Jung experienced himself as having two personalities: his persona (No. 1), and his natural archetypal unconscious source of wisdom (No. 2.). Jung said,
“From the beginning I had a sense of destiny, as though my life was assigned to me by fate and had to be fulfilled. This gave me an inner security, and, though I could never prove it to myself, it proved itself to me. I did not share this certainty, it had me. ... Often I had the feeling that in all decisive matters I was no longer among men, but was alone with God. And when I was “there,” where I was no longer alone, I was outside time; I belonged to the centuries; and He who then gave answer was He who had always been, who had been before my birth. He who always is was there. These talks with the “Other” [No. 2 personality] were my profoundest experiences: on the one hand a bloody struggle, on the other supreme ecstasy.” (MDR, 48)
INTROVERTED THINKING WAS HIS DOMINANT FUNCTION
Jung’s intellectual life began with a dream of an underground phallus when he was 3 1/2 years old. Most of Jung’s thinking as a child was about existential interior matters. Nature occupied him and was the important part of his world. People were objects and confounded him.
He said about his experience: "Through this childhood dream I was initiated into the secrets of the earth. What happened then was a kind of burial in the earth, and many years were to pass before I came out again. Today I know that it happened in order to bring the greatest possible amount of light into the darkness. It was an initiation into the realm of darkness. My intellectual life had its unconscious beginnings at that time." (MDR, 15)
EXTRAVERTED THINKING WAS AN ASPECT OF HIS ADAPTED PERSONA
IT WAS DIFFERENTIATED AS A YOUNG MAN
As Jung was preparing to go to University, he had a dream.
“It both frightened and encouraged me. It was night in some unknown place, and I was making slow and painful headway against a mighty wind. Dense fog was flying along everywhere. I had my hands cupped around a tiny light which threatened to go out at any moment. Everything depended on my keeping this little light alive. Suddenly I had the feeling that something was coming up behind me. I looked back, and saw a gigantic black figure following me. But at the same moment, I was conscious in spite of my terror that I must keep my little light going through night and wind, regardless of all dangers. When I awoke I realized at once that the figure was ... my own shadow on the swirling mists, brought into being by the little light I was carrying. I knew too, that this little light was my consciousness, the only light I have. My own understanding is the sole treasure I possess, and the greatest. Though infinitely small and fragile in comparison with the powers of darkness, it is still a light, my only light.
The dream was a great illumination for me. Now I knew that No. 1 was the bearer of the light, and that No. 2 followed him like a shadow. My task was to shield the light and not look back at the vita peracta; this was evidently a forbidden realm of light sought to thrust me back into the immeasurable darkness of a world where one is aware of nothing except the surfaces of things in the background. In the role of No. 1, I had to go forward into study, moneymaking, responsibilities, entanglements, confusions, errors, submissions, defeats. The storm pushing against me was time, ceaselessly flowing into the past, which just as ceaselessly dogs our heels. It exerts a mighty suction which greedily draws everything living into itself; we can only escape from it -- for a while -- by pressing forward. The past is terribly real and present, and it catches everyone who cannot save his skin with a satisfactory answer.”
(MDR, 87-88)
PSYCHIATRY APPEALED TO BOTH JUNG'S No. 1 and No. 2 PERSONALITIES
“Here alone the two currents of my interest could flow together and in a united stream dig their own bed. Here was the empirical field common to biological and spiritual facts, which I had everywhere sought and nowhere found. Here at last was the place where the collision of nature and spirit became a reality. (MDR, 109)
EXTRAVERTED FEELING AS JUNG’S INFERIOR FUNCTION
Jung did not relate to people as a child -- did not even have one “chum” to share his world. He led an extremely lonely introverted existence. He sensed that he repelled other children. He did not fit in. He viewed his inferior extraverted feeling as part of his persona which: “bursts into all kinds of emotions, like a flame that flares up quickly and then goes out.” I was but the sum of my emotion [#1,self], and the Other in me was the timeless, imperishable stone [#2, or Self.]. (MDR)
At the end of his life, he would still often “burst into emotion. He died in 1961 and was surrounded by people who loved him. His self-analysis, confrontation with the unconscious, and compassion finally connected him with the rest of humanity through his healing.
REMARKS BY OTHERS ABOUT JUNG’S PSYCHOLOGICAL TYPE
(SOME ARE CONTRADICTORY)
"I think your instincts (Angela Maffeo) are right (INTP). In his BBC interview Jung said his feeling was his inferior function.... good sensation, stone building, and interest in archaeolgy, etc." [Alice Howell, the writer].
“In his English Seminars of 1925 on pg. 69 of the Bolligen 1989 edition, he says, “As a natural scientist, thinking and sensation were uppermost in me and intuition and feeling were in the unconscious and contaminated by the collective unconscious.”
From a BBC interview “Face to Face” in 1958 Jung said " he had always been highly intuitive and thinking, and that he has always been extremely introverted. He has had difficulties with feeling, sensation, and extraversion.
At the end of his life, Jung said:
"... Recollection of the outward events of my life has largely faded or disappeared. But my encounters with the “other” reality, my bouts with the unconscious, are indelibly engraved upon my memory. In that realm there has always been wealth in abundance, and everything else has lost importance by comparison. (MDR5)
...My life has been singularly poor in outward happenings. I cannot tell much about them, for it would strike me as hollow and insubstantial. I can understand myself only in the light of inner happenings. It is these that make up the singularity of my life, and with these my autobiography deals."
Prepared and Interpreted by Angela Maffeo
