind of artificial mechanism—by a crutch. The process cannot be speeded up, or only to a certain extent, but never to the speed of the superior function, and for very good reasons, because if you think of the turning point of life and the problems of aging and of turning within, then this slowing down of the whole life process by bringing up the inferior function is just the thing which is needed. So the slowness should not be treated with impatience and with trying to educate “the damned inferior function”; one should rather really accept the fact that in this realm one has to waste time, and that is just the value of it, because that gives the unconscious a chance to come in.

Another typical aspect of all inferior functions, which is also connected with its unadaptedness and primitiveness, is its touchiness and tyranny. Most people, when the question of their inferior function is in any way touched upon, become terribly childish and touchy; they can’t stand the slightest criticism but always feel attacked, for they are uncertain of themselves and, with that, naturally they tyrannize everybody around them; everybody has to walk carefully. If you want to say something about another person’s inferior function, it is like walking on eggs, for people just cannot stand any criticism there, and a rȋte d’entrée is required, waiting for the right moment for a peaceful atmosphere, and then carefully, with a long introductory speech, one might get over some slight criticism about the inferior function. But if you shoot any criticism at people, they will get absolutely bewildered and emotional, and the situation is ruined. I learned this for the first time with absolute amazement many, many years ago when I was studying. A fellow student showed me a paper she had written. She was a feeling type, and the paper was very good, but in a minor passage, where she switched from one theme to another, it seemed to me that there was a hiatus in the connection of thought. What she said was quite right, but in between the two passages, for a thinking type the logical transition was lacking, though for me it was very easy to see. So I said to her that I thought it was an excellent paper but that on one page she might make a better transition, as there was a jump from one theme to another, and if one didn’t think well oneself, one did not get the connection at once. She got absolutely emotional and said, “Oh, well, then it’s all ruined, I shall just burn it,” and she took it out of my hand, saying, “I know it’s junk, I shall burn it up!” I pulled it out of her hand and said, “For God’s sake, don’t burn it up!” “Oh, well,” she said, “I knew you thought it would be junk,” and she went on and on. When the storm was over I was able to get in a word and said, “You need not even retype it; you only need to write in one little sentence to make the transition—just one sentence between these two paragraphs.” The storm started all over again, and I gave up! I saw her later, and she told me that the night after that she dreamed that her house burned down and, typically, the fire started in the roof. I thought, “My God, these feeling types!” For her, writing the paper had been such an achievement, bringing out some thoughts, and it had been just at the limit of what she could do, and then she couldn’t even stand that little bit—it wasn’t even criticism—but even the idea that it could be improved a bit. That’s an extreme case of what always happens with the inferior function with most people. They tyrannize their surroundings by being touchy, for all touchiness is a form of secret tyranny. Sensitive people are just tyrannical people—everybody else has to adapt to them instead of their trying to adapt to the others. But people who are well adapted still generally have a kind of childish, touchy spot where one cannot talk to them reasonably and one has to adopt “bush manners,” as if one were dealing with tigers and elephants.

The example concerning the paper written by a feeling type illustrates another general feature, namely a tremendous charge of emotion, which is generally connected with the manifestation of the inferior function. As soon as you get into this realm, people easily become emotional. Not only does this have the disadvantage which the above example illustrated, but there is also a very positive aspect, namely that in the realm of the inferior function there is a great concentration of life, so that as soon as the superior function is worn out—begins to rattle and lose oil like an old car—if people succeed in turning to their inferior function, they will rediscover a new potential of life. Everything in the realm of the inferior function becomes exciting, dramatic, full of positive and negative possibilities. There is great charge and the world is, as it were, rediscovered through the inferior function. But the disadvantage is that outside there is this unadapted aspect. That is why in the fairy tales which I mentioned before, the fool, the third son of the group of four royal people, is the one who can find the water of life, or the great treasure, for the inferior function brings a renewal of life, if one allows it to come up in its own realm. Many people discover relatively soon in life that the realm of their inferior function is where they are emotional, touchy, and unadapted, and they therefore acquire the habit of covering up this part of their personality with a surrogate, pseudo reaction. For instance, let us say a thinking type cannot express his feelings normally and in the appropriate manner at the right time. It can happen that he cries when he hears that a friend’s husband has died, but when he meets the widow, not a word of sympathy will come out. Such a person not only looks very cold but does not feel anything! He had all the feeling before, when at home, but now, in the appropriate situation, he cannot pull it out at the right moment. That’s why, for example, thinking types are very often looked on by other people as having no feelings, which is absolutely not true. It is not that they have no feelings but that they cannot express them at the appropriate moment. They have the feeling somehow and somewhere when it pleases the feeling, but not just when they ought to produce it. It is a great error also to think that feeling types cannot think. They think very well, and very often have deep, good, and genuine thoughts, unconventional thoughts, but the thoughts come and go as they like. For instance, it is very difficult for a feeling type to pull up his right kind of thinking during an exam. There he ought to think, but thinking just goes! As soon as he is at home, he can think again, but his thinking does not comply, is not amiable enough to come up at the right time, which makes the feeling type look as though he were utterly stupid. He is looked upon by society as being stupid because he cannot produce his thinking at will.

So a minimum adaptation of the inferior function is required. I, for instance, being a thinking type, could not just go to a funeral with my hands in my pockets, whistling, and saying: “Oh, I don’t care, I just don’t feel anything just now! I’m sorry, I’ll try again at home when I feel like it!” That excuse would not be accepted. Life has no mercy with the inferiority of the inferior function, which is why people produce a pseudo covering-up reaction. Because it is not their real reaction, they simply borrow a general form from the collective. That is why a feeling type, when pressed for thinking reactions, loves to serve up a lot of commonplace remarks or thoughts, which are not his real thoughts, but because he has to think quickly, and the real thought is not yet up to the level at which it could be expressed, he just makes a few commonplace remarks. It is very usual for feeling types to use material they have learned by heart, because something must be produced and the real thought is not yet there. The same is true for thinking types, who get into the habit of producing a kind of amiable, conventional feeling. They send flowers, bring chocolates, or use some very ordinary expression of feeling. For example, I have drawn up a type of letter of condolence with certain phrases which have struck me as being very nice and touching, and every time I write such a letter, I make a cocktail from those phrases. If I tried to express my real feelings, I would stick at such a letter for three days! The same applies to intuitives with their inferior sensation, for they simply have the habitual technical ways of dealing with it, borrowing help from the collective. One must therefore not be deceived by these pseudo adaptation reactions, but always look to see where the inferior function comes up in its own way, and not be deceived and think that someone has quite good thinking or feeling. You can always observe these covering-up reactions by the fact that they are impersonal and banal, and very collective stuff.

Another general problem connected with the inferior function is what one might call the hold which the superior function has on the inferior. When someone tries to meet his inferior function and has several times experienced emotional shock or pain in meeting real reactions, then the superior function at once says: “Ah, that is something, now we must organize that,” and then the superior function, like an eagle seizing a mouse, tries to get hold of the inferior function and bring it over into the realm of the main function. For example, I know a natural scientist, a very successful introverted thinking type. Somewhere in his fifties he became very bored with his professional work and began roaming about looking for other possibilities. His wife and family could have told him a lot about his inferior feeling, a field right under his nose where he could have started some experiments! He had several dreams of collecting beautiful, rare mountain flowers, which clearly showed what the unconscious was now aiming at. He had the typical inferior feeling of the thinking type, namely rare and very special feeling—like flowers in the mountains, for the flowers there have a much more intense color than those in the plains, which is also typical for the inferior feeling of a thinking type. He thought that was a good idea for a hobby and so made friends with a botanist and went for days and all through his holidays collecting mountain flowers, and any attempts made by other people at telling him that he could do something about his feeling always met with the reply that he had given up his main function and was doing something with his other side, that he was studying mountain flowers! Thus (a) he got stuck in the concretistic interpretation instead of taking the thing symbolically, and (b) he again made a sort of science of it, for he was concerned with knowledge of those flowers, so the main function was at it again and the inferior function once more was frustrated.

To take an irrational type: there is the intuitive who gets into a situation where he should use his inferior sensation. He becomes attracted by the idea of stone-cutting, or working with clay, or something of the kind, the sort of thing which very often helps inferior sensation to come up in an intuitive, for by such means he may get in touch with some kind of concrete material, with matter. Then he will perhaps model something in clay, say a very helpless-looking, childish statue of an animal, or something of the kind, and then he experiences something improving in himself, but immediately—like an eagle—intuition jumps onto it and says that “This is it, that’s what should be introduced into all the schools. . . .” And away he goes into his intuition again, into all the possibilities of clay modeling and what it could contribute to the education of humanity and what it would include, for from there one would have the key for the experience of the Godhead. You can see how the intuitive always brings in the whole world—everything is brought in, but the one thing that is not considered is the modeling of another figure! Just not that! The main function is on top again, having had this quickening and vivifying touch with the earth, off it goes, up into the air again.

The same thing happens with the feeling type who, when cornered by absolute necessity, sometimes produces a few thoughts, but then he quickly escapes this hot bath and never returns to it. But he has a lot of feeling judgment about what thinking is like and the use it has and so on, a number of evaluations instead of continuing his attempt to think. At once one skips out of it again, and then the superior function tries to get hold of the inferior function and to organize it in some way.

In fact it is absolutely impossible to pull up the fourth, inferior function, like a fisherman pulling up a fish with his rod, and all such attempts as, for instance, speeding it up or educating it so that it should come up at the right moment prove failures. One can try to force it to function in an exam, or in a situation in life, but this succeeds only to a certain extent and only by bringing in conventional, borrowed material. Then you can have a species of pseudo-adaptation with the three functions, but with the fourth function you cannot. It insists on remaining below because it is contaminated with the whole remainder of the unconscious and remains in that condition. Trying to fish up your inferior function would be like trying to bring up the whole of the collective unconscious, which is something you just cannot do. The fish will be too big for your rod, and if you catch it, what do you do? Do you cut it off again? If so, you regress! If you don’t give in, well, there is only one alternative—your fish will pull you into the water! So at this moment comes the great conflict, which means for the thinking type, for instance, the famous sacrificium intellectus—in religious language—or, for the feeling type, the sacrificium of his feeling, and having, as it were, the humility to go down with all your three other functions onto that lower level. This then produces a stage between the two layers, about at the level where everything is neither thinking nor feeling nor sensation nor intuition. Something new comes up, namely a completely different and new attitude toward life, in which you use all and none of your functions all the time.

Really getting in touch with the inferior function is something like an inner breakdown at a certain crucial point of one’s life, but it has the advantage that afterward some functions no longer tyrannize the ego nucleus, but are only used by it. If someone has really gone through this transformation, then he can sometimes think, if that is the appropriate reaction, or let intuition or sensation come into operation; but there is no longer any automatic possession by these functions. The ego can take one function up and put it down, like taking up a pencil or an eraser, according to the situation, but the ego dwells, as it were, in the awareness of its own reality outside the functional system. This breaking away from the system of the functions is achieved through the meeting with the inferior function, through which a shock is conveyed to the whole personality. One can therefore say that the inferior function is really the bridge to the experience of all the deeper layers of the unconscious. Going and staying with it, not just taking a quick hot bath in it and getting out as soon as possible, but staying in it for a long time, effects a radical change in the whole setup of the personality. That is why Jung again and again quotes an old saying of a legendary alchemist and author, Maria Prophetissa, which, translated into English, runs: “One becomes two, two becomes three, and out of the third comes the fourth as the one.” One becomes two, that is, you first assimilate your main function, then the first auxiliary. This means that first you have one function and then two, and after that you assimilate a third, and thus two becomes three. But the next step does not consist of just adding another unit—going on counting one, two, three, and then adding another unit, which would make four—but now a very complicated process begins: namely, “out of the third comes the fourth as the one,” for out of the third you move back toward the one, so that the one comes back as the fourth. Jung once told me, in a private conversation, that there is no fourth in the upper layer, but that it is just as shown in the following diagram.

Top: Field of naive ego consciousness with three functions

Middle: Middle field where the ego-Self relationship no longer functions autonomously but is only instrumental

Bottom: Preconscious totality with performed four functions

You can illustrate it in the following way: there are a mouse, a cat, a dog, and a lion. The first three animals you can get to make friends with you if you treat them well, but then comes the lion. It refuses to be added as the fourth but will eat up the others, so in the end there is only one animal left. That is what the inferior function does: when it comes up, it eats up all the rest of the personality, and that is why the fourth becomes the one, for it is no longer the fourth, there is only the one left—a total psychic life phenomenon, and no longer a function! Naturally that is a simile and just gives a kind of illustration.

There is another possibility, which is that the ego does not suffer the sacrificium of the main function as a sacrifice but childishly drops into the inferior function, but then there is no merit in the whole process, for then people suddenly give up their adaptedness and identify with the unadapted childish part of themselves, which is the inferior function. They try to force their surroundings to accept it, but that is not sacrificing the main function: just the opposite, it is letting the lion eat up the other three animals, which means you become childish and then you have the whole resistance in the outer world. Or, in the case of an extravert, you fade out of life and become a lonely fool. I remember, for instance, the case of an extraverted intuitive who, after a sudden breakdown in the middle of life, started to use his mystic, introverted sensation in painting. He retired from life and produced the most amazing, childish kind of lonely pictures and anonymously disappeared into this occupation. Nothing came of it because he avoided the crash of the transition; he simply threw one part away and snapped over into the other. It makes all the difference whether I just fall into my inferior function involuntarily or if I go through the whole process of suffering and then sacrifice the dominating aspect of the superior function. In the case of a sacrifice, the ego personality remains unharmed—it detaches from the functions and, in a way, can afterward use them as an instrument and put them aside again. But if you snap into the inferior function, then the former ego goes with it. It becomes identical with the inferior childish side, begins to be completely unadapted, and then, naturally, such people normally build up some kind of persecution complex because everyone is so hostile to them. They never understand why everything goes wrong, but think it must be somebody else’s fault somewhere—either the Jesuits or the Communists! That is because they fell down into the fourth instead of going through the process described by Maria Prophetissa—one becomes two, two becomes three, and out of the third comes the fourth as the one.

There is a new kind of personality who has detached his ego awareness or his ego consciousness from identifying with all four functions. The nearest possible example, and a very convincing one, is found in some descriptions of the behavior of Zen Buddhist masters, where it is said that the door of the inner house is closed, but the master meets everybody and every situation and everything in the usual manner. He continues in everyday life, right in it, absolutely participating in it in a normal way: if people come to be taught, he will teach them with feeling; if a difficult problem is put before him, he can think about it; if it is the moment to eat, he will eat, and if it is the moment to sleep, he will sleep. So he uses his sensation function in the right way, and when it is a question of seeing in a flash of intuition through the other person or the situation, he will do that, so that his intuition functions. However, he will not be inwardly identical with any of these situations, he will not be tied to one of them any longer, and he will also not be tied, not only to the situation, but to his own ego functions meeting the situation. He will have lost a certain kind of childish eagerness to meet things. If you present people who are still identical with their thinking with a thinking problem, they go right into it, which is even necessary, because if they do not learn to be right in it, they will never learn to think properly and appropriately. But afterward, if you present them with a thinking problem, they remain inwardly outside it. Though they apply their thinking to the problem, they can stop thinking from one minute to another without having to continue it. Most people, when they have set themselves a problem, cannot stop thinking about it, which shows that they are possessed by their train of thought. For example, there is the absent-minded professor who even at luncheon is still thinking over his mathematical formula; he cannot stop, which shows that thinking has him. It is difficult to bring examples because there are very few people who have reached that stage, but there are very good descriptions of being detached from one’s own conscious functions in certain Zen Buddhist examples.

Naturally there are also differences. We have no monastic discipline, but have to develop our inferior function within everyday life. But I think that our way of trying to approach the problem of the inferior function also imposes some kind of discipline on all individuals, which has an analogy in the monastic life, not only in the East but also in the West: for instance, remaining with a difficulty for a long time, giving up other occupations in order to have enough time and energy for this main problem, practicing a kind of asceticism. But the monastic life, whether in the East or in the West, is a collectively organized affair. You have to get up at a certain time, do certain work, obey the abbot, and so on, in contrast to which the discipline that comes upon an individual within the process of individuation is imposed purely from within. There are no outer rules, and therefore the development is much more individual. That means that if you let it happen spontaneously instead of forcing people from outside into organized discipline, then you will see that the discipline is completely different from person to person.

For a while I analyzed two men who were friends; one was an introverted thinking type and the other an extraverted feeling type. The extravert’s discipline was very severe, for even if he drank a glass of wine, or stayed at a dinner party half an hour too long, he had the most awful dreams. Sometimes both would receive invitations, and the introvert would say that he had no time, but promptly dreamed that he had to go to the party, while his friend, who had received the same invitation, the same night had a dream (naturally he had already decided on his costume and knew which lady he would invite to come with him) telling him he should not go! No party, stay at home! It was really amusing to see how it was just as great an agony for the introvert to go to a party as it was sad for the other poor chap to stay away! Sometimes they would exchange notes and say, “Isn’t it really nasty! Now I would like to go and may not, and you hate going but your dreams say to go!” So there is a kind of discipline, but it is invisible and very precisely adjusted. That is the advantage of our way of dealing with the problem, because you get your very appropriate private monastic discipline or military service—invisible to the outer world, but very disagreeable.

