Post by cayateye on Aug 3, 2020 0:27:45 GMT
From Carl Jung's Psychological Types
(Under: The Peculiarities of the Basic Psychological Functions in the Introverted Attitude)
Feeling
Introverted feeling is determined principally by the subjective factor. It differs quite as essentially from extroverted feeling as introverted from extroverted thinking. It is extremely difficult to give an intellectual account of the introverted feeling process, or even an approximate description of it, although the peculiar nature of this kind of feeling is very noticeable once one has become aware of it.
Since it is conditioned subjectively and is only secondarily concerned with the object, it seldom appears on the surface and is generally misunderstood. It is a feeling which seems to devalue the object, and it therefore manifests itself for the most part negatively. The existence of positive feeling can be inferred only indirectly. Its aim is not to adjust itself to the object, but to subordinate it in an unconscious effort to realize the underlying images.
It is continually seeking an image which has no existence in reality, but which it has seen in a kind of vision. It glides unheedingly over all objects that do not fit with its aim. It strives after inner intensity, for which the objects serve at most as stimulus.
The depth of this feeling can only be guessed - it can never be clearly grasped. It makes people silent and difficult of access; it shrinks back like a violet from the brute nature of the object in order to fill the depths of the subject. It comes out with negative judgments or assumes an air of profound indifference as a means of defense.
The primordial images are, of course, just as much ideas as feelings. Fundamental ideas, ideas like God, freedom, and immortality, are just as much feeling-values as they are significant ideas. Everything, therefore, that we have said about introverted thinking is equally true of introverted feeling, only here everything is felt while there it was thought.
However, the very fact that thoughts can generally be expressed more intelligibly than feelings demands a more than ordinary descriptive or artistic ability before the real wealth of this feeling can be even approximately presented or communicated to the world. If subjective thinking can be understood only with difficulty because of its detachment, this is true in an even higher degree of subjective feeling. In order to communicate with others, introverted feeling has to find an external form not only acceptable to itself, but capable of also arousing parallel feeling in them. Thanks to the relatively great inner (as well as outer) uniformity of human beings, it is actually possible to do this, though the form acceptable to feeling is extraordinarily difficult to find so long as it is still mainly oriented to the fathomless store of primordial images.
If, however, feeling is falsified by an egocentric attitude, it at once becomes unsympathetic, because it is then concerned mainly with the ego. It inevitably creates the impression of sentimental self-love, of trying to make itself interesting, even of morbid self admiration. Just as the subjectivized conscious of the introverted thinker, striving after abstraction to the nth degree, only succeeds in intensifying a thought process that is in itself empty, the intensification of egocentric feeling only leads to inane transports of feeling for their own sake. This is the mystical, ecstatic stage which opens the way for the extroverted functions that feeling has repressed. Just as introverted thinking is counterbalanced by a primitive feeling, to which objects attach themselves by a magical force, introverted feeling is counterbalanced by a primitive thinking, whose concretism and slavery to facts surpass all bounds. Feeling progressively emancipates itself from the object and creates for itself a freedom of action and conscience that is purely subjective, and may even renounce all traditional values. But so much more so does the unconscious thinking fall a victim to the power of objective reality.
The Introverted Feeling Type
It is principally among women that I have found the predominance of introverted feeling. 'Still waters run deep' is very true of such women. They are mostly silent, inaccessible, and hard to understand; often they hide behind a childish or banal mask, and their temperament is inclined to melancholy. They neither shine nor reveal themselves. As they are mainly guided by their subjective feelings, their true motives generally remain hidden. Their outward demeanor is harmonious and inconspicuous, giving an impression of pleasing repose, or of sympathetic response, with no desire to affect others, to impress, influence, or change them in any way.
If this outward aspect is more pronounced, it arouses a suspicion of indifference and coldness, which may actually turn into a disregard for the comfort and well-being of others. One is distinctly aware then of the movement of feeling away from the object. With the normal type, however, this happens only when the influence of the object is too strong. The feeling of harmony, therefore, lasts only so long as the object goes its own moderate way and makes no attempt to cross the other's path. There is little effort to respond to the real emotions of the other person, which tend to be damped and rebuffed, or to put it more aptly, are 'cooled off' by a negative value judgment. Although there is a constant readiness for a peaceful and harmonious co-existence, strangers are shown no touch of amiability, no gleam of responding warmth, but are met with apparent indifference or a repelling coldness. Often they are made to feel entirely superfluousness.
