Lesson 42 - Your Four Thinking Styles

“Whatever you want, especially when you’re striving to be the best in the world at something, there’ll always be disappointments, and you can’t be emotionally tied to them, cos’ they’ll break your spirit.”
MIKE TYSON

The Four Thinking Styles

This is yet another significant contribution by Carl Jung to the personality theories. He identified four basic functions, which are our preferred ways of dealing with the world: inner and outer.

In all honesty, these four functions probably came from his study of the Tree Of Life that was created in the Kaballah. So, is Jung the originator of these ideas? Is the HBDI (Hermann Brain Dominance Instrument) an offshoot of the Jung system, or does it extend to the Kaballah, too? All good questions.

Jung suggested four styles or functions: Thinking, Feeling, Sensing, and Intuition. These functions are paired in their opposite, as in Thinking-Feeling and Intuition-Sensing, as illustrated in the diagram below. These functions are also known as the Jungian compass of ego functions. Let’s look at them briefly.

Carl Jung: 4 Functions

Thinking – involves analyzing and evaluating information or ideas rationally and logically. Jung called this a rational function, requiring decision-making or judging rather than simple information intake.
Feeling – Similar to thinking, feeling is a matter of evaluating information; however, by weighing one’s overall emotional response. Jung calls it rational, obviously not in the usual sense of the word.
Sensing – Sensing is getting information using sensory organs. A sensing person is good at looking and listening and generally getting to know the world. A sensing person tends to prefer facts and data more. Jung called this one of the irrational functions, meaning that it involved perception rather than judging information.
Intuiting – Intuiting is a perception that works outside 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. An intuitive person tends to prefer interconnections and interrelations of facts and events and can conceive their patterns. Jung said it was like seeing around corners.

Mother and daughter duo Katharine Cook Briggs and Isabel Briggs Myers found Jung’s types and functions quite valuable for understanding personalities, and they went on to develop one of the most popular tests called Myers–Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), which is used the results extensively for career guidance, organizational development, and talent management. MBTI not only proves beneficial for the career but is also immensely useful in getting deep insights about yourself.

MBTI included an additional dimension, Judging-Perceiving, to Jung’s functions. Myers and Briggs included this one to help determine which of a person’s functions is dominant. I will cover this in more detail when I write about personality assessments.

More About Carl Jung

Carl Jung was an early supporter of Freud because of their shared interest in the unconscious. He was an active member of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society (formerly known as the Wednesday Psychological Society). When the International Psychoanalytical Association was formed in 1910, Jung became president at Freud’s request.

However, in 1912, while on a lecture tour of America, Jung publicly criticized Freud’s theory of the Oedipus complex and his emphasis on infantile sexuality. The following year, this led to an irrevocable split between them, and Jung went on to develop his version of psychoanalytic theory.

Most of Jung’s assumptions of his analytical psychology reflect his theoretical differences with Freud. For example, while Jung agreed with Freud that a person’s past and childhood experiences determined future behavior, he also believed that we are shaped by our future (aspirations) too.

Differences between Jung and Freud

Theory of the Libido

Jung (1948) disagreed with Freud regarding the role of sexuality. He believed the libido was not just sexual energy, but instead generalized psychic energy.

For Jung, the purpose of psychic energy was to motivate the individual in several important ways, including spiritually, intellectually, and creatively. It was also an individual’s motivational source for seeking pleasure and reducing conflict;

Theory of the Unconscious

Like Freud (and Erikson), Jung regarded the psyche as made up of several separate but interacting systems. The three main ones were the ego, personal, and collective unconscious.

According to Jung, the ego represents the conscious mind, comprising the thoughts, memories, and emotions a person is aware of. The ego is largely responsible for feelings of identity and continuity.

Like Freud, Jung (1921, 1933) emphasized the importance of the unconscious about personality. However, he proposed that the unconscious consists of two layers.

The first layer, the personal unconscious, is essentially the same as Freud’s version of the unconscious. It contains temporally forgotten information and repressed memories. Jung (1933) outlined an important feature of the personal unconscious called complexes. A complex is a collection of thoughts, feelings, attitudes, and memories that focus on a single concept.

The more elements attached to the complex, the greater its influence on the individual. Jung also believed that the personal unconscious was much nearer the surface than Freud suggested, and Jungian therapy is less concerned with repressed childhood experiences. In his view, the present and the future were the keys to the analysis of neurosis and its treatment.