That is why there are a great many people who from time to time experience the problem of the inferior function as one of getting into the hot bath and then snapping out of it again. Then they more or less go on with their three functions, constantly slightly uncomfortable on account of the nonintegrated fourth. When that gets too bad they dive in a bit, but as soon as they feel better, they get out again, and, on principle, they remain in their trinitarian world, where the fourth is the devil who remains in a corner of their life. Now, we saw how much this has to do with even the image of God being trinitarian or quaternary because, in my experience, people who stick in this kind of phase are the people who never quite understand what Jung means by the whole problem of the fourth, and they never quite understand what individuation really means. They remain, so to speak, with little visits to the other land—in the conventional former world of identifying with one’s own consciousness. Many, many people, even those who have undergone a Jungian analysis, do not get further than those kinds of visits into the fourth realm and hopping out of it again and then talking about it to others—not really trying to stay in it, because that is hellishly difficult to achieve.

As long as you do not really get into this stage there remains, so to speak, what I call the devil in the corner and the difficulty of that is that, personally spoken, this is only the personal devil, the personal inferiority of an individual, but with it really also comes in the whole collective evil as well. That means that the little open door of each individual’s infe-nor function is what contributes to the sum of the big collective evil in the world. You could, for instance, observe that very easily in Germany when the devil slowly took over the situation in the Nazi movement. Every German I knew at that time who fell for Nazism did so on account of his inferior function. The feeling type got caught by the stupid arguments of the party doctrine. The intuitive type got caught by his dependence on money—he could not give up his job and did not see how he could deal with the money problem, so he had to stay in it in spite of the fact that he did not agree. And so on. The inferior function was in each personal realm the door where some of the collective evil could accumulate. Or, one could say that each one who had not worked on his inferior function contributed to this general disaster—in a small way—but the sum of millions of inferior functions constitutes an enormous devil! Propaganda against the Jews was very cleverly made up in that respect. For example, the Jews were insulted as being destructive intellectuals, which completely convinced all the feeling types—a projection of their inferior thinking. Or they were accused of being reckless moneymakers, and that completely convinced the intuitive, for they represented his inferior sensation and now one knew where the devil was, and so on. Thus, propaganda used the ordinary suspicions which people usually had against others on account of their inferior function. So one can say that behind each individual the fourth function is not identical with the collective principle of evil, but is just a little deficiency; yet the sum of these is really responsible for a tremendous amount of trouble.

In that way the process of individuation is an ethical problem, and someone without any morality gets stuck right at the beginning and gets nowhere, if that cannot be changed. But the word perfection is not appropriate; that is a Christian ideal which does not quite coincide with our experience of the process of individuation. Jung stresses that the process seems to tend not toward perfection but toward completeness. This means that you have to come down, and that means a relative lowering of the level of the personality so that this lower level may not remain quite as dark as it was before. If you are in the middle, the one side is not as dark and the other not quite as bright, and there is more a tendency to constitute a kind of completeness which is neither too light nor too dark. But one has to sacrifice a certain amount of striving for perfection in order to avoid building up too black a counterposition.

So there is a social obligation to work on one’s fourth function because it makes one a less dangerous individual, and the sum of dangerously split individuals is what gives rise to wars and social explosions. Propaganda always tries to arouse this.

Someone practicing a low type of propaganda would know that it is not by reasonable talk that one gets the masses, but by arousing emotion, and emotion can be aroused in everyone at the same time if you bring up the inferior function, because that is the emotional function. Therefore, if you speak to intellectuals, you must arouse primitive feelings! For instance, if you speak to university professors, you must not use scientific language because in that field their minds are clear and they will see through all the snares in your speech if you want to get a lie across, but if you substantiate your lie with a lot of feeling and emotion—since university professors will on the average have inferior feeling—they will fall for that at once. Hitler had the art of doing this. If you read the records of his speeches, you will see that he talked quite differently to the different groups which he addressed, and he knew very well how to wake up the inferior function. A man who had been present at several of his speeches told me that Hitler did it through his intuition, or his own feeling into the situation. At times, Hitler would, at first, be quite uncertain. He would try out his themes like a pianist, mentioning a little of this and a little of that, and he would be pale and nervous, and his SS men would get all worked up because the Fiihrer did not seem to be in form. But he was just trying out the ground, and then he would notice that if he brought up some particular theme, that would arouse emotion, so then he would just go full tilt for that! That’s the demagogue! When he feels that inferior side, he knows that the complexes are there and that is what to go for, and one must argue in a primitive emotional way, the way in which the inferior function would argue. Hitler did not think that out, it was the fact that he was caught in his own inferiority which gave him that talent, but such examples are not all in the past! Naturally, emotion and feeling are not always coupled. They are connected in a thinking type. You have a very good example in the national differences between French and German. The German language has many words for feeling which are confused with emotion, while the French word for feeling, sentiment, conveys nothing of emotion, not a shade of it, because in general the French, as a nation, have more differentiated feeling, so to them it is not emotional. That is why the French always make fun of German feelings—they say: “Oh, the Germans, with their heavy feeling—beer and singing and ‘O Heimatland,’ all that sentimental stuff.” But a Frenchman has sentiment, a clear-cut thing with no wishy-washiness about it. There you have an example of the feeling type condemning the inferior feeling of a nation whose superiority is not in feeling. The Germans think much better, but their feeling is rather primitive, warm and full of the atmosphere of the stable, but also full of explosives! But that is a typical instance of inferior feeling.

With a tremendous amount of devotion and training, one can build up islands where the inferior function more or less functions quite well. But even in those cases, if you get disturbed by an unconscious complex, it will happen that the devil will get you into a car accident. For instance, if an intuitive is really good at driving cars, on the one day he is dissociated and out of himself, it will be more than likely that something will happen to him in this area than it would be to another type, because even in such a case it remains that door which is not quite shut against the other impulses of the collective unconscious. But in everyday ways, one can get one’s inferior function to work in certain areas quite well—with a tremendous amount of effort. This is a problem which is much greater in civilized societies.

With people who still live completely in nature, such as peasants and hunters and the Bushmen of whom Laurens van der Post wrote, there you can say that in that kind of life, one would not survive unless one used all one’s functions, more or less. For example, a peasant can never become as one-sided as some town dwellers. He cannot only be an intuitive; he simply has to use his sensation. But he cannot only use that, because he has to plan the farming: when the sowing must be done and which kind of carrot or wheat must be grown, and how much, and what the prices are, for otherwise nowadays he would be ruined at once. He has also to use a certain amount of feeling, because you cannot deal with your family or animals without it, and he has to have that certain smell for the weather and the future in general—what might happen or not—for otherwise he is always in trouble. So in natural situations things are more or less arranged so that one must to a certain extent use all the functions. That is why people who live under natural conditions rarely become as one-sided as town people. Among primitive tribes and such people, you can see that they generally distribute the functions. For instance, my peasant neighbor always asks the fisherman who lives with him what the weather will be. He says he does not know how the fisherman knows, but he just does, so he himself does not bother, for the fisherman is always right. He relies on that man’s intuition and does not use his own in that case, so even there people tend to push off certain functions onto others who are specialists. But they cannot do it completely as town specialists do. If, for example, you are a bachelor and work as a statistician for yourself alone, you really need practically no feeling! That, naturally, has its disagreeable consequences, but in nature you could not do that.

PRACTICAL DESCRIPTION OF THE FOURTH FUNCTION

The Inferior Intuition of the Extraverted Sensation Type

This is the end of my general outline on the problem of the inferior function. The next step will be to give you a short description of what the inferior function of each type looks like in practical life so that you can connect it with experience in your own life. I should like to start with the intuition of the extraverted sensation type. I am not going to describe the extraverted sensation type, but only how inferior intuition operates in such a type. I shall concentrate on the theme of what his inferior intuition will do in his case, and I shall go through all the possible eight types in this way. But I cannot avoid first giving you a brief sketch of the type in general and then will turn to what in this setup the inferior function does.

The extraverted sensation type is represented in someone whose gift and specialized function is to sense and relate to outer objects in a concrete and practical way. Such people observe everything, smell everything, and on entering a room know practically at once how many people are present. You can always ask them whether Mrs. So-and-So was there and what dress she had on. If you put such a question to an intuitive, he would say he had not noticed and had no idea, and what did she have on? It is amazing what people normally do not see! The sensation type is, relatively, a past master at noticing such things. There is the famous story of a professor of jurisprudence who tried to demonstrate to his students the unreliability of witnesses. He had two people come into the classroom at the university and exchange a few sentences and then begin to fight each other. He stopped them and then said, “Now, ladies and gentlemen, please write down exactly what you witnessed.” It then turned out that the whole quarrel had been staged, so that the professor had an exact record of what was said. But practically nobody was capable of giving an exact and objective account of what had happened. They all missed certain points. Based on this staged incident, the professor tried to show his students that they should not rely on eyewitnesses too much. This story illustrates the tremendous individual relativity of sensation: some are more and others less gifted in it. I would say that the extraverted sensation type would score highest in this field and would probably miss fewest points and give the relatively best account of the scene, while the introverted intuitive would probably just remember a few sentences and that he had seen blows exchanged, but would not know who started it all or anything else.

The extraverted sensation type is the best photographic apparatus, as it were. He can quickly and objectively relate to outer facts, which is why you find this type among the good mountaineers, engineers, business people, and so on, all of whom have a wide and accurate awareness of outer reality in all its differentiations. This type will remark on the texture of things—whether silk or wool—for he will have feeling for the material; thus aesthetical good taste is generally also present. Jung says that such people very often give an outer impression of being rather soulless. You may all have met such a soulless engineer type, where one has the feeling that the man is absolutely dedicated to engines and their oils and so on and sees everything from that angle. He produces no feeling and does not seem to think much either, and intuition is completely lacking, for that is for him just the realm of crazy fantasy. The extraverted sensation type calls everything approaching intuition mad fantasy, completely idiotic imagination, and something that has nothing to do with reality. He can even dislike thought, for if he is very one-sided, he will call that always getting into the abstract instead of keeping with the facts.

I had such an extraverted sensation type as a teacher in natural sciences. You could never put a general theoretical question to him, for he would call that getting off into abstract thinking and would say that one must keep to the facts—look at the worm and see what it looks like and then draw it, or look in the microscope and describe what you see there. That is natural science, and all the rest is fantasy and theory and nonsense. He was very good at explaining how factories make certain chemical products, and I still know the Haber-Bosch process by heart, for he hammered it into me, but when it came to the general theory of the interrelation of elements and so on, he did not teach us much. He said that that was still uncertain in science and that it was a theory which changed every year and was in constant evolution. So he skipped that side of the work. Everything which might have been a hunch or a guess, or anything intuitive, appears in a type where sensation is differentiated in an unpleasant form. That is, if this man had intuitions at all, they would be of a suspicious or grotesque kind. For example, he once in quite an amazing way ventured into graphology, and one day I brought him a letter written by my mother excusing me for not having been able to come to the course because I had had flu. He looked at the writing and said, “Did your mother write that?” I said yes, and he said, “Poor child!” He only sensed the negative! He was like that. He would get suspicious fits about his colleagues and the children in his class. You could see that he had some kind of dark intuition of something murky, for his intuition, being inferior, was like a dog sniffing in the garbage pails and such places—he was interested in dirty linen. This inferior kind of intuition was very often right, but sometimes completely wrong! Sometimes he just had persecution ideas—dark suspicions without any foundation. A type who is so accurate on the factual level can suddenly get melancholy, suspicious premonitions, ideas of dark possibilities, and one does not know how these suddenly cropped up. That is how inferior intuition came up in his case. Now, because he was an extraverted sensation type, his intuitions were more on an introverted level. That remark, “Poor child,” was by chance turned toward an outer object, namely to me and my mother’s handwriting, but normally, in the case of the extraverted sensation type, inferior intuition circles around the subjective position of the sensation type, very often in dark feelings or hunches or premonitions about illnesses which he might get or other misfortunes which might befall him. That means the inferior intuition is, in general, egocentric, it is turned toward the subject but with an egocentric quality in it, and it often has this kind of negative, depreciative attitude. If you get such people nicely drunk or very tired, or know them intimately so that they come out with their other side, then if they produce intuitions, they can produce the most amazing, weird, eerie ghost stories.

I knew a woman who was one of the biggest mountaineers in Switzerland. She was obviously an extraverted sensation type, and only concrete facts counted and everything was due to natural causes, of course. She could climb alone all the four thousand mountains, not only in Switzerland but in the whole range of the Alps—the French, the Savoyan, and the Austrian also. But in the dark evenings in the hut afterward, with a good fire burning, she would switch over and tell you the most eerie, horrible ghost stories of the type you would normally hear among the shepherds and peasants. It was quite wonderful to see this primitive, weird fantasy coming out of her. The next morning when she put on her boots, she would laugh it all off and say that was all nonsense! For then she would snap back into her superior function and laugh about what she had said the evening before. The same was true for the man I mentioned earlier, for at school excursions he would suddenly switch over and tell you extraordinary, fantastic events that he apparently had experienced. It is always a kind of personal experience, a personal event, aimed at the person himself, which shows the introversion of the intuition; what such a person intuits in such a situation is part of his personal problem and situation.

Another aspect of inferior intuition in an extraverted sensation type is a sudden attraction for Anthroposophy, Theosophy, or some other cocktail of Eastern metaphysics, generally of a most otherworldly and metaphysical type. Suddenly very realistic engineers and people who you would think are the most unlikely persons would join such a movement and with a completely uncritical mind get quite lost in it. That is because their inferior intuition has such an archaic character. On their writing desks, to your great amazement you will find mystical writings, but of a rather second-class quality. If you ask them if they read that, they will say that it is just nonsense but that it helps them to go to sleep—that is when the main function still denies the inferior function! If, for example, you ask the Anthroposophists at Dornach who supplied the money for their buildings, you will find that it came from just such extraverted sensation people. As a whole, you can say that the American nation, for instance, has a very great number of extraverted sensation types, which is why, on the other hand, such strange movements flourish especially well in the United States, to a much greater extent than in Switzerland, for example. In Los Angeles you can find practically every kind of fantastic sect, and you are told a host of unrealistic stories of a rather dubious character.

I remember once analyzing such a type, and during the day, in the middle of another hour, I suddenly had a telephone call from him. The man was sobbing over the telephone and said he was overwhelmed: “It happened—I cannot tell you, I am in danger!” Now, this was not a hysterical person, and he had no latent psychosis or anything of the kind, so you would never expect him to behave in this way. I was absolutely astonished and asked him if he would be able to go to the station and buy a ticket and come to Zurich—he was living in another Swiss town. He said he thought he could manage, so I told him to come. By the time he arrived he had snapped back into his superior sensation and brought me a basket of cherries, which we cheerfully ate together. I said: “And now what?” But he could not even tell me! Because by getting to the station and buying the cherries, he had gotten back onto the upper level again. He had been attacked for a minute from the other level, and the only thing I got out of him was when he said: “For a minute I knew what God was! It is as if I realized God! And it shook me so much that I thought I would go mad, and now it is gone again. I remember it, but I cannot convey it anymore, and I am no longer in it.” There, via the inferior function, intuition, he suddenly had the whole collective unconscious and the Self, and everything. For a minute—like a flash—it all came up and completely shook the upper part of his personality, but he could not hold it. That was the first beginning of the coming up of inferior intuition, which shows its tremendously creative and positive, as well as its dangerous, aspect. Intuition has that quality of conveying a tremendous amount of meaningful contents simultaneously. You see the whole thing in one minute, in one second, and that had come up for a minute—and then it went again. There he was, munching cherries, back in his rather flat, ordinary, extraverted sensation world. That would be an example of the first genuine appearance of inferior intuition in such a type.

Then comes the great danger from what I call the grip of the superior upon the inferior function. I knew an extraverted sensation type, a very efficient builder and good businessman—a parvenu—who had made a tremendous amount of money. He was very practical but built horrible houses. Only the gadgets in them were perfect, so that people liked to live there, even though from an artistic point of view the houses were awful. He was a good skier, dressed very well, admired women, and had the kind of refined sensuality which an extraverted sensation type can display, with good taste in food and so on. This man fell into the hands of an intuitive woman twenty years older than himself. She was a wild, fantastic mother figure, and enormously fat, which in her case represented lack of discipline; introverted intuitive types are often terribly immoderate and exceed their reasonable limits both physically and psychically, which has to do with their inferior sensation. This woman lived only in her fantasies and was absolutely incapable of supporting herself financially, so it was the typical union where the man provided the money and looked after the practical side of life and the woman the whole fantasy aspect. I once went skiing with him, but never again—I was bored to tears! The only thing which he might have talked about in an interesting way was his business, but he did not talk of that to women, and otherwise he had nothing to say except that the sun was nice and the food not bad! To my great surprise, this man invited me to the Anthroposophs at Dornach to see a play. The theater called the Goetheanum was his other “spiritual” mother and held a great attraction for him. He was absolutely gripped by the play, so moved that he was completely knocked out. I watched him from time to time and wondered what was the matter with the man, for he was completely carried away. Afterward I was tactless enough to say that the play was too high up for me and that what I was longing for was a good steak! He was shocked out of his wits by my materialism! I was only about eighteen at the time and would be wiser now and not make such remarks. But that was how this type of inferior intuition worked. On the one side it was projected onto this woman and on the other side there was Dornach. He tried to break with the woman, having realized the mother-son relationship, and hoped to park his inferior intuition in Dornach instead. That was certainly a step forward from just having it projected onto a mother figure, for at least it was an attempt to assimilate it on an inner level, which was why my remark was so especially tactless. How the attempt worked out I have no idea, for I lost contact with him, but one should never make depreciative or hurtful remarks if people come out with their inferior function.

