by Ruth Snowden
• Heredity: genetic factors will tend to predispose a child to being more introverted or extroverted.
• Parental type: the child may identify with one or other parent and so begin to copy their behaviour. Alternatively, they may deliberately develop an opposite type in order to rebel.
• Social factors: whichever behaviour is encouraged and achieves the best results will also influence the development of a psychological type. The family, school, peer group and so on are all important here. Extrovert children soon appear to be more active, talkative, sociable and interested in their surroundings. This type of outlook is favoured in modern Western society and so will tend to be encouraged.
Problems often arise when parents try to force a child into a mould that goes against their natural type. This sort of pressure can result in neurosis and hampers development in later life. If the parents are more flexible, they can help the child towards individuation. Often, the unconscious function is projected onto others as the child grows – perhaps onto parents, siblings, peer group members, actors or pop stars. The child will identify with groups or fall in love with people who satisfy this function. Through a process of repeated projection and subsequent withdrawal, the psyche gradually becomes more integrated. This is why attachments of this sort are so important to the developing psyche.
SUMMARY
Today we have looked at Jung’s theories about personality and the ‘psychological types’. As we have seen in earlier chapters, Jung posited the existence of a basic psychological blueprint, or apparatus, common to all human beings. How then, he wondered, could there be such a multiplicity and diversity of personalities? His answer was that factors such as heredity, upbringing and social conditioning led individuals to place different emphases on the four ‘functions’ of the psyche. These, in turn, combined with one of the two main psychic attitudes – introversion and extroversion – to create eight main personality types.
Jung’s ideas in this area, although enormously influential, have often been criticized as reductive. Jung himself, however, argued that it was rare indeed for someone to conform to a single type and that matters were always complicated by people having ‘auxiliary’ functions and ‘shadow personalities’. Jung insisted above all on the fluidity and dynamism of the human psyche.
FACT-CHECK (ANSWERS AT THE BACK)
1. What, in Jungian thought, is an ‘attitude’?
a) A set of behaviours
b) Another word for a mood
c) A disposition pertaining to psychic energy
d) None of the above
2. Which of the following might be an example of extrovert behaviour?
a) Going for a solitary walk
b) Reading
c) Joining an amateur theatre group
d) Going out to a night club
3. Which of the following might be an example of introvert behaviour?
a) Playing soccer
b) Swimming
c) Angling
d) Hiking
4. Which of the following is not one of the four ‘functions’?
a) Feeling
b) Speaking
c) Intuition
d) Thinking
5. The four functions are…
a) Mutually exclusive
b) At loggerheads
c) Balanced in pairs
d) None of the above
6. An person belonging to the extrovert thinking type is often…
a) Rational
b) Dutiful
c) Caring
d) Tyrannical
7. A person belonging to the introvert sensation type is often…
a) Out of touch
b) Caring
c) Otherworldly
d) Bad at expressing themselves
8. A person belonging to the extrovert intuitive type is often…
a) Poor at relationships
b) Loving
c) Unconventional
d) Prone to addiction
9. People can be attracted to…
a) The opposite personality type
b) People who belong to the same type
c) Someone who expresses their own hidden aspects
d) All of the above
10. Which factors help determine an individual’s personality type?
a) Peers
b) Parental type
c) Culture
d) Heredity
In his search for universal truths within human psychology, Jung was also interested in a wide range of esoteric and paranormal areas that would link up with his theories about the collective unconscious. ‘Esoteric’ knowledge is secret or mystical knowledge, revealed only to those ‘in the know’; ‘paranormal’ refers to things that cannot be explained by objective methods within the framework of current understanding.
Jung saw the spiritual aspects of human experience as being of vital importance to the health of the psyche, emphasizing the importance of individual experience. He found the more dogmatic, fundamentalist religions unhelpful because they lead to disagreement and spiritual stagnation. He believed that religions need to grow and evolve in order to answer our deep spiritual needs. For example, he studied Gnosticism (a religious and philosophical movement), astrology, alchemy and the I Ching (a method of divination) in order to explore aspects of mysticism, magic, science and religion. In these studies, he discovered much archetypal symbolism and mythology that supported his theories.
THE PROBLEM OF EVIL
Jung found the conservative dogma and ritual of his father’s type of Christianity too limiting. He emphasized that, for him, the Christian insistence that God the Father and his son Jesus were sinless beings represented an unbalanced attitude – a total denial of the shadow. He predicted an inevitable swing to counteract this trend, which he saw beginning with the nineteenth-century teachings of thinkers, such as Marx and Darwin, whose rationalist, materialist stance came into conflict with Christianity. But Jung felt that modern man had gained scientific insight at the cost of losing his soul – he was no longer in contact with the numinous.
