Energies and Patterns in Psychological Type

The reservoir of consciousness

John Beebe

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317413653
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychologie
• Subtopic: Santé mentale en psychologie

This book encapsulates John Beebe's influential work on the analytical psychology of consciousness. Building on C. G. Jung's theory of psychological types and on subsequent clarifications by Marie-Louise von Franz and Isabel Briggs Myers, Beebe demonstrates the bond between the eight types of consciousness Jung named and the archetypal complexes that impart energy and purpose to our emotions, fantasies, and dreams. For this collection, Beebe has revised and updated his most influential and significant previously published papers and has introduced, in a brand new chapter, a surprising theory of type and culture.

Beebe's model enables readers to take what they already know about psychological types and apply it to depth psychology. The insights contained in the fifteen chapters of this book will be especially valuable for Jungian psychotherapists, post-Jungian academics and scholars, psychological type practitioners, and type enthusiasts.

PART I

Theoretical contributions

1

THE EIGHT FUNCTION-ATTITUDES UNPACKED

To help people apply their scores on the MBTI® to themselves, and to reap the deeper transformative benefits of Jungian type theory, we need to be able to recognize the different types of consciousness Jung originally described. Practically, that means we have to be prepared to recognize in someone’s interactive or introspective personality style introverted feeling (Fi), introverted thinking (Ti), introverted intuition (Ni), introverted sensation (Si), extraverted feeling (Fe), extraverted thinking (Te), extraverted intuition (Ne), or extraverted sensation (Se), simply on the basis of what the person reveals in our presence. We also need to be able to assess how well the function-attitude displayed is actually working for the person who is showing it to us.

Consider the fresh daylight that an executive coach can potentially bring to a client when she says, “It sounds like you’ve done everything in your power to solve this problem using your preferred introverted intuition and extraverted thinking. I’ve also heard you express some introverted feeling evaluations of the situation. Have you considered calling out the reserves to see how some of the other types of consciousness might approach this quandary?” Then think how futile this intervention would be if the coach could not explain to the client what those other functions are like.

My own experience as a clinician who believes that type understanding is crucial to uncovering what limits people and what helps them to develop is that very few us, whether clients or type practitioners, can actually recognize the eight function-attitudes. To help us all meet this challenge, I will offer here some guidelines that I have developed to make the task of recognizing and identifying the different function-attitudes just a little easier when we are working with clients.

The first step I took toward this came about five years ago when a personal friend Diane Johnson, a successful novelist who had read some of my work on types, told me it would really help if I could find words in everyday language to correspond to the different processes that Jung, with his scientific background, felt he had to specify in psychological terms. The eight function-attitudes that he describes in Psychological Types (1921/1971, ¶¶556–671) were for him the ‘psychological types.’ This term meant something quite specific for him: the eight types of awareness capable of constituting a psychological individual’s conscious psychology. They are mental processes that, even if still in the unconscious, are likely to press for integration into the psyche, where they can become, for the first time, consciousnesses. They hold the motivation to energize will and to develop over time—will and time being additional factors that can become linked to consciousness.

Working with the novelist’s challenge, I came up with a set of eight keywords that I thought might get to the essence of the eight function-attitudes. I have been working on them ever since, testing and refining them at various conferences where I have been invited to share my latest thinking about types. Only recently have I been satisfied enough with what has emerged to commit it to publication. So here, beside each mental process whose functioning I have been trying to epitomize, I will offer the word in everyday language that I believe best gets at the heart of what that process is engaged in accomplishing.

Fi.	Introverted feeling	appraising
Ti.	Introverted thinking	defining
Ni.	Introverted intuition	knowing
Si.	Introverted sensation	verifying
Fe.	Extraverted feeling	affirming
Te.	Extraverted thinking	planning
Ne.	Extraverted intuition	envisioning
Se.	Extraverted sensation	experiencing

The reader may recall that each of these words is called in grammar a gerund, a verbal noun or process word. Each describes a procedure that a mind can follow over time, a procedure aimed at perceiving or judging reality as accurately as possible, which is the aim of any consciousness.