Another example of inferior introverted intuition, but this time really inferior, illustrates the disgusting form and desperate abyss into which the inferior function can lead. Recently, in an American science fiction publication, I read the story of a man who invented an apparatus by which people could be dematerialized and then rematerialized. With it the operator could be in one place and could send electronic waves through space which would rematerialize people at the other end. He could, for instance, be in Zurich and then materialize in New York. By means of such an apparatus it would be possible to dispense with airplanes, ships, and the like. First he experimented with ashtrays, but that did not quite work, and then later with a fly. A few mistakes occurred at the beginning, but after the adjustment of a few wires it seemed to work with the fly. In case anything went wrong, he wanted to be the first victim, so he put himself into the apparatus. Unfortunately, the experiment got stuck on the way and he came out at the other end with the enormous head of a fly! He tried to contact his wife and, covering up his head with a cloth so that she could not see it, told her that she must try to free him, and gave her various instructions, but nothing worked. Finally, in desperation, he asked her to kill him, out of kindness to him, which she did. Afterward the story just becomes one of the usual criminal type. When he is dead and buried, the woman goes mad and gets put into an asylum, but then the fly is found, so that it might have come right after all, but it is too late. The prosecution, out of pity, has the fly put into a matchbox, which is sentimentally deposited on the tomb, and an inscription states that the deceased was “a hero and a victim of science.” I have spared you most of the disgusting and perverse details in the story, which are expounded with great gusto.

There you see how inferior intuition takes shape in a sensation type. Since the story is written by a sensation type, it gets disguised as completely practical sensation. The fly would represent inferior intuition which gets mixed up with the conscious personality. A fly is a devilish insect. In general, flies represent involuntary fantasies and thoughts which annoy one and buzz around in one’s head and which one cannot chase away. Here, this man gets caught and victimized by an idea which involves even murder and madness, since he induces his wife to murder him. In order to save her life she is put into a lunatic asylum where she spends her time trying to catch flies, hoping to find the one which might be a part of her husband. At the end of the story the commissioner of police talks to the author and says that the woman was, after all, just mad, and one sees that he would represent collective common sense—the verdict finally adopted by the writer, which says that all this is just madness.

If, instead of projecting again, the writer had established the continuity of his inferior function in his consciousness, and had got it free from his extraverted sensation, then a really pure and clean story would have come out. In genuine fantasies such as those of Edgar Allan Poe and the poet Gustav Meyrinck intuition is established in its own right, for these fantasies are highly symbolic and can be interpreted in a consistent way. But a sensation type always wants to concretize his intuitions in some way.

The Inferior Intuition of the Introverted Sensation Type

First I must discuss the main function of the introverted sensation type. Many years ago, in the Psychological Club, we had a meeting at which members were asked to describe their type in their own words, instead of just quoting Jung’s book on the types. Members were to describe how they experienced their own superior function, and I have never forgotten an excellent paper which Emma Jung gave, for it was only after hearing it that I felt that I now understood the introverted sensation type better than I ever had done before. In describing herself, she said that the introverted sensation type is like a highly sensitized photographic plate. When somebody comes into the room, such a type notices the way the person comes in, the hair, the expression on the face, the clothes, and the way that person walks. All this makes a very accurate and tremendous impact on the introverted sensation type, who is so highly sensitized that every detail is absorbed. The impression comes from the object to the subject. It is as though a stone fell into deep water: the impression falls deeper and deeper and sinks in. Outwardly, the introverted sensation type looks utterly stupid. He just sits and stares, and you do not know what is going on within him, for he looks like a piece of wood with no reaction at all—unless he reacts with one of the auxiliary functions, thinking or feeling; but inwardly the impression is being absorbed.

The introverted sensation type therefore gives the impression of being very slow, which is not the case; it is only that the quick inner reactions go on underneath and the outer reaction comes in a delayed way. These are the people who, if told a joke in the morning, will probably laugh at it at midnight. The type is very often misjudged and misunderstood by others in their surroundings because one does not realize what goes on within. If such a type can express his photographic impressions artistically, then they can be reproduced either in paintings or in writing. I have a strong suspicion that Thomas Mann was such an introverted sensation type. He can describe marvelously every detail and give the whole atmosphere of a room or personality, as, for instance, in The Magic Mountain.

The inferior intuition of this introverted type is in a way similar to that of the extraverted sensation type, for it also has a very weird, eerie, fantastic inner life, but it is more concerned with the impersonal, collective outer world. With the builder I mentioned, for example, you can see that he is an extraverted sensation type. He picks up intuitions that concern himself. In his extraverted sensation he is concerned with the collective outer world—with road building, or the building of big houses, but his intuition is applied to himself and is mixed up with his personal problems. With the introverted sensation type, the movement from the object comes toward him. The novels by Thomas Mann have a very subjective character, while his intuition is concerned with events which go on in the background—he picks up the possibilities and the future of the outer world.

I have just seen in the material of an introverted sensation type material which I would call very prophetic—archetypal fantasies which mainly represent not the problems of the dreamer but those of his time. The assimilation of these fantasies is very difficult because there is the same difficulty as with the extraverted sensation type, namely that sensation is a function with which we comprehend the here and now. The negative aspect of sensation is that the type gets stuck in reality. As Jung once wrote: for them the future does not exist, future possibilities do not exist, they are in the here and now, and there is an iron curtain before them. They behave in life as though it will always be the same as it is now; they are incapable of conceiving that things might change. The disadvantage of the type is that when his tremendous inner fantasies well up, the person has great difficulty in assimilating them because of the accuracy and slowness of the conscious function. If such a type is at all willing to take his intuition seriously, he will be inclined to try to put it down very accurately. But how can you do that? Intuition comes like a flash, and if you try to put it down, it has gone! So he does not know how to deal with the problem and goes through agonies because the only way his inferior function can be assimilated is by loosening the hold of the superior function.

I knew an introverted sensation type who for many years had very accurately painted the contents of her unconscious. It took her about three weeks to complete a painting. The paintings were absolutely beautiful and worked out in every detail, but, as I heard from her later, she did not paint the contents of her unconscious as they came, but corrected and improved the colors and refined the details. She would say, “I naturally improved them aesthetically.” Slowly the need to assimilate the inferior function became imperative, and she was told by her dreams that she should speed up her paintings and take the colors exactly as they were, however crude, and just put them on paper quickly. When I translated the message of her dreams in this way, she got into a panic and said she could not, it was impossible. To have this put to her was like being knocked out; she could not do it but continued to paint in her usual way. Japanese Zen paintings can give the essence of an image from within, which would be the opposite of this woman’s work. She did not get the accuracy from within and could not do what her dreams indicated and had a tremendous battle, for she could not give up the superior function and accurate detail. So again and again she missed the coming up of the inferior intuition for she could not put it down when and as it came.

That is how the fight looks between the superior and inferior function in the introverted sensation type. If you try to force them to assimilate intuition too quickly, they get symptoms of giddiness or seasickness. It is rather like being on the sea or in an airplane; they feel carried away from the solid ground of reality, and because they are so stuck there, they get actual symptoms of seasickness, or get giddy from a purely psychological background. I knew one introverted sensation type who had to go to bed to do active imagination, for otherwise she felt exactly as if she were on a boat and became seasick. She felt as if the solid ground were dissolving under her feet. Naturally, if you are not that type, you are rather amused, but again here there is the possibility of the superior function getting hold of the inferior. A marvelous example is the Swiss painter Heinrich Füssli, who became famous in the last century and went to the English court. He was obviously an extraverted sensation type, and his inferior function came up in the most fantastic themes. He painted a wonderful picture of Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream—this light and fantastic fairy tale. The theme attracted him because it was completely fantastic, but instead of painting it as it would have come up from within, he made a minute study of it and fixed and glued his intuition into a very sensuous form. In the picture Titania is waking up and looking at the ass with whom she is in love and she just looks amazed! The fairies and witches and her lover are all there watching her. It is a beautiful picture but painted in such a classic way, with so much detail of flesh and garments, and even with every hair painted in on the ass’s head, so that the picture loses just the atmosphere it should convey, namely that of the dream world. Thus, in a way, it fails completely, and Füssli, in spite of his gifts, never quite became a really famous painter. The picture shows how he ruined his own chances by not giving up his superior function. He should have painted quickly with all the vagueness of a dream world, but instead he fell into his superior function and made a painting, putting in the toenails of every figure and so on, so that the picture became frozen and lost its dynamic character.

Because the introverted sensation type’s superior function is introverted, his intuition is extraverted and therefore is generally triggered off by outer events. Such a type might, while walking down a street, see a crystal in a shop window, for instance, and his intuition might immediately get its symbolic meaning, or the whole flood of the symbolic meaning of the crystal would come into his mind, but that would have been triggered off by the outside event, since his inferior intuition is essentially extraverted. Naturally, he has the same bad characteristics as the extraverted sensation type, for in both types intuitions are very often of a sinister character, with dark premonitions—that an atomic war will soon break out, that people around them will die of cancer, and they also pick up negative gossip. The fantasy material tends to be of a sinister character and if it is not worked upon, the prophetic contents which break through will be pessimistic and negative.

All split-off inferior functions have a tendency to be compulsive and create persecution ideas. You find that also in the thinking type, for instance. The inferior function is always the vehicle for persecution ideas, so always first watch out for it. If intuition goes astray, one is possessed by sensual fantasies of the most coarse and sexual type, like a rat sniffing around in dustbins. Always, when people feel undermined and persecuted, it is likely that the inferior function has gone underground and is persecuting and undermining the superior function, for the former is always the door by which such dark things come in. Intuitives are bottled up with coarse sensation fantasies too, because they neglect sensation so much. But when the hunches or intuitions of the sensation type appear, they give this dark feeling of something impending somewhere and are therefore colored with fear. But one must be careful because only the event can show whether a prophecy was right or not. Premonitions of an atomic war cannot be said to be incorrect and just inferior intuition; they might be right! Only by looking backward in history can you see if they were wrong and just negative intuition. The prophets in the Bible became immortal just because they were right, so they were probably not sensation types but genuinely intuitives with relatively correct intuitions. In the sensation type, intuition can be absolutely right or wrong. I cannot tell you how often in my life I have been rung up by sensation types who “knew” that Jung was dying or dead, or that So-and-So had gone into the hospital, or was hopelessly ill, when there was nothing of the kind!

What is worse about negative intuition is that it sometimes does hit the nail right on the head. Jung says intuition is anyhow a problematic function because it gets right to the core of the situation. It either hits the bull’s eye, or goes absolutely astray, right outside even the realm of the target. In general, when intuition is the main function and one of the other functions—either thinking or feeling—has been developed, the person has an intuition that it might be either the bull’s eye or off in the woods, and therefore he holds back. But inferior intuition is just primitive, and it either hits the bull’s eye or goes extremely wide of the mark. And the sensation type sometimes surprises you by hitting the bull’s eye, which you can only admire, or else with hunches in which there is no truth—just pure invention! The type has sudden inner intuitions, and the great difficulty for him is to know how to deal with them, for they may be complete nonsense or absolutely right.

The Inferior Feeling of the Extraverted Thinking Type

The conscious personality being extraverted, I will try to describe the way in which inferior introverted feeling works. The type is to be found among organizers, people in offices and government positions, in business, in law—many good lawyers are of the extraverted thinking type—and among scientists, when they are the type who organize scientific investigations where they can build up teamwork. They can also compile useful encyclopedias. They dig up all the dust in old libraries and do away with inhibiting factors in science due to clumsiness or laziness or a lack of clarity in language, and the confusions which arise from having a different terminology. The extraverted thinking type brings order here by taking a definite stand and saying, “If we say so-and-so, we mean so-and-so,” or “If we mean that, we mean that,” and so on. They put clarifying order into the outer object, the outer situation. It is a rational function, and as its direction is outward, it is an activity which tends to establish logical order. At a business meeting, such a man will say that one should get at the basic facts and see how to proceed. A lawyer who has to listen to all the chaotic reports of contending parties is able, with his superior mind, to see which are the real conflicts and which the pseudo contentions and then arrange a solution satisfactory to all parties. The type has a great faculty in this way and is socially creative. They can cut through with creative clarity of mind and bring things into acceptable order. The emphasis will always be upon the object, not the idea. Such a lawyer will not fight for the idea of democracy or domestic peace or anything of that kind. His whole mind will be absorbed with and swallowed up by the outer objective situation. If you were to ask him about his attitude or ideas about something, he would be absolutely amazed, for he is not concerned with that and would be completely unconscious of any personal motive. Generally, if you search for them, the unconscious motivations will consist of a childlike, naive belief in peace, charity, and justice. If pressed into saying what he understood by “justice,” he would be quite bewildered and would probably throw you out of his office, because he was “too busy,” so the subjective element remains in the background of the personality. He never thinks about what he understands; he fights for justice but never considers what he understands by justice! His premises of high ideals remain within the realm of his inferior function, which is feeling. For his ideals he will have a strange mystical feeling attachment which he will not show, and you would have to drive him into a corner to find out about it. Feeling attachments to certain ideals or to people are present, but never appear in daytime activities. Such a man might spend his whole life in settling problems, in reorganizing firms, or in situations where there was a necessity for putting things clearly, and only at the end of his life would he start to ask himself mournfully what he had really lived for. And then he falls into his inferior function. Hitherto everything has made demands on his main function; he has never considered what he lived for, for the dark background has remained unclear.

I once talked to a man of this type who was terribly overworked and needed a good holiday. He gave me a lot of good advice, saying I should go on a holiday, and when I asked him why he didn’t, he replied, “My God, I should be much too much alone and get much too melancholy!” Such a person will ask himself whether his work is really important. He may remember how he once saved someone from being robbed and so on, but had the world improved? Such feelings would have come up in him, and he would have felt like falling into an abyss. He would have had to recheck his whole evaluation of things. Naturally, therefore, he avoided taking any holidays—until he fell and broke his hip and had to stay six months in bed—and that is how nature imposes the inferior function on such people!

The extraverted thinking type has, in a hidden way, a kind of mystical, loyal feeling attachment to ideals and often also to people, but this deep, strong, warm feeling hardly ever comes out, but is entirely hidden. I remember an extraverted thinking type who really moved me when he once came out with his feeling for his wife. Its genuineness, depth, and warmth were really touching, but when I talked to his wife, it was deplorable to see how very little idea she had of that, because as a mad extravert, he would spend the whole day in his profession, milling around in life, and those deep feelings were never expressed. If his wife had been dying of consumption he would not have noticed it until he was at the funeral and it was too late, and she did not realize the depth of his feeling for her and that, in a very deep sense, he was very loyal and faithful to her, for all that was deeply hidden and not expressed in his life; it remained inside and was introverted and did not move toward the object. It took quite a few talks to get a better understanding in the marriage and make the wife realize that her husband really loved her. He was so terribly occupied with the outer world and his feeling was hidden and neither expressed nor accepted in his life, so that his wife did not realize it, though actually it played a tremendous hidden role within him.

I remember the dream of the approaching transference of an extraverted thinking type. He dreamed that while he was coming to me (he was a foreigner), an old coachman with an old coach and four horses had also left the town where he lived and was slowly moving toward Zurich, but had not yet arrived. This man had come to analysis for all sorts of outer reasons—to learn about Jungian psychology, etc.—but his feeling was also on the way, but it had only come a few kilometers, and I teased him by asking when his coachman was going to arrive! If people can begin to laugh about their inferior function, that can be redeeming, for then everything is twenty times better. When a sense of humor is established and you can pull the other person’s leg, as they can pull yours, a lot of trouble is cleared away, which is why I mentioned the archetype of the fool at the beginning of this chapter. This man had a sense of humor and was able to laugh about his coachman.

Introverted feeling, even if the main function, is very difficult to understand. A very good example is the Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke, a feeling intuitive type, who wrote: “Ich liebe dich, was geht’s dich an?” (“I love you, but it’s none of your business!”) That is just love for love’s sake! The feeling is very strong but does not flow toward the object; it is rather like being in a state of love within oneself. Naturally, this kind of feeling is very much misunderstood, and such people are considered to be very cold. They are not at all cold, but the feeling is all within them. On the other hand, they have a very strong hidden influence on the surrounding society, for they have very secret, strong inner ways of establishing values. For example, such a feeling type may never express his feeling but behaves as though he thinks one thing is valuable and another not, which exerts a certain impact on other people. When the feeling is inferior, it is even more hidden and more absolute. The lawyer I described has his idea of justice, which would have a very suggestive effect on other people; that is, the hidden feeling at the back of his mind of what he considers to be justice would unconsciously influence other people in the same direction without his ever noticing it. It would really dictate not only his own fate but that of others, invisibly, but through his activity. The hidden, introverted feeling of the thinking type establishes strong invisible loyalties. Such people are among the most faithful of all my friends, even though they may only write at Christmas, if at all, and there is no other contact. I know that they are absolutely reliable in their feeling, but one has to move toward it to get to know of its existence.