Jung asserted that none of us is without our darker aspects. A lack of understanding of what goes on in the unconscious is dangerous because it means that we are afraid to confront the shadow and therefore do not develop the capacity to deal with evil. Jung’s attitude to the problem of evil is probably the most important way in which his thinking differs from traditional Christian theology. For Jung, in fact, God was both ‘the annihilating fire and an indescribable grace’. Once again we find balanced opposites, which are so important in Jung’s thinking.
THE STORY OF JOB
One of Jung’s most controversial books was Answer to Job, published near the end of his life in 1952. Jung uses his own interpretation of the Old Testament story of Job to explore his idea of the shadow aspect of God. The story tells of how the devil bets God that Job will turn against him if he is tormented enough. God takes up the devil’s bet, and sends Job all kinds of nasty trials and tribulations. Jung’s fundamental question is: if God is all-good, then where does evil come from, and how does God permit it to exist? Jung suggests that the Old Testament God, who torments Job, is unpleasant and frightening and yet he demands love from Job. For Jung, this is a demonstration of God’s shadow side.
Jung’s idea is that God goes through an individuation process of his own, gradually becoming more mature and whole. He traces the course of this development through the Bible, until we reach the point where God wants to transform himself through becoming human. Eventually, by being incarnated as Jesus, God fully experiences what he had made Job suffer.
Jung emphasized the spiritual journey that each individual undergoes.
The notion that God could have a negative, shadow side has perturbed many Christians. But Jung’s idea is that we all need to transform the negativity in ourselves before we can hope to transform the outer world. This is what we are trying to do in the search for the Self. The Self represents a deeper, wiser aspect of our bei
ng that knows our life’s purpose and our true path.
THE JOURNEY TOWARDS THE SELF
Jung saw Christ as providing people with an archetypal image of the Self, to which they can aspire. Other religions also have their own figure, such as Buddha, who represents spiritual perfection and wholeness. Just as God sent his son Christ into the world, so each of us sends our ego into the outer world on a quest for individuation, whereon the ego ceases to occupy centre stage in our consciousness. This is a lengthy and very painful process, which Jung compares with the difficult initiation tests often undergone by members of shamanic tribes. Such tests are often designed to bring initiates to the brink of death, after which they emerge with new spiritual awareness. After this, the shaman is able to be a healer and spiritual teacher.
Jung identifies this archetypal death and rebirth process as occurring in different forms in many cultures and religious traditions, for example in:
• the death and resurrection of Jesus
• the alchemical process where a base metal is broken down and eventually transmuted into the Elixir Vitae
• shamanic initiation rituals
• ancient Egyptian myths, where again the god dies and is reborn.
Interestingly, in the Egyptian tradition rebirth was originally only for the Pharaoh, who was a God-like being, but eventually it was available to others who followed the correct burial rites. Jung’s vision was that eventually a kind of psychic rebirth would be available for anyone willing to undergo the individuation process.
Naturally, Jung’s unorthodox views about religion opened him to criticism from theologians, who resented his trespassing on their territory. He disagreed totally with fundamentalist points of view, where people held that their own particular brand of belief represented absolute truth. Jung tended more towards the Gnostic view that it was knowledge that counted, rather than faith. He cautioned that whenever dogma takes over, humans lose sight of whatever spiritual insights they had in the first place. Jung felt it was necessary for him, as a psychologist, to explore this important area of the human psyche in as much depth as possible and so he also made in-depth studies of some of the Eastern religions.
HINDUISM
In the Hindu faith there are many gods and goddesses, who all originate from an original creative force called Brahma. Each god or goddess symbolically represents a different divine aspect – such as Vishnu the creator, Shiva the destroyer, or Krishna the god of love. Unlike in the Christian tradition, the shadow side of the divine is openly portrayed.
Jung found the physical postures of yoga helpful for calming the mind and he was fascinated by the symbolic process of spiritual transformation described in the yogic texts. Once again, he found a description of the archetypal process of separation and eventual rebalancing of opposites, just as he had in alchemical texts. He saw the physical and meditative processes of yoga as a useful means of relaxing the ego’s grip over the unconscious, so that the individuation process could get underway. But he cautioned Western people not to go too deeply into the more obscure practices of Yoga, warning that Western minds are not usually properly prepared and that he felt total psychosis could result.