When I first tried to teach these words to people, however, as pathways into what the types ‘are,’ I realized that people could not always enter the phenomenon I was trying to get them to contemplate with just that single word on its door. And so, following a suggestion made by Dick Custer for introverted thinking, I decided to create a semantic field by offering two wing words for each word that I regarded as the heart of the process I was trying to convey. For introverted thinking, Dick had suggested other words I had mentioned in passing as synonyms for my keyword, ‘defining.’ These were ‘naming’ and ‘understanding.’ He drew a triangle, with ‘defining’ at the apex and ‘naming’ and ‘understanding’ at the lower corners.

After that, with other participants at the same Type Resources conference in Cleveland (2010) making suggestions, I established a similar semantic field for each of the types of consciousness that Jung had named. For ease in reading them here, I will not present them as triangles, but as words across a page. The presentation on this page also reflects some adjustments in the order of words for each process, going across, that I have made in recent years:

Se.	engaging	experiencing	enjoying
Si.	implementing	verifying	accounting
Ne.	entertaining	envisioning	enabling
Ni.	imagining	knowing	divining
Te.	regulating	planning	enforcing
Ti.	naming	defining	understanding
Fe.	validating	affirming	relating
Fi.	judging	appraising	establishing the value

I found immediately that when I provided at least three words, listeners could begin to grasp what each of the mental processes was about, and could start to recognize it in themselves and others.

I realized later that what had unconsciously emerged in a particularly creative moment, involving at least as much my anima as my more preferred functions, was a deepening that each mental process follows as its potential is increasingly realized. The first of the three words (as we read across for each of the eight mental processes) can be thought of as what the process looks like on the surface, to another person seeing someone for the first time using that process—what we might call its persona level. The second, central, word captures the heart of the process—the one that is embraced by the ego as its chief concern. The third word embodies what the process becomes at its most evolved level when it is working in sympathetic harmony with what Jung calls the Self: one might call this the goal of the process. Thus, introverted feeling (Fi) can develop from an initial, near instinctual ‘judging’ into a mature, reflective ‘appraising’ before evolving to a more far-seeing ‘establishing the value.’ In this latter stage, which aspires to wisdom, the feeling reaction finds its ground in a more ideal, archetypal realm, which allows it to discriminate the value that has led to the earlier judgments and appraisals.¹

Even as this sequence of three terms can describe a progressive maturation of the insight involved in making a particular feeling judgment into an appraisal and then a value, it also illustrates the fact that there is a temporal process within consciousness, which we can actually see unfolding in real time when we are privy to the operation of any type of consciousness. I can certainly say that, in my own case, my extraverted intuition (Ne) often begins its action as a mental process, with a stage of ‘entertaining’ that applies in two senses of the word: (1) interesting and amusing myself and others; and (2) beginning to consider or ‘entertain’ possibilities that I may want to go on to envision in greater detail. As soon as, through a process of ‘envisioning,’ I am firmly committed to advancing possibilities that I have formerly simply entertained myself with, I find that I become quite naturally interested in ‘enabling’ others to see and profit from these same possibilities. My extraverted intuition in this third stage is subtly informed by its communication with the inferior function of introverted sensation, lending my intuition a more grounded, effective quality. My whole career around the theory of psychological types, which I entertained in my mind as centrally important as early as 1968, and the possibilities of which I envisioned in a way that led to the model I produced based on a set of thought experiments that began in 1973, has led to my enabling audiences and readers to benefit from better understanding type.

