Part 6

TYPES.

In picturing Roosevelt as an extravert and Nietzsche as an introvert, I did not mean to imply, of course, that either lacked the opposite mechanism. All of us are born with both the sexual-instinct and the ego-instinct, the gift of love and the will-to-power. However, because we are loaded more one way than the other, the one tendency tends to suppress the other, and the other remains therefore, not erased, but relatively undeveloped, and shows itself in inadequate and perhaps twisted expression.

There was, of course, an extravert in Nietzsche. But that extravert lived a shadowy life beside the great introvert, and showed himself in a clumsy relationship with others, an inadequate response to the world, an inability to get along. So too was there an introvert in Roosevelt, but he was a poor one, with doubtless strange ideas sometimes breaking forth into impulsive and wrong-headed action.

All that we can say is that life forces us to accept one side more than the other, until we become, as it were, specialists along the side of extraversion or of introversion.

This specialization, of course, makes us one-sided, and this one-sidedness reaches an even greater narrowness through a still further specialization, which is that of function.

According to Jung, the human psyche is composed of four functions. These are thinking, feeling, intuition and sensation.

I do not intend to burden the reader with explanations of these terms, for we would go far afield in a maze of technicalities. I will merely try to give a hint of their meaning.

Thinking is readily recognizable. It is, in its pure form, an act of will, and it may begin with an idea, which it proceeds to illustrate and to prove, or it may begin with many separated facts and proceeds to bind them together into a theory or idea.

Feeling is a reaction of like or dislike to an object. It must not be confused with emotion. Both thinking and feeling, according to Jung, are adapted functions; that is, functions which have developed through the discipline of life, and which did not exist in their pure forms when we were born. Emotion, however, is something allied to our instinctive life and something we share with the animals. It is psychologically what Jung calls a feeling-sensation; that is to say, it is partly physical and partly mental. We see this clearly when we find an emotion of shame bringing a blush to the cheek, or one of fear setting the heart pounding, or one of joy making the pulses leap. In each case we were aware of something mental, sense of joy, fear, etc., and something physical, heart pounding, cheeks blushing, etc.

Feeling is separated from sensation and developed into something by itself. The feeling person is one who has a highly developed sense of the values of things registered through reactions of like and dislike. His immediate liking is not accidental, but due to a high sensitiveness to the really good qualities of the object; his disliking is equally a deep and a true thing.

If thinking and feeling are conscious functions, that is, more or less under the direction of the will (one makes oneself think, one learns to like and dislike), intuition and sensation are unconscious functions. There is no control of them. They simply happen.

Intuition is a sort of instant insight. It has something of the lightning flash in it. It is a seeing-into. And this seeing-into may be of something near or of something far. A man may have a hunch that a certain horse is going to win a race; a woman may have an intuition that her husband, in spite of his protests, has been untrue to her. Intuitions may also be of a deeper sort. The intuition of the painter leads him to paint the soul, the inner life of the sitter. The intuition of the inventor by a blinding flash reveals the solution of the problem.

Sensation, according to Jung, is sensing, a function which transmits a physical stimulus to perception. We see, hear, feel (contact), etc. It is our conscious sensing of the world about us through images, sounds, etc., just as intuition is an unconscious sensing of the world about us. Hence, sensation relates more closely to the physical life, the body, than any of the other functions.

Now what Jung maintains, and amply proves in his great work on Psychological Types, is that each of us is not only either an introvert or an extravert, but also that each of us develops one of these four functions at the expense of the others. There are therefore thinking types, feeling types, intuitive types and sensational types, and since any of these types is also either extraverted or introverted we have eight types.

I will merely give a few examples to show what the types are like:

Extraverted thinking type. A good example is Darwin. He was a slow, patient thinker; thinking was most obviously his most highly developed function; but this function was extraverted. That is to say, like all extraverts his attention and interest was in outer things and the ideas of others. Hence he was one who built up a theory on observed data, whether this was a direct study of plants and animals or in reading the works of others. His thoughts proceeded from the outside in.