Although he was impressed by the Hindu religion and yoga, Jung could not accept the ultimate goal, which is samadhi – the total absorption of the Self into the divine. He argued that such a state would be logically impossible, because if there is no Self, then there is no consciousness, so who can be experiencing samadhi? In any case, he was not at all happy with an ultimate goal that seemed to represent a total escape from reality. This seemed to him to be pointless and he believed instead that each of us is in the world for a special purpose, which is known to the Self and which it is our task to discover. The goal of Jungian analysis was to help people towards wholeness and to function more fully in the real world.
BUDDHISM
The goal of Buddhism is to attain an inner state of enlightenment, once again detaching oneself from the physical world and the endless chatter of the psyche. Jung saw parallels here with psychological therapy, where the aim is to alter conscious awareness and so achieve a higher spiritual state.
Jung was particularly interested in The Tibetan Book of the Dead – a sort of travel guide for the departed soul. This tied up with other texts that he had discovered; for example, in Ancient Egyptian mythology there is also a Book of the Dead. He had explored similar themes when he wrote the Seven Sermons (1916) and once again he was struck by the archetypal nature of the teachings that he found cropping up in different cultures. In other Buddhist teachings, he found more vivid archetypal imagery, such as the ‘jewel in the crown of the lotus’, which he saw as another mandala-like symbolic image for the Self.
Buddhism appealed to Jung because:
• it is up to each person to follow their own path to enlightenment – there is little emphasis on dogma and faith
• the answer to spiritual growth is seen as lying within – there is no external deity as such
• the spiritual teachings and meditations are helpful for training the mind towards concentration.
Nevertheless, he also found that there were drawbacks. In Buddhism suffering is seen as an illusion from which one can ultimately escape through attaining enlightenment. Jung disagreed, saying that suffering is real and unavoidable. We can only overcome suffering by living through it and analytical psychology can help us to do that. Also, withdrawal from life is in itself a form of repression – a denial of the shadow – and as such would tend to produce an opposite swing eventually.
Finally, in Buddhism there is an endless cycle of reincarnation, where the individual is born and dies and is born again. The only escape from this dismal trap is through enlightenment. Jung says that this is no good for the Western mind, which needs to feel that it progresses towards a goal and has a purpose in its existence.
After travelling extensively in the East, Jung was eventually drawn back to study Western teachings. He realized that the study of Eastern religions had been important to him, but that it was only a part of the path that would bring him to his goal. He compared the Eastern way of thinking with that in the West and concluded that:
• Western man is mainly extroverted, finding meaning in external objects and looking for meaning in the ‘real world’ – consciousness in Western man is too detached from the unconscious
• Eastern man is mainly introverted and looks for meaning within the self – in Eastern man, the tendency is for consciousness to merge completely with the unconscious.
Jung came to realize that meaning was both without and within. He had discovered that both traditions had their own strengths and drawbacks. Neither point of view was completely right nor completely wrong. This insight shows a move towards balance and maturity within Jung’s own psyche – an integration of the two sides of his personality that had troubled him for so long.
CHANGES IN CHRISTIAN THINKING
Jung came to believe that Christianity was of central importance to Western man, but it needed to gain new insights in order to answer the spiritual needs of modern people. For example, he felt that there was an imbalance in the doctrine of the Trinity, which sees God as having three aspects – Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Jung felt that this idea did not acknowledge a feminine aspect to the divine. Gnostic teaching had added a ‘fourth term’, as an attempt to incorporate the hidden and mysterious feminine side.
In 1950 the Catholic Church announced a new doctrine – the Assumption of the Virgin Mary – which decreed that she was taken straight up to heaven, body and spirit, when she died and didn’t have to wait for the Day of Judgement like the rest of us. Jung saw this new doctrine as very important because he felt that it acknowledged an archetypal psychological need. Ordinary people had always shown this need in the way that they regarded the Virgin as a comforting, motherly person, whom one could pray to in times of need. She had definitely been venerated all along, even though she wasn’t ‘officially’ divine. People had visions of her
and Jung points out that she often appeared to children, suggesting that the collective unconscious was at work.
Jung believed that the study of religion was very important in giving us insight into the workings of the unconscious. He stressed that when he spoke of ‘God’ he referred to the ‘God within’. Whether or not God exists as a separate external entity was for Jung a pointless and unanswerable question. But he believed that it was essential for people to have a spiritual dimension in their lives and that numerous neuroses arose because people overlooked this aspect of their being. People tend to focus on the narrower aspects of life, such as work, marriage and success, but all the while they stay unhappy because they restrict themselves spiritually. Jung saw spirituality as being vitally important to the achievement of wholeness in the human psyche.
GNOSTICISM