Outwardly, the extraverted thinking type does not give the impression of having strong feeling. In a politican, his inferior feeling might unconsciously manifest in a deep-rooted and steadfast loyalty to his country and would seem to him to be completely evident—but it might make him throw the atom bomb or commit some other destructive act. Unconscious and undeveloped feeling can be barbaric and absolute, and therefore hidden destructive fanaticism sometimes suddenly bursts out of the extaverted thinking type and, if unchecked, can be very destructive and manifest in some sudden fanatical action. These people are incapable of seeing that, from a feeling standard, other people might have another value, for they do not question the inner values which they defend. Where they definitely feel that something is right, they are incapable of showing their feeling standpoint, but they never doubt their own inner values.

In that point inferior feeling is different from inferior intuition. Intuition is an irrational function which grasps facts, future possibilities, and possibilities of evolution, but it is not a function of judgment. Inferior intuition might have presentiments about a war, or illnesses of other people, which might happen or might not, or of archetypal changes in the collective unconscious. Introverted intuition has sudden hunches about the slow transformation of the collective unconscious in the flow of time. Every age has a certain atmosphere about it. For example, in art or in literature, there are sudden breaks with former themes, and introverted intuition has a feeling for them. A German writer named Bruno Goetz wrote a book about the Third Empire, meaning by it a Kingdom of God in which paganism and Christianity would be mixed. He wrote it long before the Nazis came to power. The Nazis tried to get hold of him and make him write for them, but he flatly refused. He even foretold in this book much of what the Nazis actually did, even to the extent of describing bands of young people between eighteen and twenty who devastated everything. The scenes he described came out practically in detail later in Nazi Germany, but at the time he wrote the book there was nothing of the kind; it was still the time of the Socialist Weimar Republic, but Goetz’s introverted intuition just knew where the archetypal constellation was moving, and he expressed it. But this can also happen when introverted intuition is inferior. There are sudden flashes of insight into the background processes which come up and disappear again, but there is no judgment, just as Goetz describes facts without judging them. As a writer, he simply puts them before you, and you do not know whether he approves or disapproves. That is what intuition does, it presents facts, with no valuation, but feeling is quite different. In Jungian terms, it is a rational function (Latin ratio = order, calculation, reason), a function which establishes order and judges, saying this is good and this bad, this agreeable and this disagreeable to me. So the inferior feeling of a thinking type would judge the values of people and ideals and not just represent facts; that would be the difference.

For example, an extraverted sensation type who neglected his intuition to a great extent had a recurring dream of poor people and laborers of a disagreeable type who broke into his house at night. He was terrified by this ever-recurring dream and began to go around in his circle of friends and at dinner parties saying that there was absolutely nothing that could be done, that he knew the Communists would win out. As he was a very able politician, this had a bad effect, for people listened to what he said. This was a bad, wrong kind of inferior intuition, based on personal projection. That is an instance of inferior intuition. Yet someone with inferior feeling might suddenly start a lawsuit, convinced that he was fighting for the right and good, but if someone else could shoot this conviction down, he would throw the whole thing over, including the lawsuit which he had himself begun. The sudden change in his judgment would indicate the sudden intrusion of inferior feeling, and this brings in another point. People are very easily influenced when it is a question of their inferior function, because since it is in the unconscious, people can easily be made uncertain, while in the realm of their superior function they generally know how to act when attacked, for they have all their weapons ready and are broad-minded and flexible and feel strong. As soon as you feel strong, you are quite willing to discuss things or change your attitude, but where you feel inferior, you get fanatical and touchy and are easily influenced. The expression on a friend’s face can affect the feeling of a thinking type, because his feeling is in the unconscious and therefore open to influence. Therefore, as mentioned before, the extraverted thinking type can make a very loyal friend, but you can suddenly lose him because he has been poisoned against you and may drop you one day like a hot potato and you don’t know why or what has happened! Somehow, something poisonous got into his system, someone said something, or even just made a face when your name was mentioned! The feeling is unconscious. Such effects can only be cured when they are taken up consciously. If you objected, in thinking terms, about his policy in having the lawsuit, the extraverted thinking type would be willing to discuss it and to ask your reasons. He would be approachable and not influenced in a wrong way, while in the realm of feeling he would break off suddenly and without reason and without quite knowing why himself.

These hidden introverted feelings of the extraverted thinking type are sometimes very childish. After the death of such people you sometimes find notebooks in which childish poems have been written to a faraway woman whom they never met in their lives and in which a lot of sentimental, mystical feeling is poured out, and these they ask to have burned after their death. That feeling is hidden. It is, in a way, the most valuable possession they have, but all the same it is sometimes strikingly infantile; still, it has this kind of mystical inner religious quality about it. Sometimes the feeling remains entirely with the mother and never comes out of the childhood realm, and you may find touching documents about the attachment to her. In such cases the introverted feeling function has never moved out of the childhood place.

The Inferior Feeling of the Introverted Thinking Type

The main function of this type is not so much trying to establish order in the outer world, but is concerned with ideas. Someone who says that one should not start with facts but should first clarify one’s ideas would belong to the introverted thinking type. His wish to bring order into life starts off with the idea that if you are muddle-headed from the very start, you will never get anywhere. You must first know what ideas you wish to follow and where they come from; you must clean up your own muddle-headedness by digging into the background of your thinking. For instance, all philosophy is concerned with the logical processes of the human mind, with the building up of ideas, and so on, and this is the realm where introverted thinking is mostly at work. In science those are the people who, for example, are perpetually trying to prevent their colleagues from getting lost in experiments and who, from time to time, try to get back to basic concepts and ask what we are really doing mentally. This explains why, in physics, there is generally a professor of practical physics and another for theoretical: one lectures on the building up of experiments and the other on mathematical and other principles and the theory of science. In all the different sciences there are always those who try to clarify the basic theories of their scientific realm. The extraverted historian of art will try to find out about the facts and try to prove, for instance, that a certain type of Madonna was painted earlier or later than another type and will try to connect that with the history and background of the artist, while the introvert might even ask what right one has to judge a work of art. He would say that first we should understand what we mean by art for otherwise we will get into a muddle. The introverted thinking type always goes back to the subjective idea, namely what the subject is doing in the whole matter.

The feeling of the introverted thinking type, as far as the attitude is concerned, is the other way around for the extravert, which means that the introverted thinking type has that same kind of strong, loyal, and warm feeling described as typical for the extraverted thinking type, but with the difference that the feeling of the introverted thinking type flows towards definite objects. While the extraverted thinking type deeply loves his wife but where Rilke, for instance, says: “I love you, but it is none of your business,” the feeling of the introverted thinking type has an outer object. He would therefore say, in the Rilke style, “I love you and it will be your business; I’ll make it your business!” Otherwise the introverted thinking type’s feeling has very much the same characteristics as the inferior feeling of the extraverted thinking type, with very black and white judgments, either yes or no, love or hate. But it can be very easily poisoned by other people and by the collective atmosphere and in that way can be made uncertain. The inferior feeling of both types is sticky, and the extraverted thinking type has this kind of invisible faithfulness which can last endlessly. The same is true for the extraverted feeling of the introverted thinking type, except that it will not be invisible but visible faithfulness. If you evaluate it positively, it will be faithful, but to negative evaluation it is sticky. It resembles the gluelike flow of feeling in an epileptoid person; it has that kind of sticky, doglike attachment which, especially to the beloved object, is not always amusing. You could compare the inferior feeling of an introverted thinking type to the flow of hot lava from a volcano—it only moves about five meters an hour, but it devastates everything on its way. That is why, naturally, an introverted thinking type will very soon experience that with his extraverted feeling he is always putting his foot in it, for the feeling is so primitive, sticky, and childish; but it also has all the advantages of a primitive function, for it is very genuine and warm. When an introverted thinking type loves, there is no calculation in it. It will be for the sake of the other, but it will be primitive. That is true for both types, for the thinking types have primitive feeling, but on the other hand it is never calculating. The inferior feeling of a thinking type is like a lioness that would like to play with you. She has no other intention than to play, but she rubs herself, purring, against your leg, or eats you up, or gives you a great blow so that you fall over when she licks your face. But there is no calculation or intention about it; it is just an expression of feeling, just as a dog wags his tail! What touches people in the feeling of domestic animals is just this lack of calculation.

So in both thinking types, inferior feeling is without calculation, whereas people who have differentiated feeling are, in a hidden way, calculating, and they always put a little bit of ego into it. I once saw the boss of a typist who was a feeling type and wondered how she stood such a horror for a single day! But she smiled and said that he was her boss, so she made the best of it, since she must put up with it, and by looking at him closely she could find that he had this and that positive quality. One could say that to see good possibilities and recognize them is admirable, but on the other hand there is a little calculation in it: she wanted to keep her place with her boss, so she made that positive feeling effort. That would never happen to the inferior feeling of a thinking type! I could never have stood it—I would rather not eat and could not have stuck it for twenty days! I was struck here by the difference between inferior and differentiated feeling. The feeling type had found a few positive qualities in that horrible man and put up with him. She did not deny all the negative things I saw in him, but she said he never demanded overtime and he gave merit to those who worked for him, so she discovered a few positive factors and stuck there.

In his book, Jung explains some of the misunderstandings between the types. If I had said that this office girl was calculating and acting out of opportunism, it would have been absolutely wrong, because that was only a background motive in her case—that would be the negative projection of the other type. It is not that she is just an opportunist, or is acting in a calculating way in having such positive feeling, but that she has differentiated feeling. She therefore never has strong feeling reactions but knows that where there is value, there is always something negative; nothing is quite black or white, but everything is grayish in reality. She has that kind of philosophical attitude. It was only I who suspected the calculation and opportunism because the introverted thinking type always knows consciously on which side his bread is buttered. But that is not right. On the other hand, you can say that inferior feeling has the advantage that there is really no calculation in it. The ego has nothing to do with it, but naturally this can create unadapted situations. Think, for instance, of the film The Blue Angel, in which a professor falls for a vamp and faithfully and loyally gets ruined by her. That would be the tragedy of the inferior feeling function. One could honor him for his faithfulness, but one could just as well say that he was a damn fool and that his inferior feeling had very bad taste. That is also true for the inferior feeling of a thinking type: the feeling shows either very good or very bad taste. A thinking type can sometimes choose very valuable people for his friends, or he can pick absolutely the wrong one, for the inferior function has both aspects and rarely fits into conventional patterns.

Another way in which infantile feeling can manifest in thinking types is instanced in the case of Voltaire, the French philosopher, who was, I think, an introverted thinking type. He fought the Catholic Church with all his might and was the author of the famous saying “Ecrasez l’infȃme” (Root out the infamy). He was an intellectual and a typical representative of the age of enlightenment. On his deathbed, however, he got very jittery and asked for the extreme unction and took it with a great upwelling of pious feeling. There he showed at the end of his life that he was completely split: his mind had left the original religious experience and his feeling had stayed there invisibly, and when it came to dying and death—which one has to meet as a whole person—the feeling came up and overwhelmed him in a completely undifferentiated way. All sudden conversions have this quality, or they are due to the sudden appearance of the inferior function in a type.

In the case of inferior feeling, just as in the other cases, the inferior function is very much coupled with emotion. Whenever people have very emotional feeling, it is a sign that the feeling is undifferentiated. As soon as tears come into their eyes in a feeling situation that has been constellated and everything is flowing heavily and passionately, you know that the inferior function has been touched. But this is also true for the inferior intuition of the sensation types. You will remember my description of the extraverted sensation type man with whom I went to the Anthroposophic tragedy play. When I said that I had had enough of that and wanted a good steak, he did not think that was a joke. He had been so deeply emotionally touched by the play we had seen together that it was hitting at his emotion when I made this tactless remark. He was not an emotional man, but a very cold fish and very down to earth; yet at this moment he was moved to the core of his heart, and therefore one could not joke about it.

All inferior functions have this tendency to make people deadly serious and emotional and pathetic. You can see it very clearly in the feeling of the thinking type. Introverted thinking may show very pathetic if not hysterical qualities in the mani-festation of feeling. On the other hand, as Jung writes in Psychological Types, people who know thinking types well know that you can have very warm feeling and intimate and reliable friendships with them, because if there is feeling, it is true and genuine.

The Inferior Sensation of the Extraverted Intuitive Type

Extraverted intuition is a function by which we conceive outer possibilities. A sensation type could say about a bell, “This is a bell,” but a child would say that you could do all sorts of things with that, it could be a church tower, and a book could be the village, and something else could be another object, and so on. In everything there is a possibility of development; thus intuition in mythology is very often represented by the nose. One says, “I smell a rat,” that is, my intuition tells me that there is something fishy about. I don’t know quite what, but I can smell it! We perceive such possibilities, and then three weeks later the rat, or the cat, is out of the bag, and you say: “Oh, I smelled it, I had a hunch there was something in the air!” These are not yet materialized, unborn possibilities, the germs of the future. Intuition is therefore the capacity for intuiting that which is not yet visible, future possibilities or potentialities in the background of a situation. The extraverted intuitive type applies this to the outer world, and therefore will be very gifted and score very high in surmising the outer developments of the external situation in general. Such types are very often to be found among business people who have the courage to manufacture new inventions and put them on the market. You find them also among journalists and frequently among publishers. They are the people who know what will be popular next year and will do big business because they will bring out something which is not yet the fashion but soon will be, and they are the first to put it on the market. You find them also among stockbrokers who, beyond the normal calculation based on the reading of newspapers and financial reports of commercial concerns, will have a certain something which tells them that a certain stock will go up, the market will be bullish, and they will make money through sensing the rise and fall of stocks. They will realize what is in the air and will be the first to speak of it. You find them wherever there is something new brewing, and you find them also in the more spiritual realm. They will always be in the advance movement, interested in the advanced aspects of a science, and they are full of enterprise and will speculate as to the outcome of this, and how something else could be used, and another thing disseminated among people, and so on.

Because intuition needs to look at things a little bit from afar or vaguely in order that it may function, you have to half shut your eyes and not look at facts too closely in order to get this hunch from the unconscious. If you look at things too precisely, you focus on facts and then the hunch can’t come through. That is why intuitives tend to be unpunctual and vague, always rushing about a little bit too late, arriving too late, and not focusing on any fact too exactly. Another disadvantage of this main function is that the intuitive type generally sows but rarely reaps. For instance, if you start a new business, there are generally initial difficulties, the thing does not work yet; you have to wait for a certain time for it to begin to be profitable. The intuitive very often, tragically, does not wait long enough; he starts the business, but that is enough for him, so he resells it and loses on it, but the next owner makes a lot of money out of the same business. The intuitive does not reap what he has sown. He is always the one who invents, but who in the end gets nothing out of it if he overdoes his main function, for he is, as it were, rushing through things and incapable of waiting till what he has sown comes out of the soil and he can gather the fruit. If he is more balanced and can wait a little while, and if he does not dissociate completely by identifying with his main function, then he is a person who can stir up new things in all the corners of the world.

Naturally, the extraverted intuitive tends specially not to attend to his body and his physical needs: he absolutely does not know when he is tired. He does not notice it and needs a breakdown to show him. Also he does not know when he is hungry; he does not know that he has any endosomatic perceptions, if he is an exaggerated one-sided type. He tends also to lose himself in the object. You find such people, for instance, following in the trail of creative people, promoting the creativity of others, absolutely losing their own possibilities in the other. This is especially the case with publishers and art dealers and such people who admire the creative artist and try to promote his work, without realizing that they lose themselves in the object, in the other person, and forget about themselves. Inferior sensation, like all inferior functions, is in such people slow, heavy, and loaded with emotion and completely—because introverted—turned away from the outer world and its affairs. It has, like all inferior functions, a mystical quality about it.

I once analyzed an extraverted intuitive type, a businessman who had started a great many businesses in some faraway country and had also speculated a lot and bought gold mines and the like. He always knew where possibilities were and made a large fortune in a very short time, absolutely honestly—quite decently—and simply because he just knew! He knew what was coming, what would happen in a few years, and he was always on the spot first and got the whole business in hand. His introverted sensation—he was rather a split personality—came up first in dreams as a very dirty, bad-tempered tramp who sat around in inns in a bad, nasty temper and in dirty clothes, and one did not know what this fellow wanted of the dreamer. I induced the dreamer to talk to this tramp in active imagination, and the tramp said that he had been responsible for some physical symptoms (psychogenic symptoms of a compulsory character), on account of which he had come to analysis, and that they had been sent because he, the tramp, did not get enough attention. So in his active imagination the man asked what he should do, and the tramp said that once a week, dressed in clothes such as the tramp wore, he should go for a walk in the country with him and pay attention to what he had to say. I advised the dreamer to follow the advice precisely, with the result that he took long walks through many parts of Switzerland, staying in the most simple inns, unrecognized by anybody. He would wander along, and during this time he had a great number of overwhelming inner experiences which came through contact with nature: the sunrise and small things like seeing a certain flower in a corner of a rock, and so on. It hit him right to the core of his personality. I can only describe it as experiencing, in a very primitive way, the Godhead in nature. He came back very silent and quieted down, and one had the feeling that something had moved in him which had not moved before. His compulsory symptoms disappeared completely during those weekly walks. Then came the problem of how he could keep this experience and avoid slipping back when he got home to his own country. So we consulted the tramp again, who said that he would let him off the symptoms if he would take an afternoon off each week and go alone into nature and continue his talks with him. The man then left, and from his letters I learned that he did this for a while, but then slipped back because there was too much business, too many possibilities of starting three other businesses, and too many meetings to start all these three other businesses. So, he put the tramp off, always saying, “Next week, next week—sure, I am coming, but next week”—and then he promptly got his symptoms back! That taught him, and he switched back and walked regularly and was all right again. It then crystallized into buying a little farm and having there a horse of his own, and one afternoon a week he attended to this horse, with what you could only call religious devotion. He cleaned it and nursed it by brushing, washing, and looking after it, and the horse was his friend. Like a ritual he went to visit it and ride about on it and look after it every week. From then on he had peace, and I have not heard much. I am sure a lot is going on inwardly with this horse, but I haven’t heard much except for Christmas cards saying that he was getting on all right—and photographs of the horse!