Faced with anything that might carry her away or arouse enthusiasm, this type observes a benevolent though critical neutrality, coupled with a faint trace of superiority that soon takes the wind out of the sails of a sensitive person. Any stormy emotion, however, will be struck down with murderous coldness, unless it happens to catch the woman on her unconscious side - that is, unless it hits her feelings by arousing a primordial image. In that case, she simply feels paralyzed for the moment, and this in due course invariably produces an even more obstinate resistance which will hit the other person in his most vulnerable spot. As far as possible, the relation of feeling to the object is kept to the safe middle path, where passion and its intemperateness are resolutely tabooed. Expression of feeling, therefore, remains niggardly, and the other person has a permanent sense of being undervalued once he becomes conscious of it. Such, however, is not always the case, because very he remains unconscious of the lack of feeling shown to him, in which case the unconscious demands of feeling will produce symptoms designed to compel a more serious attention.
Since this type appears rather cold and reserved, it might seem on a superficial view that such women have no feelings at all. Such a view, however, would be quite false; the truth is, their feelings are intensive rather than extensive. They develop in depth. While an extensive feeling of sympathy can express itself in appropriate words and deeds, and thus quickly gets back to normal again, an intensive sympathy, being shut off from every means of expression, gains a passionate depth that comprises a whole world of misery and is simply benumbed. It may, perhaps, break out in some extravagant form, leading to some astounding act of an almost heroic character, quite unrelated to either the subject herself or to the object that provoked the outburst. To the outside world, or to the blind eyes of the extravert, this intensive sympathy looks like coldness, because it usually does nothing visible, and an extraverted consciousness is unable to believe in invisible forces.
Such a misunderstanding is a common occurrence in the life of this type, and is used as a weighty argument against the possibility of any deeper feeling relation with the object. But the underlying, real object of this feeling is only dimly divined by the normal type herself. It may express itself in a secret religiosity anxiously shielded from profane eyes, or in intimate poetic forms that are kept equally safeguarded from profane eyes, not without the secret ambition of displaying some superiority over the other person by this means. Women often express a good deal of their feelings their children, letting their passion flow secretly into them.
Although, in the normal type, the tendency to overpower or coerce the other person with her secret feelings rarely plays a disturbing role, and never leads to a serious attempt of this kind, some trace of it nonetheless seeps through into the personal effect they have on him, in the form of a domineering influence often difficult to define. It is sensed as a sort of stifling or oppressive feeling which holds everybody around her under a spell. It gives a woman of this type a mysterious power that may prove terribly fascinating to the extraverted man, for it touches his unconscious.
[From here on, it mostly discusses neurosis, not the normal type]
This power is derived from the deeply felt, unconscious images, but consciously she is apt to relate it to the ego, whereupon her influence becomes debased into personal tyranny. Whenever the unconscious subject is identified with the ego, the mysterious power of intensive feeling turns into a banal and arrogant desire to dominate, a vanity, and a petty bossiness. This produces a type of woman most regrettably distinguished by her unscrupulous ambition and mischievous cruelty. But it is a change, however, that also leads to neurosis.
So long as the ego feels subordinate to the unconscious subject, and feeling is aware of something higher and mightier than the ego, the type is normal. Although the unconscious thinking is archaic, its reductive tendencies help to compensate the occasional inclination to exalt the ego into the subject. If this does take place as a result of complete suppression of the counterbalancing subliminal processes, the unconscious thinking goes over into open opposition and gets projected onto objects. The now egocentric subject comes to feel the power and importance of the devalued object. She begins consciously to feel 'what other people think'. Naturally, other people are thinking all sorts of mean things, scheming evil, contriving plots, secrecy intrigues, etc. To prevent this, she must carry out counter-intrigues, to suspect and sound out others, and weave counter plots. Beset by rumors, she must make frantic efforts to convert a threatened inferiority into a superiority. Endless secret rivalries develop, and in these embittered struggles she will shrink from no baseness or evil means, but even virtues will be misused and tampered with in order to play the trump card. Such a development must end in exhaustion. The form of neurosis is neurasthenic rather than hysterical, often with severe physical complications, such as anemia and sequelae.
