“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 the previous letter we considered the pathology of Introverted Thinking taken to an extreme. With this letter, we consider its complement, Extraverted Feeling. Though Extraverted Feeling would normally be accompanied by other type dispositions, it will be useful to consider it here as though it were acting alone.
People who favor Extraverted Feeling are highly attuned to the feelings and values of others. They can quickly adapt in many diverse situations. At one moment, they may be solemn with someone who is sad or troubled; in the next, they can put on a smiling face for a celebration or lively party. Above all, they seek harmony in relationships and with their culture or organization.
With so much attention focused on empathy, relating, and seeking harmony with others, an individual may too readily lose her own genuine sense of self. She may figuratively spread herself too thin.
But since actual life is a constant succession of situations that evoke different and even contradictory feelings, the personality gets split up into as many different feeling states. At one moment one is this, at another something quite different—to all appearances, for in reality such a multiple personality is impossible. The basis of the ego always remains the same and consequently finds itself at odds with the changing feeling states. (CW 6, par. 599)
Any of the other type dispositions may be suppressed as extraverted feeling gains ascendency. Usually, but not always, they will be some combination of the introverted dispositions. The individual’s one-sidedness is initially met with figurative whispers from the suppressed types. If it is Introverted Thinking, a meek, almost childish voice from within might urge, “Remember to see life from a more holistic perspective. Consider the future; consider the meaning of life. Not all that glitters is gold.” If it is Introverted Feeling, the meek guidance may arrive as feeling images that encourage her to “find your own unique way, seek harmony with yourself, not just the world; remember to be true to what has eternal value.”
And so, if she listens, she may step back a bit from her attachment to others and remember to care for herself, her own personal values, her own sense of meaning. But if not, she may cast these unwanted shadowy voices and figures as judgments onto others. She may see highly intellectual people as elitist, aloof, or phony. They may be tarnished by her archaic thinking function, as “nothing but” shallow and intellectually bloated people. If intuition is furthest in the unconscious, she may judge highly creative, nonconforming people to be “derelicts, rebels, or radicals.” She may struggle to allow them into her well-formed field of norms and values.
An example of someone seized up by one-sided Social Feeling could be the mother of singer-song writer Chris Christopherson. Her son was abiding by prevailing cultural norms: Suma Cum Laude graduate of Pomona College, Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University, Captain in the army.
As a conventional young man scheduled to teach at West Point, he visited Nashville Tennessee, the centroid of emerging country western music, where he spent some time behind stage getting acquainted with musicians and the music. He realized that he had found his authentic direction in life. He gave up his position at West Point, moved to Nashville, started wearing T-shirts and jeans, grew his hair long, and worked as a janitor. He began writing songs for others, and then performing them.
Eventually, he became one of the greatest country music song writers of all time. But his new direction in life was too much for his culturally tradition-bound mother. Early in his new life in Nashville, she sent him a letter, disowning him.
Jung characterizes the change in the normally warm extraverted feeling, taken to a one-sided extreme, as “cold, unfeeling, untrustworthy.”
. . . the personal quality of the feeling, which constitutes its chief charm, disappears. It becomes cold, unfeeling, untrustworthy. It has ulterior motives, or at least makes an impartial observer suspect them. It no longer makes that agreeable and refreshing impression which invariably accompanies genuine feeling; instead, one suspects a pose, or that the person is acting, even though she may be quite unconscious of any egocentric motives. (CW 6, par. 596)
As Extraverted Feeling becomes rigidly one-sided, it diminishes rather than enhances life. The individual becomes overly identified with outward culture, people, organizations, associations, or political parties, losing touch with the fructifying bounty of renewal from the unconscious. The types ignored in the shadow erupt to bring the individual back to wholeness and to the personal growth that will unify personality. If the one-sidedness is extreme, they will erupt destructively to shatter the attachments the individual values most.
The initial indications of the excessive one-sidedness may appear outwardly as pretentious displays of emotion. The “loud expostulations” indicate that the shadow types are no longer simply mild, archaic, or primitive; they have turned into open opposition.
“. . . signs of self-disunity will become clearly apparent, because the originally compensatory attitude of the unconscious has turned into open opposition. This shows itself first of all in extravagant displays of feeling, gushing talk, loud expostulations, etc., which ring hollow: “The lady doth protest too much.” It is at once apparent that some kind of resistance is being overcompensated . . . The stronger the feeling relation to the object, the more the unconscious opposition comes to the surface.” (CW 6, par. 599)
Jung notes that hysteria, with its unmanageable fear and emotional excesses, is the form of neurosis to which extraverted feeling is most subject.
Hysteria with the characteristic infantile sexuality of its unconscious world of ideas, is the principal form of neurosis in this type. (CW 6, par. 600)
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