There you see how the inferior function, introverted sensation in this case, was the door to experiencing the deeper layers of the unconscious, its superpersonal aspects. He got out of his ego and ego purposes via this contact with nature and the horse, and one sees also very clearly that even if the introverted sensation appears outside—in the horse, in this case—it obviously carries a symbolic meaning. Attending the horse was for him attending to his own physical and instinctive personality: the horse was a first personification of the impersonal collective unconscious for him, but it was very important just for an intuitive type to do this completely concretely and very slowly and not go off, for instance, and say, “Oh, the horse is a symbol of the unconscious,” but really to stick to the concrete horse which he had and attend to it even though he knew it was a symbol. It carried the meaning of his life, but he had to attend to it in this concrete form. He had a lot of little accidents at first because he was very helpless in sensation matters, so he broke a lot of bones, one after the other, rather a harmless business—his collarbone and such things—until he was capable of really attending to a horse properly, because he was not at all good at sensation matters, being accustomed to rushing about and to having servants for all the concrete facts of life.

Two factors are very big problems for this type: money and sex, especially insofar as they really have to do with sensation, though I must say I have seen the same thing with the introverted intuitive, for in general this is typical for inferior sensation. Money imposes a certain amount of sensation: we must know about how much we have and how much we can spend; a certain accuracy and realism is needed. Sex, in its physical aspects, is also a sensation experience. Very often intuitives have great difficulty in these areas because they have great numinosity for them. But sex or money complexes do not appear only in intuitives; other people can have a sex complex or a money complex, but with the intuitives there is the additional trouble that it touches their inferior function, which means that physical sensation is numinous, is a tremendum numinosum, something which touches their emotions. Therefore they cannot, for instance, often go near it; it is sacred and exciting, or the other way around—very coarse. The inferiority of sensation in an extraverted intuitive sometimes shows in the very coarse vulgarity of their sexual fantasies and acts. It is completely primitive and undifferentiated. Some act it out completely, and others suffer from very vulgar sexual fantasies of a very primitive nature. But this, in a way, is not so bad with an extraverted intuitive because the inferior sensation is introverted and so not turned toward the outer object and therefore also not meant to be lived on a great scale but rather to be touched as a carrier of inner meaning.

The person who is really in touch with the future, so to speak, with the germs of the future, is the creative personality. Now, the extraverted intuitive, because he is capable of sniffing the wind and knowing what the weather will be tomorrow, will see that this perhaps completely unknown painter or writer will be the man of tomorrow, and therefore he will be fascinated. His intuition can recognize the value of such a creative person.

He will attach himself to creative people and try with his intuition to get them started and support and back them, because his intuition rightly tells him that there is the future, that is what is going to succeed, even if today it is completely ignored or not yet recognized, and in that way he has sometimes great merit. Creative people are often introverted and are so occupied with their creations that they cannot be away from their work in order to promote it. Their work takes up so much of their energy that they cannot be bothered with how it should be presented to the world, how to advertise it, or anything of the kind. Moreover, any kind of purposiveness poisons creative processes, so they may not even do it, but very often then the extraverted intuitive comes and helps. But, naturally, if he does that all his life, then, as happens very often, publishers and art dealers who are would-be creative people project a minor creative ability which they have in themselves onto the creative person and then they lose themselves. So, sooner or later, such people will have to pull themselves out of their extraversion and say, “Now, even if it is on a minor scale, what is my creativity?” And then they will be forced down into their inferior sensation, and instead of attending to other people’s creativity they will have to attend to their own inferior sensation and what might come out of that.

The same thing applies to this businessman whom I took as an example: he always started up new factories and new enterprises and got a lot of other people to work and make money, but when he consulted me, he was the poorest devil of all poor devils. He had nothing out of it except a lot of money! But he was so much occupied in rushing along making money that he couldn’t enjoy having it; he had not the time! It was only when he discovered that he could buy a farm and a horse that he got a little out of his money. For the first time in his life he had something, because he was able to have a farm and a horse! But if analysis had not gotten him to start this, he would have had just nothing from money, it would have remained an abstract thing in the bank! But as he did not know how to enjoy life—how to live in the here and now, to look after his body and to pay attention to this world, to see the beauty of the world, to see the sun rise and the trees blossom—what was the use of having money? It needed the turn to his inferior function to have all that; before, it had been of no use to him. His wife was a sensation type and he first told me he was earning all the money for her! Now, she knew how to enjoy it, but he was making it for her! It was not her fault; she did not really want him to make so much money, but he projected sensation onto her, and so he was doing it for her. And he got nothing out of it; he was just pale and always haunted, rushing about in airplanes and trains to make more money! Even when he had realized a bit, every time he saw the possibility of big business, it was so difficult to let it go, to leave it for someone else to take. It was a battle with his greed. He would see a possibility that nobody else had noticed and could just take it and make all that money. But he had to leave it alone so that somebody else could take it—that was hell! That is the sacrifice of the superior function. For an extraverted intuitive it means letting some business go down the drain and thinking, “Oh, well, other people need money too, let them have it, I have enough!” They just cannot resist the possibility which they, with their clever intuition, saw first! But you can’t develop the inferior function without giving up, to a certain extent, the superior function. In his case it meant that he had to give up a great deal of money. There it was, just lying in front of him, he could just have taken it if he wanted, and that naturally was very disagreeable, because he knew that if he did not take it, somebody else would. But for the extravert it is always giving up a certain amount of worldly advantage, if he wants to turn toward introversion, and in the extraverted intuitive it meant giving up these possibilities, seeing them and not using them in any way! Just letting them go!

The Inferior Sensation of the Introverted Intuitive Type

The introverted intuitive type has the same capacity as the extraverted intuitive for smelling out the future, having the right guess or the right hunch about the not yet seen future possibilities of the situation, but his intuition is turned within, and therefore you can say that he is primarily the type of the religious prophet, of the seer. On a primitive level he is the shaman who knows what the gods and the ghosts and ancestral spirits are planning and who conveys that to the tribe. In psychological language we should say that he knows about the slow processes which go on in the collective unconscious, the archetypal changes which take place in the unconscious, and he conveys that to society. The prophets of the Old Testament, for instance, were people who, while the people of Israel were happily asleep—as people always are—from time to time told them what Yahveh’s real intentions were, so to speak, and what He was doing just now, and what He wanted His people to do, which the people generally did not enjoy hearing.

Many introverted intuitives are to be found among artists and poets. They generally are artists of the type which produces very archetypal and fantastic material, as in Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra or in Gustav Meyrinck’s The Golem and Kubin’s The Other Side. This kind of visionary art, as one could call it, is generally only understood by later generations as a realization of what was going on in the collective unconscious at that time. The inferior sensation of this type also has difficulties in noticing the needs of the body, or being very uncontrolled about it. You know that Swedenborg even had a vision in which God Himself told him he should not eat so much! He ate, naturally, without the slightest self-discipline and with complete unawareness. Swedenborg was a typical introverted intuitive, the prophet or seer type, and he was coarse and uninhibited and impossible about overeating, and so once he had a vision of God telling him that he should stop that! The introverted intuitive also suffers, as the extraverted intuitive does, from a tremendous vagueness where facts are concerned.

As an illustration of the more ridiculous aspect of the inferior sensation of an introverted intuitive, I could tell you the following story. An introverted intuitive woman was present when I gave a lecture on early Greek philosophy and was terribly moved and impressed by it and asked me to give her private lessons about the early Greek pre-Socratic philosophy, as she wanted to get deeper into this field. She invited me to tea and, as happens very often when you have to give lessons to introverted intuitives, she wasted my first hour—this was many years ago—in telling me all about how she was moved and what she conceived to be at the back of my mind and hers and what she believed we could do together and so on. She talked and talked, as we say, “the devil’s ear off,” so the first hour got wasted and the second hour got wasted, and as I felt that really I had to earn my money and get her going somehow, I insisted that we should look at the book which I had brought and proceed in a systematic way. She suddenly got that and said, yes, she would look at it now, but that I should leave her alone, for she had to do that quite her own way. I noticed that she was getting very nervous. The next time when I came she said that now she had found the real way to get into the problem, namely, that, naturally, she could not study Greek philosophy without knowing about the Greeks, and she could not know about the Greeks before knowing quite concretely about their country, so she had now started to draw a map of Greece, and she showed me the map! That had taken a lot of time! With her inferior sensation she had first had to buy paper and pencils and ink, and that excited her enormously. She was absolutely in heaven about her discovery, and she showed me something which I must say was very beautifully done. She had made a map of Greece and really done it slowly and accurately. She said that she could not now go on with philosophy; she first had to finish this map. So the next time she had colored it! That went on for a few months, and then her intuition picked another theme she was very enthusiastic about, and we never got down to Greek philosophy! She left Zurich, and I did not see her often, but I did meet her about fifteen years later, and then she told me a long story of how she was still impressed and moved by the lessons on Greek philosophy which I had given her and all that she had conceived from them. She had just drawn a map! With immense devotion! She was a very extreme case of introverted intuition, but I must admit in looking back that I see that it was a really numinous thing for that woman to draw this map of Greece, because there, for the first time, she had gotten in touch with her inferior sensation.

Introverted intuitives are sometimes so completely unaware of outer facts that their reports about things have to be treated with the greatest care, for though they do not lie consciously, they can tell the most appalling stories, simply because they do not notice what is right under their noses. I very often distrust ghost reports, for instance, and reports about parapsychological phenomena, for those reasons. Introverted intuitives are very much interested in such fields, but because of their absolute weakness in observing facts and lack of concentration on outer facts, they can tell you the most appalling nonsense and swear it is true, simply because they have not noticed what was going on. They pass an absolutely amazing amount of outer facts unnoticed and just do not take them in. I remember, for instance, driving with an introverted intuitive type one autumn, and in all the fields the potatoes were being dug up and there were bonfires. I had noticed that long ago and was enjoying the sight. Suddenly the introverted intuitive person, who was driving, stopped the car in horror, sniffed, and said: “Something is burning! Is it coming from outside?” She looked at the brakes and everything was all right and then she decided it was outside and was the bonfires! I had noticed those bonfires long before; they were everywhere and it was absolutely obvious that the smell of burning came from them! But introverted intuitives can drive for an hour through such a country with such a phenomenon and not notice it—and then suddenly be struck by the fact and then, of course, make something out of it which it is not. They will make a wrong guess! It had, naturally, also the quality which all inferior functions have, namely that the sensation of an introverted intuitive comes up into consciousness in bits: sometimes it functions and then it disappears. For example, suddenly a smell is intensely realized. Three-quarters of an hour before, it was not realized at all, but then suddenly it is taken in with great intensity. The inferior sensation of an extraverted intuitive is extremely strong, but it breaks through here and there and then fades again out of the field of awareness. Of course, the introverted intuitive also has particular trouble in approaching sex because it involves his inferior extraverted sensation. You see it most tragically mirrored in the works of Nietzsche, where, toward the end, shortly before he went off his head, very coarse, vulgar sexual allusions more and more penetrate some of his poems and had already also appeared in Thus Spake Zarathustra. When he went insane, he apparently produced material of that kind, which unfortunately was destroyed after his death because of its distasteful character. Extraverted sensation in his case was very much connected with women and sex and in a completely outer concrete way, and he didn’t know how to deal with the problem at all.

The positive aspect of inferior extraverted sensation in the case of an introverted intuitive is also to be found in an interesting way in the illumination experience of the German mystic Jakob Boehme, an introverted intuitive. He had a wife and six children for whom he never earned any money and with whom he was in constant trouble because his wife always said that instead of writing books about God and fantasizing about the inner development of the Godhead, he would do better to see that his family had something to eat. He was really crucified between these two poles of life, but his greatest inner experience, a revelation of the Godhead upon which all his later writings are based, came from seeing a ray of light being reflected in a tin plate. The sun suddenly came in through the window and reflected in the plate, and his eye was hit by the ray of light, and that outer sensation experience snapped him into an inner ecstasy, and within a minute he saw the whole mystery of the Godhead. Then for years and years he really did nothing except slowly translate into discursive language what he had seen inwardly in one second! He carried out his vision by describing it and circumambulating it many many times, which is why his writing is so emotional and chaotic, for he tried to describe this one experience in so many words and in so many amplifications. But the actual vision was set in motion by seeing a ray of light striking a tin plate on his table, which implies extraverted sensation—an outer fact started off the process of individuation in him; all his deeper realizations were started in that short moment. There you see, besides the inferior aspect of extraverted sensation, this strange character of wholeness, the mystical aspect which the inferior function often has. It is interesting that even Swedenborg’s overeating connected him with the Godhead—it had to be the Lord Himself who told him that he should not overeat, so that the problem of his inferior sensation is connected with his deepest or greatest concern. That little silly detail is connected with his greatest concern—it is the Lord Himself who takes the trouble to warn him.

Something interesting about Boehme is that as long as he was crucified between inner needs and his nagging wife, who said he had better make good shoes and feed his six children and then speculate about a Godhead, he was very productive, but after his first book was published, a German baron was so sorry for him and felt so much that he was the great seer that he removed all his outer troubles by paying for his and his family’s support, and from then on Boehme’s writing got full of resentment and repetitions. It sterilized his creativity, and on his tomb is an image of the Godhead like this: )(, which is really tragic, as it shows that he could not unite the light and the dark sides. That remained an insoluble problem to him, and in my experience it is connected with the simple fact that he accepted money from this baron and thereby escaped the torture of his inferior function.

I once analyzed a woman of that type who came from a simple sector of the population. She had great inner visions, and she too, naturally, was in a constant muddle about money and outer life and just didn’t know how to function. She was in trouble with the landlord and with the dairy because she forgot to give the bottles back or swore she had given back five when the shop swore it was only one—the usual sensation trouble which such prophets have. They just stumble about in reality and are quite sure they have done something which the others say they have not and so accuse them of lying. They simply do not know what they are doing. They can’t count bottles or remember whether they brought the bottles back to the shop or not. Now, this person too had a secret hope that one day someone would discover her capacities and pay for her support and she would escape those troubles. But when she got out of them, she went completely off her head! As soon as she got back into her worries and accepted them, she was all right. So to be crucified between the superior and the inferior function is vitally important, and I can only tell you that if you ever feel like saving such artists or prophets, for God’s sake look at the case first very circumspectly and see how much you can afford to help them, because if you buy them off reality, then they go off reality! And then you have not helped them in the least. Just that type will beg you to help them out of their trouble, on their knees they will beg you to save them from the torture of outer reality with which they can’t cope. But if you save them, the creative core of their personality is destroyed. That does not mean that if they are starving you cannot give them something so that they can survive and help them from time to time, when the situation is bad. But don’t let them off the problem of reality because, strangely enough, that sterilizes the inner process as well. That happened to Boehme, and because of it he was not able to unite the opposites, not even in his system and not in his life either, so what Baron von Merz did destroyed him by unwise charity.

The Inferior Thinking of the Extraverted Feeling Type

The extraverted feeling type is characterized by the fact that his main adaptation is carried by adequate evaluation of the outer object and adequate relation to it. The type will therefore very easily make friends, will have very few illusions about people, but will be capable of evaluating their positive and negative sides appropriately and of knowing how much or how little they and the situation means to them. So people of this type are generally very much liked by those around them. They are well-adjusted, very reasonable people who roll along amiably through society and can get what they want very easily and can somehow ensure that everybody is willing to give them what they want. They lubricate their surroundings so marvelously that life goes along for them very easily. You find them frequently among women, and they generally have a very happy family life with a lot of friends. Things are easy in the surroundings, but this does not mean that they have the slightest illusion or are calculating; they are just amiable, seeing the good in situations and people. Only if they are in some way neurotically dissociated do they become a bit theatrical and a little bit mechanical and calculating. If you go to a luncheon party with an extraverted feeling type, she or he is capable of saying little things like, “What a nice day it is today, I am so glad to see you again, I haven’t seen you for a long time!” And the person really means it, and with that the car, so to speak, is lubricated and the party goes! You feel happy and warmed up. They spread a kind of atmosphere of acceptance, and it is agreeable: “We appreciate each other, so we are going to have a good day together.” They make those in their surroundings feel wonderful, and in the midst of that they swim along happily and create a pleasant social atmosphere. Only when they overdo it, or if their extraverted feeling is already worn out and they therefore start to think, do you notice that this becomes a little bit of a habit, that it becomes a phrase which they say mechanically. For instance, I once noticed an extraverted feeling type on a dreadful day when there was a horrible fog outside saying mechanically, “Isn’t it a wonderful day?” I thought, “Oh dear, your main function is rattling off; you overdo it!”