(Under: The Peculiarities of the Basic Psychological Functions in the Introverted Attitude)
Feeling
Introverted feeling is determined principally by the subjective factor. It differs quite as essentially from extroverted feeling as introverted from extroverted thinking. It is extremely difficult to give an intellectual account of the introverted feeling process, or even an approximate description of it, although the peculiar nature of this kind of feeling is very noticeable once one has become aware of it.
Since it is conditioned subjectively and is only secondarily concerned with the object, it seldom appears on the surface and is generally misunderstood. It is a feeling which seems to devalue the object, and it therefore manifests itself for the most part negatively. The existence of positive feeling can be inferred only indirectly. Its aim is not to adjust itself to the object, but to subordinate it in an unconscious effort to realize the underlying images.
It is continually seeking an image which has no existence in reality, but which it has seen in a kind of vision. It glides unheedingly over all objects that do not fit with its aim. It strives after inner intensity, for which the objects serve at most as stimulus.
The depth of this feeling can only be guessed - it can never be clearly grasped. It makes people silent and difficult of access; it shrinks back like a violet from the brute nature of the object in order to fill the depths of the subject. It comes out with negative judgments or assumes an air of profound indifference as a means of defense.
The primordial images are, of course, just as much ideas as feelings. Fundamental ideas, ideas like God, freedom, and immortality, are just as much feeling-values as they are significant ideas. Everything, therefore, that we have said about introverted thinking is equally true of introverted feeling, only here everything is felt while there it was thought.
However, the very fact that thoughts can generally be expressed more intelligibly than feelings demands a more than ordinary descriptive or artistic ability before the real wealth of this feeling can be even approximately presented or communicated to the world. If subjective thinking can be understood only with difficulty because of its detachment, this is true in an even higher degree of subjective feeling. In order to communicate with others, introverted feeling has to find an external form not only acceptable to itself, but capable of also arousing parallel feeling in them. Thanks to the relatively great inner (as well as outer) uniformity of human beings, it is actually possible to do this, though the form acceptable to feeling is extraordinarily difficult to find so long as it is still mainly oriented to the fathomless store of primordial images.
If, however, feeling is falsified by an egocentric attitude, it at once becomes unsympathetic, because it is then concerned mainly with the ego. It inevitably creates the impression of sentimental self-love, of trying to make itself interesting, even of morbid self admiration. Just as the subjectivized conscious of the introverted thinker, striving after abstraction to the nth degree, only succeeds in intensifying a thought process that is in itself empty, the intensification of egocentric feeling only leads to inane transports of feeling for their own sake. This is the mystical, ecstatic stage which opens the way for the extroverted functions that feeling has repressed. Just as introverted thinking is counterbalanced by a primitive feeling, to which objects attach themselves by a magical force, introverted feeling is counterbalanced by a primitive thinking, whose concretism and slavery to facts surpass all bounds. Feeling progressively emancipates itself from the object and creates for itself a freedom of action and conscience that is purely subjective, and may even renounce all traditional values. But so much more so does the unconscious thinking fall a victim to the power of objective reality.
The Introverted Feeling Type
It is principally among women that I have found the predominance of introverted feeling. 'Still waters run deep' is very true of such women. They are mostly silent, inaccessible, and hard to understand; often they hide behind a childish or banal mask, and their temperament is inclined to melancholy. They neither shine nor reveal themselves. As they are mainly guided by their subjective feelings, their true motives generally remain hidden. Their outward demeanor is harmonious and inconspicuous, giving an impression of pleasing repose, or of sympathetic response, with no desire to affect others, to impress, influence, or change them in any way.
If this outward aspect is more pronounced, it arouses a suspicion of indifference and coldness, which may actually turn into a disregard for the comfort and well-being of others. One is distinctly aware then of the movement of feeling away from the object. With the normal type, however, this happens only when the influence of the object is too strong. The feeling of harmony, therefore, lasts only so long as the object goes its own moderate way and makes no attempt to cross the other's path. There is little effort to respond to the real emotions of the other person, which tend to be damped and rebuffed, or to put it more aptly, are 'cooled off' by a negative value judgment. Although there is a constant readiness for a peaceful and harmonious co-existence, strangers are shown no touch of amiability, no gleam of responding warmth, but are met with apparent indifference or a repelling coldness. Often they are made to feel entirely superfluousness.