The system of keywords and wing words has helped me to understand type better, especially in regard to the functions of consciousness that are normally in shadow for me and thus have been difficult for me to empathize with. One such type of consciousness is extraverted sensation (Se). Patients in my analytic practice for whom that function-attitude is dominant often cannot follow my rather abstract introverted thinking. It’s just too disembodied to be tangible to them. The extraverted sensation type, I have realized, works quite differently, first by ‘engaging,’ then by ‘experiencing’ and finally (if it can get there) by ‘enjoying’ what it has engaged and experienced. Although the root word of function, as James Hillman (1971/1998, p. 91) noted, is the Sanskrit bhunj, which means to enjoy, I think it is fair to say that few truly enjoy the kind of understanding introverted thinking loves to savor. Rather, ‘enjoying’ is something people with developed extraverted sensation can only get to if they engage with something and experience it for themselves, having a sort of hands-on encounter with it that they will either enjoy or not. From both an intellectual–scientific and a spiritual–religious angle, enjoyment seems like a subjective, selfish goal, a form of entertainment that should not be confused with the responsibilities of consciousness. But, working with people whose dominant or auxiliary function is extraverted sensation, I have often noticed that, only if they have enjoyed something sufficiently, by bringing it near to themselves in an embodied way, and have found it, when truly touched, to be a source of concrete satisfaction, does it seem sufficiently real to them to say that they have become aware of what it consists of. This enjoyment has a hint of the spiritual to it, suggesting that the extraverted sensation function is in communion with its introverted intuitive opposite. As a consciousness, therefore, extraverted sensation in its stages of engaging, experiencing, and enjoying the reality of something is the difference between talking about it and getting to know it intimately. It involves touching and being touched by every part of it—a very different thing from a simply mental representation.

In this way, I have learned that the various types are exactly as Jung thought, psychological stances that permit consciousness of all the phenomena we describe as psychological. That our psychology, which inevitably has a goal, aims at all of these activities—establishing the value, understanding, divining, accounting, relating, enforcing, enabling, and enjoying—will perhaps be clearest to people who, through analytical psychotherapy, have been witness to the individuation process (Jung, 1959). A working analyst like myself sees that in psychotherapy our different consciousnesses do emerge and grow toward their particular goals. This is the deepest, Self-level of the drive to become conscious. But even a novice to psychology can quickly recognize that most people start by judging, naming, imagining, implementing (internal methods by which they have already learned to deal with what they encounter) and validating, regulating, entertaining, and engaging (methods by which they enact a genuine encounter with the Other).

I would advise people, whether veterans or novices at typology, who are still trying to learn what the types are actually doing, to focus on the central words in my horizontal sequences for the different functions of consciousness, using the wing words as the beginning and the end of the process whose functioning they are trying to become conscious of. Using this method of observation, it will become clearer the degree to which some people are centrally engaged in appraising, defining, knowing, or verifying as the internal process by which they hope to master the objects they encounter. Other people are more occupied with affirming, planning, envisioning, or experiencing as their way of expressing their willingness to subject themselves to the influence of the objects with which they are trying to connect. Seeing this fundamental difference between the introverted and extraverted functions, we can gradually come to understand not just the ways the functions differ in their introverted and extraverted aspects, but what the different purposes are that make them functions. At that point, we may be more able to understand what Jung, with his reliable introverted intuition, imagined, knew, and divined² that the recognition of the different types of consciousness could permit, provided we also join him in verifying the uncanny accuracy of his categories of consciousness as to how the individuating psyche actually functions on its trajectory toward consciousness.

Notes

1 I was sorry in Cleveland that I couldn’t express this final stage of the introverted feeling process in a single word. For the group there, I tried ‘valuating,’ and, though it met with a certain approval from those practiced in introverted feeling, I realized it was not a word in common speech. The phrase, ‘establishing the value’ turned out to be clearer. This is the one place in the exercise where I had to use more than one word to convey my meaning, which I think says something quite fundamental about the difficulty of putting the introverted feeling process into words.

2 Like ‘entertaining,’ ‘divining’ has a double meaning in this scheme. It is not only seeing in what direction the future is bending. It is also descrying the divine purpose hidden in the developing situation. A recent article by Peter Struck (2016) makes explicit the historical link between divination and intuition.

References

Hillman, J. (1971/1998). The feeling function. In M.-L. von Franz & J. Hillman, Lectures on Jung’s typology (pp. 89–179). Woodstock, CT: Spring Publications.

Jung, C. G. (1921/1971). Psychological types. In Cw 6.

Jung, C. G. (1959). Conscious, unconscious, and individuation. In Cw 9, i (pp. 275–289).

Struck, P. (2016). 2013 Arthur O. Lovejoy lecture: A cognitive history of divination in Ancient Greece. Journal of the History of Ideas,...