In general people of this type have very good taste in the choice of partners and friends, but are a little bit conventional about it. They wouldn’t risk choosing someone too much out of the ordinary, but would remain in a socially acceptable framework. The extraverted feeling type dislikes thinking, because that is the inferior function, and what they dislike most of all is introverted thinking, which means thinking about philosophical principles or abstract things or basic questions of life, such as: What is the meaning of life? Do I believe in God or not? What is my attitude toward the problem of evil? Such deeper questions are carefully avoided, and there is the reaction that thinking about such problems would make one melancholy. The unfortunate thing is that, naturally, they do think of such things but are not aware of it, and because their thinking is neglected, it tends to become negative and coarse. It consists of coarse, primitive thinking judgments without the slightest differentiation and very often with a negative tinge. I have also seen that introverted feeling types sometimes have very negative thoughts about the people around, very critical, I would say overcritical judgments, which they never allow really to come out. That is why Jung says that the extraverted feeling type can sometimes be the coldest person on earth, and it may happen that if you get lured into this well-lubricated car of their extraverted feeling and feel, “We like each other and get along well together,” then suddenly one day they will say something to you which is like smacking you on the head with a block of ice! One sometimes cannot imagine what cynical negative thoughts they have. They are not aware of them, but they pop out when they begin to have the flu, or when they are rushed, or in such moments when the inferior function wells up and where control of the superior function fails.

An extraverted feeling type dreamed that she should establish a bird observation station. She saw in the dream a kind of cement building, a tower built high up in the air, and on the top was a kind of laboratory where one had to observe the birds. So we thought she should try to be aware of autonomous thoughts which would, as it were, alight on her head and go again. That is how thoughts operate in a feeling type; she has thought-birds alighting on her head and flying off and before she can say, “What am I thinking?,” they are gone again. The woman agreed, and I asked her how it could be done technically. She said she should take a little notebook and a pencil and carry them around with her, and when she had a sudden thought, she should just jot it down! Nothing more, and we would see afterward how the thoughts were connected. Next time she brought only one piece of paper, and on it was: “If my son-in-law died, my daughter would come back home.” She got such a shock through that thought that she never put a ring on a second bird!

That one bird was quite enough for a long time! She then confessed something even more interesting and said that in a way she knew she sometimes had such thoughts but always thought that if she didn’t write them down, then they would not have any effect, but if she did, then they would act like black magic and affect the surroundings, so she avoided looking at them. Now, that was completely wrong; it is the other way round! If the feeling type is aware of his negative thoughts, then they don’t act like black magic; they are depotentiated of any destructive effect. It is just when these thoughts are left alone to fly around his head without being caught that they actually have a destructive influence on their surroundings.

If one analyzes extraverted feeling types and is a little bit sensitive to the atmosphere, one very often gets a bit frozen or cooled down in spite of their amiability, because one senses these critical negative thoughts swarming around in their heads but never expressed; they hit one in a disagreeable way. One sees a kind of cold flash sometimes in the eyes, and one knows that there is some very negative thought about, but the next minute it is gone! It gives one the creeps! For instance, thoughts such as, “If you die . . .,” are generally based on a very cynical outlook on life: the dark side of life is illness and death and such things, and the thoughts circle around these factors, but the person doesn’t “allow” them to come through, so a kind of second philosophy of life, cynical and negativistic, creeps around in the background. The worse thing about these negative thoughts in the extraverted feeling type is that they are introverted and thus very often turned against themselves. I have never caught so many absolutely destructive judgments as extraverted feeling types have about themselves. At bottom they allow themselves to think that they are nobodies and worthless, that their lives are worthless, and that everybody else might develop and get on the path of individuation, but they are hopeless, and so on—absolutely destructive condemning ideas of themselves, but which they do not think consciously. These thoughts dwell in the back of their minds, and from time to time, when they are depressed or not well off, or especially when they introvert (that is, when they are alone for half a minute), then this negative thing whispers at the back of their mind: “You are nothing; everything is wrong about you.” These thoughts are coarse, primitive, and very undifferentiated; they are generalized judgments which are like a cold draft which goes through the room and makes you shiver. The effect is that extraverted feeling types naturally hate to be alone when such negative thoughts could come up in their minds, so as soon as they have realized one or two, they quickly switch on the radio or rush to meet other people. Therefore, the worst thing about them is that they never have time to think. But they carefully arrange their lives in that way!

Because extraverted feeling types have such a tremendous capacity for objectively feeling the other person’s situation, they are usually the people who genuinely sacrifice themselves for others. If you are alone in the flat and have the flu, it is certainly an extraverted feeling type who will turn up first and ask who is doing your shopping and whether he can help you. The others couldn’t be so quick and practical about feeling into your situation, for they feel how you feel at every minute and then naturally cannot resist lending a helping hand. To the others, even though they might like you as much, it would not occur that they could do this or that for you, either because they are introverts or because another function is dominant in their system. So you find the extraverted feeling type always jumping into the breach, for wherever something does not function, they realize it at once and see the importance of it. Feeling is seeing the value of something, and they see the importance or the value of what should be done and then just do it. Naturally, if they overdo this, they pile up negative resistance against the outer situation. If this woman who had the one little thought—“My only daughter would come back home”—had dug deeper, she would have had to say to herself, “O.K., let’s face that thought! What am I after? If I have such a thought, what is the premise, and what is the conclusion to be drawn?” She could then have developed the thought and said that the premise is something like a devouring mother’s attitude, and the conclusion is that she wants the son-in-law removed. Why? For what purpose? She could, for example, have said, “Assuming that my daughter does come home, what then?” And then she would have seen that she would have hated to have a sourpuss old maid of a daughter at home. And in continuing that thought, she would have seen that there was a contradiction in it, and then she would have probably dropped into a deeper layer and said, “And what then? If my children have now left home, what is the real purpose of my life?” And then she would have had to philosophize about the future purpose of her life after forty-eight: “Does life still have a meaning once one has brought up the children and started them into life, and if so, what is it, and what is the meaning of life altogether?” She would have been confronted with the deep but human philosophical questions which she never had faced before, and that would have brought her into deep water. She naturally could not have solved the problem, but then she might have had a dream to help along a whole process, a quest for the meaning of life which her inferior thinking function would have started. Now, because the case was that of an extraverted feeling type, the quest would be a completely introverted inner thing, like developing an introverted philosophical view of her own life. That would have required that she spend a long time alone in her room and really become slowly aware of the dark underground of her thoughts.

The easy escape which I have seen in several extraverted feeling types is that they get out of the difficulty by simply selling their souls to some already established system. One person I remember got converted to Catholicism and simply adopted, unchecked, that basic Scholastic philosophy and from then on only quoted Scholastic authors. That was, in a way, taking up the thinking function, but taking it up in an already established form. The same thing can be done with Jungian psychology, just repeating the concepts by heart in a mechanical way, but never working out one’s own standpoint. It is a kind of pupil-like, uncreative attitude which just takes over the system unexamined and never asks, “What do I think about it? Does this really convince me? Are the facts upon which this thought is based convincing to me? Does it coincide with the facts I have checked? Can I take it over myself with my own conviction? Does it coincide with my own inner experiences?” Instead, it is taken over wholesale, so that if such people then meet others who themselves know how to think—for instance, thinking types—they get fanatical because they feel helpless. They then fight for the system they have chosen with a certain apostlelike fanaticism because they feel uncertain about the basis of the thinking system: how the system developed, its basic concepts, and so on; and because they are uncertain and have the feeling that the system could be thrown over by a good thinker, they adopt an aggressive attitude.

Another danger is that if an extraverted feeling type starts to think, he gets completely caught up in it. Either he cannot cut off his relationships sufficiently to go and sit and be alone and think, or, if he succeeds in cutting off all outer ties, in having enough time alone to get down into the problems of his own thoughts—which is already great progress—then he gets terribly caught by them and really loses sight of life and disappears into books, or into a library, and gets covered with dust and is no longer able to switch to any other activity. He gets swallowed by that one thought task.

If you want to have a very world-famous example of the inferior thinking of an extraverted feeling type, read Goethe’s Conversations with Eckermann. It is just an amazing collection of platitudes—aperçus of so-called depth, but really just plain platitudes. There you see the inferior function of Goethe very visibly exposed to the world. He has also published maxims, general reflections, which and that is very typical for their level—you meet on the back leaf of every calendar! They are very true, you can rarely object to them in any way, but they are just so true that any sheep could have thought them just as well. That is Wagner at work in the great poet.

Naturally, the inferior thinking of the feeling type is threatened by such generalities and platitudes, which are typical for undeveloped thinking. If, for instance, you give students of fourteen to eighteen years of age a theme to write about, you will see that at that age they usually cannot produce any differentiated or special thought but write generalities—which, at that age, is already an achievement. The way in which we educate children in school in writing such generalities is most idiotic. I remember that in my own youth we got such themes as “Does the individual or do the masses decide the course of history?” Now, imagine! How can a girl of sixteen know anything differentiated or factual about that? You just write generalities! I must confess that it is only hearsay, but I have heard that many debating clubs in American colleges seem to move on those levels, without the slightest differentiation of thought as to facts, or anything extraordinary or above level, or anything focused on one theme; there are just evident platitudes and generalities which anybody could think. The inferior thinking of the extraverted feeling type has therefore a very disagreeable way of secretly making one feel uneasy. The feeling type likes—unconsciously—to throw a wet blanket on his surroundings with his secret negative thinking. There is a kind of skepticism which can exert a repressing effect upon others. If you get into discussion with the negative thinking of such an extraverted feeling type, you see that, in general, he has jumped to conclusions too quickly and thereby has not gotten to the bottom of things. There are all kinds of negative thoughts and rather sweeping statements which are also a typical feature of inferior thinking.

The Extraverted Thinking of the Introverted Feeling Type

The introverted feeling type mainly adapts to life by feeling, but more in an introverted way, that is, mainly toward the orientation of the subject with a differentiated scale of evaluation. This type is very difficult to understand. Jung says that the saying “Still waters run deep” applies to people of this type. They have the same reactions of a very differentiated scale of value, but unlike the extravert, they do not express them outwardly, but are affected by them within. You often find introverted feeling types in the background where important and valuable events or setups are taking place, just as if their introverted feeling has told them that that setup was really important and was the real thing. With a kind of silent loyalty and without any outside explanation, they turn up in places where important and valuable inner facts, archetypal constellations, are to be found. With inconspicuous constancy they will stick, for instance, to important archetypal ideas, and they generally exert a positive secret influence on their surroundings by setting standards. The others observe them and, though they say nothing, for they are much too introverted to express themselves much, they set certain standards because they have them within themselves. Introverted feeling types, for instance, very often form the secret ethical backbone of a group, for without irritating the others with moral or ethical precepts, they themselves have such right standards of ethical values that they secretly emanate a positive influence on those around. One has to behave correctly because they have that kind of right value standard, or good taste, which always suggestively forces one to be decent if they are present, and that is because their differentiated introverted feeling sees what is inwardly the really important factor.

The thinking of this type is extraverted, flowing toward the outer object. In amazing contrast to their silent and inconspicuous outer appearance, the introverted feeling types are therefore generally interested in an immense number of outer facts. In their conscious personality they do not move about much, but sit in their badger’s hole, while their extraverted thinking, their more unconscious mind, roams about among an extraordinary amount of outer facts. They read, for example, about the most unexpected things: the natural sciences and God knows what. They are interested in practically all outer facts of life, but this is a kind of hidden interest, whereas with the extraverted thinking types, that would be right in the foreground of their interests. If introverted feeling types want to use their extraverted thinking in a creative way, they have the usual extravert’s difficulty of being overwhelmed by too much material, too many references, and too many facts, so their inferior extraverted thinking sometimes just gets lost in a morass of single outer objective references and facts through which they can no longer find their way. The inferiority of their extraverted thinking very often expresses itself in a certain monomanic way, in that they have only one or two thoughts with which they race through a tremendous amount of material. This is very obvious and is why Jung characterizes the Freudian system as a typical example of extraverted thinking.

Jung has never said anything about Freud’s type as a human being; he has only said in many of his books that Freud’s system represents extraverted thinking, so what I add now is my personal conviction, namely that Freud was an introverted feeling type and that therefore his writings bear the characteristics of his inferior extraverted thinking. There you typically have the fact that the basic ideas are few and that they are raced through, and that the writer has beaten through an enormous amount of outer material and is completely oriented toward the outer object, so that a rather poor biological outer setup of facts is connected with the basis of his thoughts. If you read biographical notes about Freud, you see that as a person he had a most differentiated way of treating people. He was an excellent analyst and had a very differentiated way of treating his patients. He had also a kind of hidden gentlemanliness which had a positive influence upon his patients and in general upon his surroundings. One must really in his case make a distinction between his theory and his personality as a human being. I think, from what one hears about him, that he belonged to the introverted feeling type.

The advantage of inferior extraverted thinking is what I now characterize negatively as racing with a few ideas through a tremendous amount of material. (Freud himself complained that his dream interpretation felt awfully monotonous—the same interpretation of every dream was boring even to him.) If this is not overdone, and if the introverted feeling type is aware of the danger of his inferior function and keeps a check on it, it has the great advantage of being simple, clear, and intelligible. It has a few comprehensive thoughts which have a kind of obviousness, in a positive sense of the word. But this is not enough, and the introverted feeling type is obliged to drill a bit deeper and try to specify and differentiate his extraverted thinking, if he does not wish at some time to fall into the trap of this kind of monomania of ideas. Therefore he has to specify his thinking, that is, make the hypothesis that each fact he cites in proof of his ideas illustrates them with a slightly differentiated slant, and with this object in view, his idea should be reformulated each time. In that way he keeps up the living process of contact between thought and fact instead of just imposing his thought upon facts. Inferior extraverted thinking has just the same negative tendencies to being tyrannical, stiff, and unmolded, and in that way not quite adapted to its own object, that all inferior functions have.

THE RELATIONSHIP OF THE INFERIOR FUNCTION TO OTHER CONTENTS OF THE UNCONSCIOUS

We have now to ask how the inferior function relates to the shadow, the anima, and the Self when it appears in dreams. It relates to and gives a certain quality to all these figures. For instance, the shadow in an intuitive type will often be personified by a sensation type; you can say that the inferior function is contaminated by the shadow in each type, for in a thinking type it will appear as a relatively inferior or primitive feeling person, and so on. Thus, if in interpreting a dream you ask for a description of this shadow figure, people will describe their own inferior function. When you try to make the shadow conscious, or to become conscious of your own shadow, the inferior function will give the animus or the anima figure a special quality. For example, the anima figure, if personified by a particular human being, will very often appear as a person of the opposite function, the fourth function. Again, when personifications of the Self appear, the same thing will happen. You can therefore say that the inferior function is the door through which all the figures of the unconscious enter.

Our conscious realm is like a room with four doors, and it will be the fourth door by which the shadow, the animus, and the anima and the personification of the Self will come in. They will not enter as often through the other doors, which in a way is self-evident, because the inferior function is so close to the unconscious and remains so barbaric and inferior and undeveloped that it is naturally the weak spot in consciousness through which the figures of the unconscious can break in. In consciousness it is experienced as a weak spot, as that disagreeable thing which will never leave you in peace but always causes trouble, for every time you feel you have acquired a certain inner balance or inner standpoint, something happens from within or without to throw you off again, and it is always through that fourth door, which you cannot shut. You can keep the three doors of your inner room closed, but on the fourth door the lock does not work, and there, when you do not expect it, the unexpected will come in again. Thank God, you can say, for otherwise the whole life process would petrify and stagnate in a wrong kind of consciousness. It is the ever-bleeding wound of the conscious personality, but through it the unconscious can always come in and so enlarge consciousness and bring forth new experience.

As long as you have not developed your other functions, your auxiliary functions, they too will be open doors, so in a person who has only developed one superior function, the two auxiliary functions will operate in the same way and will appear in personifications of the shadow, animus, and anima. It is only when you have succeeded in developing three functions, in locking three of your inner doors, that the problem of the fourth door still remains, for that is the one which is apparently not meant to be locked. There one has to succumb, one has to suffer defeat, in order to develop further. So if you attend to your own dreams, you will see that these inner figures, if they appear personified as real persons, tend to choose such personifications. Another kind of personification, which naturally has to do with the shadow, is that the fourth function is contaminated with personifications from the lower levels of the social strata of the population or by the underdeveloped countries. That is a beautiful expression—the “underdeveloped” countries. It is just marvelous how we Westerners in our superior arrogance look down on the underdeveloped countries and project our inferior functions upon them! The underdeveloped countries are within ourselves, and therefore, naturally, because this is such an obvious symbolism, the inferior function for a white person often appears as a wild Negro or a wild Indian. Frequently also the inferior function is expressed by exotic people of some kind: Chinese, Russian, or whoever may give that quality. The unconscious tries in this way to convey the quality of something unknown to the conscious realm, as if it would say: it is as unknown to you as the Chinese are unknown in your culture. The shadow, animus, and anima appear very often projected onto Asian or African or “primitive” people.

