“The passage across is usually blocked by conscious resistance to any subjection of the ego to the realities of the unconscious and their determining power.” (CW 6, par 631)
In previous blogs we have considered positive attributes of the types. With this series on “Type Pathologies” we will consider what sort of trouble people create when they rely exclusively on the few types that come most easily to them.
Jung’s type model includes eight orientations of consciousness; each is indispensable for the unification of unique personality. Relying narrowly on one or two type dispositions is a condition that Jung termed “primitive.”
In this first letter we consider introverted thinking. Though introverted thinking would normally be accompanied by other type dispositions, it will be useful to consider it here as though it is acting alone.
Introverted thinking is supremely capable of applying logic to develop and discern the meaning of ideas as they arise from the collective unconscious. It is often an engaging and intriguing circumambulation around an idea that may require hours, days, weeks, months, or sometimes, as exemplified by Kant, years to complete. The conceptual journey is intensive and holistic, navigating in and around an intangible image to logically assess and assemble a coherent idea.
But that delightful and intriguing journey can easily become all-consuming and obstruct the preeminent processes of individuation. Introverted thinking becomes troublesome when a person becomes overly identified with the sublime and transcendent ideas discovered in the inner life.
This kind of identification may be sometimes seen in the lives of theoreticians, mathematicians, philosophers, or architects, wherever introverted thinking is relied on to holistically and reflectively sort out a difficult conceptual problem. The physicist Wolfgang Pauli, the mathematician John Nash, the architect Frank Lloyd Wright, or the philosopher Frederick Nietzsche could serve as examples of excessively one-sided introverted thinking.
Identification with introverted thinking is troublesome for individuation; consequently, the type orientations suppressed by that one-sidedness resist. The degree of resistance from the suppressed types depends on the degree of attachment with the lead types of consciousness. If the ego is dramatically inflated with its introverted thinking identity, the suppressed types will be more destructive. If the ego attachment is mild, the suppressed types will resist with a less disruptive opposition.
In the early stages of the one-sidedness, the suppressed types are experienced as naive, undeveloped, archaic, or primitive. In their subservient position, they sort of whisper a timid call to balanced wholeness, suggesting an alternative way to life. If the feeling function is suppressed, it might whisper, “value your relationships.” If the sensation function is suppressed, it might whisper “consider the practical facts of everyday life.”
But for the one-sided thinker, the whispers can seem insignificant; the suppressed and undeveloped types are easy to ignore. The submissive shadow types are not especially intrusive. But, if the one-sidedness persists, they strengthen their opposition.
Disowned by the individual, they will be cast out as negative projections onto others. If extraverted feeling is deepest in the shadow, it may be projected onto individuals or groups, disparaging other more sociable people as trivial, superficial, inferior or insignificant. (See Extraverted Feeling in the Shadow II) If extraverted sensation is in the shadow, anyone who is at ease in the physical world might be shunned as too materialistic, too energetic, or a self-indulgent epicure. (See Extraverted Sensation in the Shadow II)
If the individual persists in an exclusive one-sided reliance on introverted thinking, his personality gets entangled with his ego orientation. He begins to think that he is the ideas that have captured his attention.
“He begins to confuse his subjective truth with his own personality.” (CW 6, par. 636)
When his personality—his center of unified balanced—is skewed toward his ego disposition; when he becomes overly identified with the illusive images and ideas he exalts, then the normally benign suppressed shadow types erupt. He is not his ego; he is an individual person progressing towards wholeness, and it seems that they will stop at nothing to bring him back to his center. They intercede to thwart the excessively rational thinking with bizarre interventions.
“The more consciousness is impelled by the thinking function to confine itself within the smallest and emptiest circle—which seems, however, to contain all the riches of the gods—the more the unconscious fantasies will be enriched by a multitude of archaic contents, a veritable “pandemonium” of irrational and magical figures, whose physiognomy will accord with the nature of the function that will supercede the thinking function as the vehicle of life. If it should be the intuitive function, then the “other side” will be viewed through the eyes of a Kubin or a Meyrnink. If it is the feeling function, then quite unheard of and fantastic feeling relationships will be formed, coupled with contradictory and unintelligible value judgments. If it is the sensation function, the senses will nose up something new, and never experienced before, in and outside the body.” (CW 6, par. 630)
A healthy relationship with his life would acknowledge and appreciate the value of each of the other type dispositions, especially those in the shadow. But that is the aim of individuation and there is less room for individuation in a one-sided life. In his entrenched one-sidedness, he becomes temperamental and prickly. Stubbornly protective of his obsessive ideas, he will denigrate or ridicule others for their inferior efforts, thus narrowing his circle of amicable relationships.