Introverted thinking type. Kant is a good example. He was a great philosopher. Instead of proceeding from facts to theory, he proceeded from ideas to facts. That is to say, through his introversion, he received ideas from the unconscious, great ideas of a timeless nature, conceptions of time, space, etc., and these he proceeded to elaborate and prove.

Extraverted feeling type. A good example of this type is Mary Pickford. It is obvious that she is not a thinker; neither is she one of those intuitive persons who see into others and know life deeply. She feels others. She responds by like and dislike; and by the fitness of things. She is well extraverted and well adapted.

Introverted feeling type. Eleanore Duse is an example. She was a great actress; but one felt her to be one of those silent women whose feelings are all within, who nurse deep moods, who cannot express their personal selves, who have great difficulty in their relationships and tend, as a rule, to shun the world and live in seclusion.

According to Jung thinking is more a masculine function; both extraverted and introverted it is found more in men than in women; feeling is more feminine, and is usually found in women.

Extraverted intuitive type. Lloyd George, of England, is of this type. A friend of mine who met him during the war said that as soon as Lloyd George looked at him, he felt he was completely understood, that the statesman saw through him. His gift has been to see the tide even before it turned, to see the possibilities in the people about them, to leap to his conclusions with a sure agility. If the thinking and feeling types are more or less steady, pursuing a definite and logical course, the intuitive type (and sensational) is changeable, erratic, swift, fickle. This is due to the fact that wherever they see a new possibility, they leap to it, forgetting what they hitherto pursued.

Introverted intuitive type. An excellent example is that given in the last chapter, that of Nietzsche. His intuitions were of the introverted kind. He saw inwardly, into the unconscious. This type is usually very badly adapted to the world. It is close to the unconscious, and its great intuitions of change, disaster and the new order of the future put it at variance with society to such an extent as to make life very difficult. Undoubtedly such men have always been the great mystics, the great prophets, as Jung quotes, “the voice of one crying in the wilderness.”

Extraverted sensation type. We see examples of this type very often among actors, dancers, circus people. They are people of a very sensuous nature, depending more on the sharp stimulus of sensation than on any other function. We also see examples among men who are epicures at eating, spend much of their time on fine dressing, and who seek sensation for its own sake, sensuous surroundings, the more sybaritic forms of sexuality, etc. Among women we see an inordinate love of luxury, a theatrical exhibitionism, and self-indulgence in many forms. Since this type is the least noble (as the intuitive is the most noble) examples need not be given.

Introverted sensation type. This is a type extremely hard to define. I will merely suggest it. It is probable that the poet Poe was of this type. He was certainly introverted, but his work is not marked specifically by deep thought, by feeling or by intuition. If we consider his poetry we see that he gives us strange pictures of a No Man’s Land of the imagination; and that he senses these imaginative realms of the dead and the ghostly. We feel a reality in these dark pictures. But they have no meaning in the way of giving us to understand life more deeply or leading us to great ideas or high flights of feeling. What they do give us is a sense of “out of space, out of time,” as he himself put it. Introverted sensation gives us just that. It is a sensing of the eternal images of the unconscious.

Such, by a series of swift strokes, are the eight types. I cannot, of course, in this space, do full justice to them. They are included in this survey because they represent an important element in Jung’s work and serve to show how dark and deep are the psychological problems of the race. With eight types (possibly more) living in the world about us, there is indeed much room for misunderstanding and for human conflict.

It is also obvious that Nietzsche was psychologically correct when he said that he saw only fragments of human beings about him, and nowhere a man. Here he saw an arm, there a leg, there an eye and here an ear, there a mouth and here a breast. In short, he saw a world of specialization, where one man becomes, like Darwin, a good thinker, but also is callous to art and to the beauty and joy of life; and where another develops neither his thinking nor his insight, but spends his existence in a vain round of the senses.

It is no wonder, then, that there is so much mental sickness. Too great a one-sidedness is a violation of man’s nature, which is full of various needs and must, if it develops freely, live a rounded life. Hence, according to Jung, the basis of the neurosis is not merely a sexual problem or a problem of power; it is due to the conflict between the developed and the undeveloped functions. There comes a time for the thinker, for instance, when his outraged feeling life must manifest itself. It is at such a moment that the neurosis begins.

VII.