This dream simile for the inferior function is also particularly fitting in that this function tends to have, in a negative way, a barbaric character and to cause possession. If, for example, introverts fall into extraversion, they do so in a possessed and barbaric way. I mean barbaric in the sense of being unable to exert conscious control, being swept away, being unable to put a brake on, unable to stop. This kind of exaggerated, driven extraversion is rarely found in extraverts, but in introverts it is like a car without brakes that goes on without the slightest control of consciousness. That is a rather well-known fact, because the inferior extraversion of introverts has to manifest outside, socially. An introvert may become disagreeable and arrogant, pushing and shouting so loudly that the whole room has to listen and everybody must notice. Such inferior extraversion may suddenly pop out in this way when an introvert is drunk. The introversion of the extravert is just as barbaric and possessed but not so socially visible because an extravert disappears right out of life if possessed by barbaric introversion. He goes completely mad in his own room, but it is not visible to other people. Extraverts who fall into their primitive introversion walk about looking very important. In dark allusions they assure everybody that they are having very deep mystical experiences about which they cannot talk, they are so important and so deep. In an important kind of way they indicate that they are now deeply steeped in active imagination and the process of individuation, and you know that you must leave at once, because they have to work on that. And then they sit in a possessed way for hours, unable to relax and unable to pull out of it. If you ring them up, they say they are deep in their process of individuation and cannot go to a tea party just now, and this is thrown at you with a kind of defensive attitude. You have a strange feeling of a barbaric kind of possession. If this happens to them in the form of yoga, or Anthroposophy, then there will be that same display of something mystical of great importance going on and of an unfathomable depth into which they have now dived. There is a mixture in it, for actually they are constantly threatened with switching back to their extraversion, which explains their overemphasis on lack of time and wanting no contact with anybody. They would love to switch over to their extraversion and go to every tea party and every dinner party, so in a kind of defensive way, they say, “No, this is absolutely forbidden; now I am in the depth of the psyche.” Very often in this phase people are sure that they are the type that they now have to live. For instance, extraverts who are in the phase where they should assimilate introversion will always swear that they are and always have been introverts and that it has always been an error to call them extraverts. In this way they try to help themselves to get into this other side, which for them is so difficult to acquire. If they try to express their introverted inner experiences, they generally do so with overexcitement. They become terribly emotional and want to take the floor and have everybody listen. That is because to them it is so tremendously unique and important.

This barbaric quality of the inferior function which is mixed up with the other attitudinal type is one of the great practical problems and constitutes the great split of the human personality, for not only has one to switch from one function to another, but with the fourth function one definitely has to switch to the other attitudinal type, and then one risks (or even cannot avoid) being temporarily possessed by the opposite attitude and thereby become barbaric and unadapted. One can thank God if one’s opposite function is only personified by primitive people in dreams, for it is very often represented by Stone Age people or even by animals, so that the inferior function has not even reached a primitive human level; it is still completely on an animal level. The inferior function in that stage dwells, so to speak, in the body and can only manifest in physical symptoms and not yet on a human conscious level, not even a primitive one. When you see, for example, how sometimes an introverted intuitive stretches in the sunshine with such enjoyment of his inferior function, you have absolutely the feeling that he is like a dog sitting in the sunshine enjoying the sun or food; his sensation is still on the level of a dog or a cat or some other domestic animal.

Feeling in a thinking type very often does not go beyond the dog level. It is more difficult to imagine that the feeling type thinks like an animal, but even that is true; these people have a habit of making banal statements which one feels any cow, cat, or dog could have made if they could speak, for they move in a realm of complete generalities. Dogs sometimes make helpless attempts to think. My dog sometimes drew some terribly wrong conclusions. He always lay on my couch, and I used to try to chase him down, and from that he concluded that I did not like him to sit on anything above the ground. So whenever one put him on something, he became bewildered and thought he would be punished. He couldn’t understand that it was only the couch and not any other raised piece of furniture which was forbidden. He had simply drawn the wrong conclusion! It is just the same when you try to teach dogs to be clean in the house. They conclude that the same applies to any kind of paved floor, and they and their owners get into all sorts of trouble until at last the poor dog realizes that it is only in the house that he must be careful. There you see that a dog has a kind of halfway undeveloped thinking which tends to draw the wrong conclusion. I have often been struck by the fact that feeling types think in exactly the same way, for when you try to explain something to them, they may draw a completely general conclusion, some sweeping assertion which does not fit the situation in any way, and they do the most stupid things. Primitive thinking started in their heads, and they drew some kind of amazingly unadapted conclusion, which led to entirely wrong results. Thus you can often say that the thinking level of the feeling type is about on the dog’s level; it is as general and helpless and stiff as you can observe it in the higher animals.

In general, in most normal societies, people cover up their inferior function with a persona. One of the main reasons why one develops a persona is so as not to expose inferiorities, especially the inferiorities of the fourth function, which is contaminated with one’s animal nature, one’s unadapted emotions and affects.

When Jung founded the Psychology Club in Zurich, he had in mind to try to find out how a group, or a society, would work in which the inferior function would not be covered up, but where people would contact each other by it. The result was absolutely amazing. People who came into this society from outside were shocked out of their wits by the rude, bad behavior and the absolutely unending quarrels this group displayed. I visited the Club many years ago and till then had never made a move toward becoming a member because I felt too shy. One day Jung said to me, “Do you not want to join the Psychology Club, or do you not dare to join it?” I said, “I did not dare to join it, but would love to.” So he said, “All right, I will be your godfather”—we need godfathers to get into the Club—“but I’ll wait first to see if you have a dream, if the right moment has come.” And what did I dream? I dreamed that a natural scientist, an old man who looked very much like Jung, had made up an experimental group to find out how animals of different species got along with each other! I came into the place, and there were aquariums with fish in them, enclosures with tortoises, newts, and such creatures, and cages with birds and dogs and cats, and the old man was sitting in the middle, taking notes on how the animals behaved socially with one another. I discovered then that I myself was a flying fish in an aquarium and could jump out. I told my dream to Jung and he said, with a grin, “I think now you are mature enough to join the Psychology Club; you have got the central idea, its purpose.”

In this rather humorous way the unconscious took up the idea, namely that it is really a great problem, for as conscious beings we can contact each other, but in this inferior function, one person is a cat, another is a tortoise, and a third a hare—there are all those animals! Such social adaptations present a great difficulty. There are all the problems of having one’s own territory, one’s own ground, for every animal species has a tendency to have a few meters of homeland. Every bird and every animal defends its territory against intruders; one may not step on the other’s ground, and all these complicated rituals build up again as soon as human beings join together and discard the persona and try really to contact each other. Then one really feels as if one is moving in the jungle or the bush: one must not step on this snake or frighten that bird by making a quick movement, and things become very complicated. This need for bush manners has even led to the belief that psychology causes social behavior to deteriorate, which to some extent is quite true. At the Jung Institute, too, we are in a way much nastier and more difficult a group to get along with than, say, a society for breeding dogs or hares, or a club for fishermen, for there the social contact is in general on a much better level. Such an accusation has often been made not only of the Psychology Club but also of the Institute. But the truth is simply that we tend not to cover up what is going on underneath. In all other societies or groups of people, that is covered up and plays under the table; underneath there are all these difficulties, but they are never brought up to the surface and discussed openly. But, in fact, naturally, facing the shadow and the inferior function has the effect that people become socially more difficult and less conventionally adapted, and that creates more friction. On the other hand, it also creates a greater liveliness: it is never boring, for there is always a storm in a teacup and excitement, and the group is very much alive instead of having a dull, conventional, correct surface. It has even gone so far that in the Psychology Club, the animal tendencies to have one’s own realm became so strong that people started reserving seats; there was So-and-So’s chair, and you couldn’t sit on it; that was a major insult, because So-and-So always sat there. I have noticed that there are also papers on certain chairs on which people write their names: this is my chair—in other words, there the dog or the cat So-and-So sits! That is a very good sign, and I thought: “Well now, that is better, matters are improving!” It is a restoration of an original and natural situation. But it is amazing how deeply the inferior function can connect one down into the realm of animal nature within oneself.

Apart from the humorous way in which I have just described it, it is a very important fact, for the inferior function is actually the connection with one’s deepest instincts, wit one’s inner roots, and is, so to speak, that which connects us with the whole past of mankind. Primitive societies perform dances with animal masks which are meant to connect the tribe with their ancestral ghosts, that is, with the whole past of the tribe. We have, for the most part, lost such masked dances, though there is still Carnival as a remnant. Anyone who doesn’t know his inferior function yet should go to a masked Carnival and find out how he feels then! On such occasions you can often reconnect with your animal past and with your inferior function.

Theoretically one can naturally have all the functions all ways, but it won’t be a problem, and there would not be much intensity of life in it. Jung once said that your opposite type is not the hardest thing to understand. That is, if you have introverted feeling, it is very difficult to understand an extraverted thinking type, but it is even harder to understand someone of the same functional type with the other attitude. That means that it would be most difficult for an introverted feeling type to understand an extraverted feeling type. There one feels that one does not know how the wheels go around in that person’s head; one cannot feel one’s way into it. Such people remain to a great extent a puzzle and are very difficult to understand spontaneously. That is why the whole theory of types is tremendously important practically, for it is the only thing which can prevent one from completely misunderstanding certain other people. It is a clue, at least theoretically, to some understanding of a person whose spontaneous reactions are a complete puzzle, which you would, if you reacted spontaneously, misunderstand completely. Just the other day I observed such a case. An intuitive brushed aside facts to such an extent that it gave a sensation type the idea that the other was the worst liar he had ever met his in life. Everything that intuitive person said was not quite right; the sensation type checked it all, and every single fact was twisted or in some other way not quite right, and so on. So the sensation type got the idea that this was just awful, that this person lied from morning to night—not one fact she had cited was right! Now, in that special case it was not a question of lying, but of tremendous one-sidedness and complete inaccuracy on the factual side. But the accusation of lying was incorrect, and in that sense it is very important to understand the types, because then a lot of very difficult misunderstandings can be avoided. I was called in to settle the dispute and tried to explain that in this case it was just the classical inaccuracy of the intuitive type. You must pin down such a person, interrupt every sentence, and say, “How was it exactly?” But it is even more difficult, as I said, to understand the same function type with the other attitude. There one can really only use theory to understand the other, because with one’s spontaneous reactions one cannot.

In general, in the realm of the inferior function, people are afraid of each other, terribly afraid, because they feel helpless. I remember once I quarreled with a woman of my same type—introverted thinking—and we shouted at each other. The night after, I dreamed that a hare and a budgerigar were put together in a cage, and the budgerigar was sitting on a perch shivering with fear and the hare in the other corner of the cage doing the same. So the comment of the dream was: on the surface you quarrel, but underneath you are both deathly afraid of each other. The feeling personality is deathly afraid of the other feeling personality. So I would say that the only way to relate on the level of the inferior function is by what Jung calls bush politeness. In the bush, if people meet each other, they stop ten meters off and put down their spears ostentatiously to show that they have no evil intentions, and then they bow, and sometimes kneel down, and then slowly they move toward each other, and stop again and bow again, and then assure each other that they have no intent to harm, and then only do they shake hands, which is very similar to the way in which animals that do not know each other approach each other. They take a look from a distance, advance a little, and then stop again, and then try to read in the other’s eyes what the other is going to do. We do exactly the same thing! As soon as we fall into the inferior function, we behave like primitives to each other and therefore need all the rituals of the primitive in meeting each other. One can only compensate for the fierceness and unpredictability and unadaptedness of the inferior function by bush politeness.

I have just read in Van Gennep’s Les Rîtes de Passage examples of how explorers approach a primitive village. They have to stop when they are so many miles away, and then three messengers from the village come, and the villagers have to be assured that the explorers have no evil designs and especially that they do not intend to use black magic against the inhabitants. The messengers then go back, and when they return, gifts are exchanged, sometimes even women are exchanged or may be given to the guests, who sleep with them, because that establishes a kind of kinship; if a man sleeps with another man’s wife, he is akin to him, he has been taken into his family. The Naskapi people of the Labrador peninsula did that, and many Eskimo men used to lend their wives to foreigners for the night, to prevent any kind of evil outburst, any thought that a guest might murder the people in the house, or that the latter might murder the guest, which could happen at any time in those countries where there were no police, for one could just disappear forever if one visited such people. Among many primitive people there is an exchange of blood; they cut each other and exchange blood. There is also a special way of kissing and of exchanging gifts—all those rîtes de passage come into play as soon as you have to relate to people on the level of the inferior function.

We can see the same thing in everyday life. For instance, you may have known someone for two or three years, but only on the conventional level of having tea or dinner together and talking about the weather and politics and theoretical questions, but never having dared to touch the sore spots in each other or to bring the conversation around to some ticklish point. But then one day you feel that it is not a real relationship, that you are not getting really close, and then you have a little wine or, if the atmosphere is favorable, you come out with your sore spots and invite the other to come out with his, and so through all the precautions of bush politeness you slowly really approach! I don’t know any other formula than bush politeness, for that is the formula with which to approach the other side, because the sore spots generally are connected with the inferior function.

There is a difference between personal politeness and bush politeness. Let’s take a practical example: I was once driving home with an intuitive type late at night, and he forgot to turn on the ignition and tried over and over again to start the car, and it would not go. I ventured politely to ask whether he had switched on. “Naturally,” came the reply, but with such an affect that I didn’t dare say any more! Now, that was his inferior sensation! So there we sat for half an hour, and I felt sure of what the trouble was but didn’t know how to tell him! The slightest tone of knowing better, or of the governess, would have produced a similar reply. I felt so helpless because I knew all the time what was wrong but didn’t know how to get around the sore spot. So you see, there the inferior function and the sore spot are absolutely connected. If he had not had inferior sensation, he would not have been so touchy. If I had said, “Have you switched on?” He would have said, “Oh, my God!” and done so and off we would have gone, but instead we sat for an hour on the road, guessing what the trouble could be, and I just didn’t know how to approach this sore area of the inferior function.

You see, there was the question of his prestige. I must say, a lot of alcohol added to the abaissement, which made the affects much more explosive, and then the man was older than I, and there was the question of being impolite. The kind of politeness that was called for was not of the persona; it is a matter of having real feeling and understanding for the other person’s weakness and not daring to touch that weakness. If you trigger off an affect, there is always the risk of a complete break, it is the razor’s edge, for there may be a definite split. I know, for example, that once a group of twelve people left the Psychology Club in a mad affect. They wouldn’t discuss the thing anymore but just left, and among them were quite valuable people. I met one of them later—an old man who was terribly sorry about it—and I asked him why he did not come back now, but he could not; he said it would be against his feeling of honor. The affect had gone too far! He had said such awful things in his rage that he felt he could not now come back; his pride made it impossible. That is tragic and very unfortunate, and that is why bush politeness is necessary in dealing with the inferior function, because the affect very easily goes too far and then the relationship is broken forever. The same can happen with two people as well as with a group; they very easily burst so far apart that they cannot be reconciled again. The inferior function plus the load of emotion behind it is a really dangerous business.

The assimilation of functions is such a serious business that people generally spend a very long time in assimilating their auxiliary functions and sometimes, say for at least eight to ten years, become a type which was not their original type. I once, for example, knew a woman who was an introverted feeling type; that is, in the past she had been a feeling type, but in the stage at which we met, she had already switched the process to developing intuition and at that stage had as much trouble with her sensation as if she had been a genuine intuitive. She was in the stage of being an intuitive; she even swore that that was her type! But if you looked at her past history carefully, you saw that that was not true. In the years before we met she had been living mainly by intuition, for her feeling was already worn out and contained no more life. And then she went through all the crises of having to switch from intuition to sensation which you see with a primarily intuitive type; for example, she became completely inaccurate about facts and had trouble relating to them, exactly as an intuitive does. She then stated with great emphasis that it had always been an error to call her a feeling type, for she was an intuitive, but she was wrong! She was right and wrong for at the stage at which she was, she was exactly like an intuitive, but that was because she was at the stage of living in her second function and was just in the crisis of getting over to the third.

The process of assimilating the functions is not in any way easy. To assimilate a function really means to live at least a few years completely with that one function in the foreground before you can claim that you have assimilated it. If once you do a little bit of cooking or sewing, that does not mean that you have assimilated your sensation function, and if you do a little bit of thinking on a Sunday afternoon, it does not mean that you have assimilated your thinking function. People often have great illusions about that. It means that the whole emphasis of life, for a while, lies on that one function. Switching over to the next function takes place when you feel that the way you are getting along now has become lifeless, when you get bored with yourself and your activities, or constantly have the feeling that this is not it—then you have again reached the stage where you have to make a switch over to another function. Generally it happens that you do not have to make up your mind theoretically. The best way to know how to switch over is simply to say, “All right, all this is now completely boring; it does not mean anything to me anymore. Where in my past life is an activity which I feel I could still enjoy? An activity out of which I could still get a kick?” And then just genuinely pick that one up, and in that case you will see that you have switched over to the inferior function.