“With the intensification of this type, his convictions become all the more rigid and unbending. Outside influences are shut off; as a person, too, he becomes more unsympathetic to his wider circle of acquaintances, and therefore more dependent on his intimates. His tone becomes personal and surly, and though his ideas may gain in profundity they can no longer be adequately expressed in the material at hand. To compensate for this, he falls back on emotionality and touchiness.” (CW 6, par. 636)
With an exclusive orientation inwardly, the facts of the world loose importance and attention. The images and ideas discovered in the inner life are indeed enthralling, but they take on an independent life of their own. They may cease to connect with the facts of the world or practical applications.
“However clear to him the inner structure of his thoughts may be, he is not in the least clear where or how they link up with the world of reality.” (CW 6, par. 634)
One-sided thinking taken to an extreme discriminates against all objective facts that do not fit with its treasured truth. The more one-sided the thinking, the more the identity gets lost in the symbolism of the inner object.
“It creates theories for their own sake . . . with a distinct tendency to slip over from the world of ideas to mere imagery.” (CW 6, par. 630)
“The thinking of the introverted type is positive and synthetic in developing ideas which approximate more and more to the eternal validity of the primordial images. But as their connection with objective experience becomes more and more tenuous, they take on a mythological coloring and no longer hold true for the contemporary situation.” (CW 6, par. 637)
Depending on the types suppressed, the individual may become obsessive about the smallest details, imagined slights, ridiculous presumptions, or exaggerated critiques. His complexes rage. He may be prone to troublesome social relationships or reckless value judgments. His unconscious will systematically and autonomously seek to uncouple him from his one-sidedness. Plagued with phobias, obsessive compulsions, and anxiety, he increasingly loses touch with concrete reality.
“Hence his thinking is of value for his contemporaries only so long as it is manifestly and intelligibly related to the known facts of the time. Once [introverted thinking] has become mythological, it ceases to be relevant and runs on in itself. The counterbalancing functions of feeling, intuition, and sensation are comparatively unconscious and inferior, and therefore have a primitive extraverted character that accounts for all the troublesome influences from outside to which the introverted thinker is prone. The various protective devices and psychological minefields with which such people surround themselves are known to everyone, and I can spare myself a description of them. They all serve as a defense against “magical” influences—and among them [for men] is a vague fear of the feminine sex.” (CW 6, par. 637)
One example of introverted thinking to a one-sided extreme is John Nash, subject of the film “A Beautiful Mind.” He was a brilliant mathematician in search of an “original idea” who won a Nobel Prize for his conceptual inquiry, but who lost his unified personality and sense of balanced wholeness in the process. His extreme one-sidedness led to his personal isolation and ultimately mental illness. How much of his illness was organic and how much his own undoing cannot be known, but his illness did exhibit the sort of eruptions that could be expected from a highly intensive orientation to introverted thinking and its isolation from practical reality and people. Jung’s comments about the neurosis of one-sided introverted thinking could easily apply to him:
The outside influences he has brusquely fended off attack him from within, from the unconscious, and in his efforts to defend himself he attacks things that to outsiders seem utterly unimportant. Because of the subjectivization of consciousness resulting from his lack of relationship to the object, what secretly concerns his own person now seems to him of extreme importance . . . he will burst out with vicious, personal retorts against every criticism however just. Thus his isolation gradually increases. His originally fertilizing ideas become destructive, poisoned by the sediment of bitterness. His struggle against the influences emanating from the unconscious increases with his external isolation, until finally they begin to cripple him. He thinks his withdrawal into ever increasing solitude will protect him from the unconscious influences, but as a rule it only plunges him deeper into the conflict that is destroying him from within. (CW 6, par. 636)
The individual who takes introverted thinking to a one-sided extreme has confused discovered truth with his own personality. His ideas take on a mythological character and no longer link up with practical reality. His circle of understanding friends or associates dwindles. His intransigence prevents him from enlisting his otherwise helpful shadow dispositions that remain relatively unconscious, but also that autonomously disable his most ardent efforts to prove himself right. He is undone by phobias, obsessions, compulsions, and anxiety that undermine his otherwise brilliant intellectual capacity.
It is a state of dissociation, in other words a neurosis characterized by inner debility and increasing cerebral exhaustion—the symptoms of psychasthenia. (CW 6, par. 631)
Image Source: de Rajesh Rathod en Pexels