Jung’s Impressions re Introverts and Extroverts

From the Tehran Press Online

… Carl Jung also developed a popular personality typology. He divided people into introvert and extrovert. Introverts are individuals who prefer their internal world of thoughts, feelings, fantasies, dreams, and so on, while extroverts prefer the external world. Introvert or extrovert, everyone needs to deal with the world; and each person has his/her preferred ways of dealing with it. Jung suggests there are four basic ways, or functions:The first is sensing. Sensing means obtaining information by means of the senses. A sensing person is good at looking and listening and generally getting to know the world. Jung called this, one of the irrational functions, meaning that it involved perception rather than the judging of information.

The second is thinking. Thinking means evaluating information or ideas rationally and logically. Jung called this a rational function, meaning that it involves decision making or judging, rather than the simple intake of information.

The third is intuiting. Intuiting is a kind of perception that works outside of the usual conscious processes. It is irrational or perceptual, like sensing, but comes from the complex integration of large amounts of information, rather than simple seeing or hearing. In Jung’s words it is like seeing around corners.

The fourth is feeling. Feeling, like thinking, is a matter of evaluating information, this time by weighing one’s overall emotional response which Jung calls rational.

Most people develop only one or two of the functions, but the final goal should be to develop all four. Once again, Jung sees the transcendence of opposites as the ideal.

‘The artist is not a person endowed with free will who seeks his own ends, but one who allows art to realize its purposes through him. As a human being he may have moods and a will and personal aims, but as an artist he is ‘man’ in a higher sense – he is ‘collective man’, a vehicle and molder of the unconscious psychic life of mankind.‘

~ by nancyfenn on January 7, 2008.