ARCHETYPAL PARALLELS TO THE MODEL OF THE FOUR FUNCTIONS

With this model of the four functions, Jung wanted to set up a heuristic model which allows us to understand better the functioning of human consciousness. This is a working hypothesis, not a dogma. Surprisingly enough, however, quaternarian models have also come up in physics and in theology, models which seem to have a relationship with Jung’s function model. In physics there are, for instance, the four Wilkinson principles. According to Wilkinson, you can look at physical phenomena in four ways, explaining all phenomena from the standpoint of energetic processes. That would be analogous to the sensation function, or sense perception, which is an energetic process—photons hit our eyes, and so on. The principle of gravitation would have a certain analogy with the thinking function—arranging facts in a certain order, an upper and a lower realm. You can explain material phenomena to a great extent from that principle or from that angle. The principle is cohesion within the nucleus of an atom. Particles of the same charge repel each other at a certain distance, but if they approach beyond that, they attract each other with a specially strong cohesion. That would correspond to the feeling function of relationship and relatedness. Finally, the fourth principle is what the physicists call the “weak interaction,” which is a constant, very slow, diffuse process which dissolves all material phenomena. This dissolution would correspond to intuition, which always tends to blur or dissolve facts and can only operate if it does so.

That is an interesting new viewpoint which shows that Jung, with his intuition, when he set forth this principle of the four functions, touched a very archetypal idea to which now an analogy from a completely different angle reappears in modem physics and is expounded by people who have not been influenced by Jungian thought whatsoever. My attitude toward this is that the idea of the four functions is an archetypal model for looking at things and that it has the advantages—and disadvantages—of all scientific models. Wolfgang Pauli, the physicist, once said something which seems to me very convincing, namely that no new theory, or new fruitful invention in the field of science, has ever been put forth without the working of an archetypal idea. For instance, the ideas of three-dimensional or four-dimensional space are based on an archetypal representation, such as has always worked, to a certain degree, in a very productive way and has helped to explain many phenomena. But then comes what Pauli calls the self-limitation of that archetypal hypothesis, namely that if one overexpands the idea to phenomena where it does not apply, then that same fruitful idea becomes an inhibition for further scientific progress. The idea of three-dimensional space, for example, is still completely valid for ordinary mechanics, and every carpenter and mason uses it when he makes a drawing or a plan, but if you try to apply the idea to microphysics, then you go off the track. So it can be said that that was an archetypal idea which originated, as can be clearly proved in the scientific mind of Westerners, through the dogma of the Trinity. Kepler, when he made his planetary models, said that space has three dimensions because there is the Trinity! Or take Descartes, who asserted the idea of causality by saying that it was based on the fact that God never has whims but always proceeds in a logical manner, and therefore everything must be causally connected. If God had sudden whims and sudden ideas, then there could not be causality. So all the basic ideas even of natural science are archetypal models, but they work in a fruitful way only if one does not force into them facts or areas of facts where they do not fit.

I think that this theory of the four functions has a kind of practical value but it is not a dogma, which would make it completely rigid. That is why Jung very clearly puts it forward as a heuristical standpoint—a fruitful hypothesis by which you can find out things, but not something which you can in any way pin down as an absolute dogma. But we know now that in all scientific investigations we cannot do more than put forward thinking models and see how far the facts fit, and if the facts do not coincide, then we have to correct the models. Sometimes we do not have to revise the whole thinking model, but must say that it only applies in a certain area and that as soon as you switch over to another area of facts it becomes a distortion. I personally am convinced, especially with this new confirmation from the Wilkinson principles, that we have not yet exhausted the fruitfulness of the model, but that does not mean that there are not facts which do not fit into it and would force us to revise it.

The problem of the third and the fourth in religious symbolism also connects with the problem of the four functions. To refer to the first diagram in this book, the archetypal constellation would be at the basis of the psyche, the structural tendency to develop four functions which you find in all mythologies of four persons, four directions of the compass, the four winds, the four angles at the four corners of the world, and all these symbolisms of four groups. It is in Christian symbolism also, for instance, in the symbols of the four evangelists, where three are animals and one a human being. There are the four sons of Horns, with three animal and one human head. Those are manifestations of a basic structural archetype in the human psyche, of the disposition in a human being which, as soon as he tries to cast a model of a total existence—of the total cosmic world, total human life, or something like that—tends to use a fourfold model. The choice just naturally falls upon a fourfold model more often than on any other. In China, it is to be found everywhere. These fourfold mandalas always arise from an impulse to cast a model of total existence, where people do not want to face a single fact but want a mapping out of general phenomena. It would therefore be an inborn structural disposition in the human psyche to use such fourfold models for totalities.

The problem of the four functions in the consciousness of an individual would be a secondary product of this more basic model. That is why, as I tried to explain in connection with the earlier diagram, it is not advisable to use the factors of the conscious functions to explain functions in the archetypal structure. Rather, one should say that the problem of the four functions in the consciousness of an individual is one of the many manifestations of this more general archetypal disposition. If, for instance, you try to explain the model of the four mountains in the four directions of the world in China, or the four winds in the four corners of the world, if you try to pin them down by saying that one must be thinking, the other must be another function, you never get anywhere; it does not click. So I would say the archetype of the quaternio as a model of the explanation of the total situation is more general than the four functions. There is in the human being an inborn disposition always to cast this model when attempting to establish a general orientation toward inner or outer life. It would therefore be dangerous to reduce the dogma of the Trinity and the problem of the fourth person of the Trinity, whether the Virgin Mary or the devil, to the problem of functions. I would rather turn it the other way around and say that it is a more general archetypal problem but, in the individual, does assume, among other things, the form of—or touches on the problem of—the four functions. For example, in the Christian religion, the Devil is the symbol of absolute evil in the Godhead, but it would be very presumptuous if you accorded your inferior thinking or inferior feeling such a great honor as to call it the devil in person! That would be rather an inflated explanation of your inferiorities—just as you could not say that your three relatively developed functions were identical with the Trinity! As soon as you put it as bluntly as that, you see how ridiculous the idea would be, but you can say that there is some connection, since evil, negativity, and destructiveness do connect in the individual with the inferior function. As a practical example, let us say that you have an inborn tendency to intrigue, yet you will rarely intrigue, or your intriguing shadow will rarely interfere with your main function, because it is so much under your ethical control that it cannot sneak in there; yet it connects very easily with the inferior function.

I can give you an instance of something that happened to me the other day. An intuitive person had to send me a letter with some very agreeable news for me, but she was very jealous and mislaid that letter. Now, did her inferior sensation function make her mislay the letter with the good news for me, or was it her intriguing, jealous shadow? It was both! The intriguing, jealous shadow got her via the inferior function. You can never pin down such a person; you can only say, “Oh, that’s your inferior sensation, don’t let’s mention it again.” But it is typical enough that the shadow or the negative impulse sneaks into the inferior function. I remember the case of a man, a feeling type, who was terribly jealous because a woman in whom he was interested had a tremendous transference to Jung, so that the feeling type felt snubbed by her. She just wouldn’t look at him, and that cut him to the heart. He could not get over it for a long time and even wrote a book against Jungian psychology, full of errors and misquotations in which he put forth a so-called better new philosophy—much better than Jung’s—nomina sunt odiosa. On the feeling level—his superior function—this man could not do a nasty thing; he could not attack Jung, for instance, by getting nasty because his feeling was too differentiated. He saw too clearly that Jung, who could not help this woman’s transference, had nothing to do with it, so his feeling remained decent, but his inferior thinking picked the motivation—which was rotten jealousy and nothing else—and produced the most amazing junk, even to the extent of misquoting certain sentences in Jung’s books. He was not even able to copy out the quotations properly because he had been blinded and swept away by a shadow impulse. Shadow impulses, destructive impulses, jealousy, hatred, and so on, generally get one via the inferior function, because that is the weak spot, that is where we are not in constant control of ourselves, are not constantly aware of the operations of our actions, so that in this corner, any destructive or negative tendencies attack and there you could say that the devil does have to do with the fourth function because it gets people through it. In medieval terms, we could say that the devil wants to destroy people and will always try to get you by your inferior function. That is the problem of the fourth door of your room, where angels can come in, but also devils! In that way I think the problem of the Trinity and the devil, as Jung comments in his paper “A Psychological Approach to the Dogma of the Trinity,” does connect with the function problem, but you cannot reduce it to the function problem. The function problem is a subdivision, not the explanation of the problem, but practically, in the individual case, it is, in my experience, connected in this way. But you could not call, for instance, such an archetypal figure as the Virgin Mary or the devil a personification of the inferior function.

However, the problem of the fourth function has in some ways a religious archetypal dimension, and the integration of the fourth element into a trinitarian system has occupied the minds of many alchemists. Jung has commented extensively on a remarkable text of the Middle Ages which is concerned with this problem.³

This alchemical text mirrors, in a projected form, the problem of the fourth function and a way of establishing a middle ground for this insoluble problem. It is called the “Treatise of the Alchemist Aristotle addressed to Alexander the Great about the Philosophical Stone.” It is probably of Arabic origin and was translated into Latin. The following recipe is given:

Take the snake and put it on the car with the four wheels and let it return so often to the earth that the whole car sinks into the depths of the sea and nothing is left visible but the blackest dead sea. There you must leave that car with its wheels until so many vapors arise from the snake that the whole plain dries out and becomes completely sandy and black. This is the earth which is no earth, but a stone without weight. But when the vapors return in the form of rain, then you can pull the car out of the water onto dry land and at that moment you will have put your four wheels upon the car.⁴

That is a very strange image. You take the wheels off the car and load them on it. It is interesting that completely independently you can find the same image in the I Ching, where it is sometimes said that one has to take off the wheels from the carriage. As far as I know, that cannot have any connection with Western alchemy. When you have put your four wheels upon the carriage, you can, if you wish, “go on towards the Red Sea, running without running, moving without movement.” Jung then comments that the snake in alchemy is the symbol of Mercurius, the prima materia, the matter with which you start the process and which further on personifies a kind of nature spirit full of opposites. As shown in Jung’s paper “The Spirit Mercurius,” Mercurius was thought of as a kind of double ambiguous nature spirit. This Mercurius snake is here placed upon a carriage. The wheels are interpreted in the text as the wheels of the elements, and the carriage or the car is called a spheric tomb, a round tomb or sepulcher. That means that the simile of the car in our text represents the alchemical vessel in which the spirit of the unconscious is contained. Jung says the symbolism describes briefly the essential phases of the opus: the snake of Hermes, the cold side of nature (that is, the unconscious), is caught in a round vessel which is made of glass and which means the Cosmos as well as the soul. If one looks at it from a psychological standpoint, it would represent consciousness of the outer and inner world. The putting of the wheels onto the carriage indicates a cessation of all four functions: one withdraws them inward, so to speak. The later transformation of these four wheels corresponds to the psychological assimilation of the integration process through the transcendent function. This function unites the opposites, which, as alchemy shows, are ordered in a quatemio, if they concern a totality.

We have not solved the problem which I touched on with the fourfold structures diagram. I said then that the ego assimilates its first function and is for a while content with that. After a time it assimilates a second conscious function and lives contentedly with that—it has pulled up both from the unconscious. Then it pulls up a third onto the plane of consciousness which contains the life activities. Now three functions are assimilated on the upper, civilized level upon which we try normally to live. I have said that one cannot bring the fourth function up to this level, no matter how much one tries. On the contrary, if one tries too hard, the fourth function will pull one down to a completely primitive level. You can simply drop down suddenly onto a low animal level if you want to, and then live your inferior function in a concrete form without having assimilated it in any way, because in such a case you lose the whole upper structure of your former personality, all that you have developed up until then. You just forget about it; it does not mean anything any more to you.

The fourth function is always the great problem: if I don’t live it, I am frustrated and half dead and everything is boring. If I live it, it is on such a low level that I cannot do it. Most people have not the courage; others would have it, but they see that it is not a solution either. So what do you do? This is the great problem, which generally comes only rather late in life, thank God, because it only comes really in a strong form when the three other functions have been assimilated, and at that moment this chemical recipe comes into place: namely, the effort to assimilate the fourth function by putting it into a spherical vessel, that is by giving it a frame of fantasy. It comes at the moment when one can only get on, not by living the fourth function in a concrete outer or inner way, but by giving it the possibility of a fantasy expression, whether in writing or painting or dancing, or any other form of active imagination.

Jung found that active imagination was practically the only possibility for assimilating the fourth function. He discovered that after having assimilated three functions, he couldn’t get on with his inferior function, and he began to play—to give his inferior function an expression through symbolic play. There in the choice of the means of active imagination you generally see best how the inferior function comes into play. For instance, an intuitive type will generally have a genuine desire to fix his active imagination with clay or in stone or by making it materially visible in some way, perhaps by making constructions. Otherwise it will not be real, and the inferior function will not come into play. Jung, being an intuitive, discovered it first by the need to build little clay and stone castles, and he saw that that was how to realize the problem constellated by the fourth function. Dancing is a rare form of active imagination which I have usually seen done by people whose feeling is the fourth function. Sometimes thinking types, when they have to assimilate their feeling function, have a genuine wish to express it in dancing in certain primitive rhythms, so dancing as an expression of active imagination is, as far as I have seen, typical for that inferior function. Inferior feeling can also express itself in very colorful paintings, color in general expressing strong feeling moods. A sensation type will conceive of weird stories or wild, fantastic novels into which intuition can run. So we can say that when there comes the problem of how to assimilate the unconscious psychological problem by fantasizing, the choice is generally connected with the inferior function, and usually it is only through active imagination that one can establish the middle lane upon which, so to speak, the three superior functions fall down and the fourth comes up.

At that moment there are no longer four functions because one transmits one’s feeling of life into an inner center, and the four functions remain only as instruments which can be used at will, taking them up and putting them down again. The ego and its conscious activity are no longer identical with any of the functions; one moves out of them altogether, which is what the alchemical text represents by the putting of the four wheels upon the car. There is a complete standstill in a kind of inner center, and the functions do not function anymore toward the outer or inner world; they are not wheels which turn. There comes a standstill of all four functions, and then one can bring them out at will, as, for instance, an airplane can let down its wheels in order to land and then draw them in again when it has to fly. This is really the whole essence of the process of individuation. Then the four functions are like wheels which have been put upon the car but which you can sometimes at will put on again if you wish to use them. At that moment the problem of the functions is no longer relevant; they have become mere instruments of a consciousness which is no longer rooted in them or in a driven way active within the functions, but has its basis of operation in another dimension, a dimension which can only be created by the world of imagination. That is why Jung calls this the transcendent function. Fantasizing this inner ground is what he calls the transcendent function; it creates the uniting symbols. This coincides strangely with the alchemical symbolism, which always speaks of the problem of the four elements—water, fire, air, and earth—which are, as in our text, represented as wheels which have to be integrated. Then there is the fifth essence, which is not another element but is, so to speak, the gist of all four and none of the four; it is the four in one and not the four. There you have the same idea: onto the four comes a fifth thing which is not the four but is something beyond them and consists of all of them. That is what the alchemists called the fifth essence, the quinta essentia or philosopher’s stone. It means a consolidated nucleus of the personality which is no longer identical or identified with any of the functions. Here one steps out, so to speak, of identification with one’s own consciousness and with one’s own unconscious, and dwells or tries to dwell on this middle plane in which all four are integrated. From then on, as the text says, one moves without movement, runs without running (currens sine cursu, movens sine motu), and then another kind of development begins because in alchemy, as well as in the development of the personality, this problem of the four functions is only the first step—it is quite difficult enough to get even as far as that!

What we call active imagination is different from what generally is used in other therapeutic systems where you let people just fantasize. It is fantasizing with ego consciousness taking its standpoint. You could call this fifth thing the urge toward individuation. When it is still unconscious, it is simply that urge toward individuation, that element of constant dissatisfaction and restlessness which nags people till they reach a higher level again and again in life. The principium individuationis is identical with the transcendent function, but in the special form of Jungian psychology one does not let it just bite one till one has to take the next step, but one turns toward it directly and tries to give it form by expressing it through active imagination. And that, in a way, then leads to an evolution which transcends the problem of the four functions, so that the constant battle of the four functions comes to a rest.

With your inner nucleus of consciousness you stay in the middle place and no longer identify with what goes on in the upper or lower planes. You stay within your active imagination, so to speak, and you have the feeling that that is where your life process goes on, or really takes place; all the rest are illustrations of it. For instance, on the one plane you very often notice synchronistic events happening, and on the other are the dreams, but you keep your consciousness turned toward the events which happen on the middle plane, that is, on the events which evolve within your active imagination, the thing with which you move along through life. The other planes still exist for you, but you are not centered in them.

Wholeness forms the center of consciousness and the parts one can visit at will, but they are no longer essential. Actually, when you talk to people who have not yet done this, you feel that they are identical with one function: one minute they talk of thoughts and are right in what they think, or they tell you about dreams and are right in them, not outside. Their ego—the flow of life—is absolutely identical with one of their functions. By contrast, when the other process has happened, the central part of the personality has stepped out of the functions. You can still think or feel at will, according to the requirements of the situation, but your self-awareness is no longer identical with the function. The center of gravity shifts away from the ego and its functional functioning into an interim position, into attending to the hints of the Self.

By the understanding of the four functions, Jung has created an instrument by which a lot of unnecessary quarrels and misunderstandings can be removed. It is especially helpful to appease marital quarrels. What remains a task for future generations is to apply it to ethnic groups. The latter are also often predominately ruled by a function: for instance, the Irish by intuition, the British by sensation, the Germans by thinking, and the French by feeling. So there is a lot more to investigate in the future.

NOTES

1. C. G. Jung, Psychological Types, CW 6 (1971).

2. Ibid., paras. 628ff.

3. C. G. Jung, Mysterium Coniunctionis, CW 14 (1963), paras. 260ff.

4. Ibid., para. 260.