Faced with anything that might carry her away or arouse enthusiasm, this type observes a benevolent though critical neutrality, coupled with a faint trace of superiority that soon takes the wind out of the sails of a sensitive person. Any stormy emotion, however, will be struck down with murderous coldness, unless it happens to catch the woman on her unconscious side - that is, unless it hits her feelings by arousing a primordial image. In that case, she simply feels paralyzed for the moment, and this in due course invariably produces an even more obstinate resistance which will hit the other person in his most vulnerable spot. As far as possible, the relation of feeling to the object is kept to the safe middle path, where passion and its intemperateness are resolutely tabooed. Expression of feeling, therefore, remains niggardly, and the other person has a permanent sense of being undervalued once he becomes conscious of it. Such, however, is not always the case, because very he remains unconscious of the lack of feeling shown to him, in which case the unconscious demands of feeling will produce symptoms designed to compel a more serious attention.
Since this type appears rather cold and reserved, it might seem on a superficial view that such women have no feelings at all. Such a view, however, would be quite false; the truth is, their feelings are intensive rather than extensive. They develop in depth. While an extensive feeling of sympathy can express itself in appropriate words and deeds, and thus quickly gets back to normal again, an intensive sympathy, being shut off from every means of expression, gains a passionate depth that comprises a whole world of misery and is simply benumbed. It may, perhaps, break out in some extravagant form, leading to some astounding act of an almost heroic character, quite unrelated to either the subject herself or to the object that provoked the outburst. To the outside world, or to the blind eyes of the extravert, this intensive sympathy looks like coldness, because it usually does nothing visible, and an extraverted consciousness is unable to believe in invisible forces.
Such a misunderstanding is a common occurrence in the life of this type, and is used as a weighty argument against the possibility of any deeper feeling relation with the object. But the underlying, real object of this feeling is only dimly divined by the normal type herself. It may express itself in a secret religiosity anxiously shielded from profane eyes, or in intimate poetic forms that are kept equally safeguarded from profane eyes, not without the secret ambition of displaying some superiority over the other person by this means. Women often express a good deal of their feelings their children, letting their passion flow secretly into them.
Although, in the normal type, the tendency to overpower or coerce the other person with her secret feelings rarely plays a disturbing role, and never leads to a serious attempt of this kind, some trace of it nonetheless seeps through into the personal effect they have on him, in the form of a domineering influence often difficult to define. It is sensed as a sort of stifling or oppressive feeling which holds everybody around her under a spell. It gives a woman of this type a mysterious power that may prove terribly fascinating to the extraverted man, for it touches his unconscious.
[From here on, it mostly discusses neurosis, not the normal type]
This power is derived from the deeply felt, unconscious images, but consciously she is apt to relate it to the ego, whereupon her influence becomes debased into personal tyranny. Whenever the unconscious subject is identified with the ego, the mysterious power of intensive feeling turns into a banal and arrogant desire to dominate, a vanity, and a petty bossiness. This produces a type of woman most regrettably distinguished by her unscrupulous ambition and mischievous cruelty. But it is a change, however, that also leads to neurosis.
So long as the ego feels subordinate to the unconscious subject, and feeling is aware of something higher and mightier than the ego, the type is normal. Although the unconscious thinking is archaic, its reductive tendencies help to compensate the occasional inclination to exalt the ego into the subject. If this does take place as a result of complete suppression of the counterbalancing subliminal processes, the unconscious thinking goes over into open opposition and gets projected onto objects. The now egocentric subject comes to feel the power and importance of the devalued object. She begins consciously to feel 'what other people think'. Naturally, other people are thinking all sorts of mean things, scheming evil, contriving plots, secrecy intrigues, etc. To prevent this, she must carry out counter-intrigues, to suspect and sound out others, and weave counter plots. Beset by rumors, she must make frantic efforts to convert a threatened inferiority into a superiority. Endless secret rivalries develop, and in these embittered struggles she will shrink from no baseness or evil means, but even virtues will be misused and tampered with in order to play the trump card. Such a development must end in exhaustion. The form of neurosis is neurasthenic rather than hysterical, often with severe physical complications, such as anemia and sequelae.