However, the most critical difference between Jung and Freud is Jung’s notion of the collective (or transpersonal) unconscious. This is his most original and controversial contribution to personality theory. This is a level of unconscious shared with other members of the human species comprising latent memories from our ancestral and evolutionary past. ‘The form of the world into which [a person] is born is already inborn in him, as a virtual image’ (Jung, 1953, p. 188).

According to Jung, the human mind has innate characteristics that are “imprinted” on it due to evolution. These universal predispositions stem from our ancestral past. Fear of the dark or snakes and spiders might be examples, and interestingly, this idea has recently been revived in the theory of prepared conditioning. However, more important than isolated tendencies are those aspects of the collective unconscious that have developed into separate sub-systems of the personality. Jung called these ancestral memories and images archetypes.

Archetypes

Archetypes (Jung, 1947) are images and thoughts that have universal meanings across cultures and may appear in dreams, literature, art, or religion.

Jung believes symbols from different cultures are often very similar because they have emerged from archetypes the human race shares. For Jung, our primitive past becomes the basis of the human psyche, directing and influencing present behavior. Jung claimed to identify many archetypes but paid particular attention to four.

The “persona” (or mask) is our outward face. It conceals our authentic selves, and Jung describes it as the “conformity” archetype. This is the public face or role a person presents to others as someone different from who they are (like an actor).

Another archetype is the anima/animus. The “anima/animus” is the mirror image of our biological sex, that is, the unconscious feminine side in males and the masculine tendencies in women. Each sex manifests the attitudes and behavior of the other through centuries of living together. A woman’s psyche contains masculine aspects (the animus archetype), and a man’s psyche contains feminine aspects (the anima archetype).

Next is the shadow. This is the animal side of our personality (like the id in Freud). It is the source of both our creative and destructive energies. In line with evolutionary theory, Jung’s archetypes may reflect predispositions that once had survival value.

Finally, there is the self, which provides a sense of unity in experience. For Jung, the ultimate aim of every individual is to achieve a state of selfhood (similar to self-actualization), and in this respect, Jung (like Erikson) is moving toward a more humanist orientation.

That was certainly Jung’s belief. In his book The Undiscovered Self, he argued that many of the problems of modern life are caused by “man’s progressive alienation from his instinctual foundation.” One aspect of this is his views on the significance of the anima and the animus.

Jung argues that these archetypes are products of the collective experience of men and women living together. However, in modern Western civilization, men are discouraged from expressing their feminine side, and women are discouraged from expressing masculine tendencies. For Jung, this undermines the total psychological development of both sexes.

Together with the prevailing patriarchal culture of Western civilization, this has led to the devaluation of feminine qualities altogether, and the predominance of the persona (the mask) has elevated insincerity to a way of life that goes unquestioned by millions in their everyday life.

Critical Evaluation

Jung’s ideas have not been as popular as Freud’s. This might be because he did not write from the layman, so his ideas were not as extensively disseminated as Freud’s. It may also be because his ideas were a little more mystical, obscure, and less clearly explained.

On the whole, modern psychology has not viewed Jung’s theory of archetypes kindly. Ernest Jones (Freud’s biographer) says that Jung “descended into a pseudo-philosophy out of which he never emerged,” and to many, his ideas look more like New Age mystical speculation than a scientific contribution to psychology.

However, while Jung’s research into ancient myths and legends, his interest in astrology, and his fascination with Eastern religion can be seen in that light, it is also worth remembering that the images he was writing about have, as a matter of historical fact, exerted an enduring hold on the human mind.

Furthermore, Jung himself argues that the constant recurrence of symbols from mythology in personal therapy and psychotic fantasies supports the idea of an innate collective cultural residue. In line with evolutionary theory, Jung’s archetypes may reflect predispositions that once had survival value.

However, Jung’s work has also contributed to mainstream psychology in at least one significant respect. He was the first to distinguish the two major attitudes or orientations of personality – extroversion and introversion. He also identified four basic functions (thinking, feeling, sensing, and intuiting), which, in a cross-classification, yield eight pure personality types.

Psychologists like Hans Eysenck and Raymond Cattell have subsequently built upon this. Jung, therefore, was a cultural icon for generations of psychology undergraduates and put forward ideas that were important to the development of modern personality theory.

The Thinking Style classification used by Ned Hermann (and another Jung concept application) will help you determine What You Came Here To Do With Your Life. When he was alive, Ned was a human resources manager at General Electric. Eventually, he went out independently and developed the Hermann Brain Dominance Instrument used for team building in corporate America. I find some of Ned Hermann’s findings true since he created a database of over 1,000,000 people, classified their thinking style, and correlated it with their profession. This database is vital to understanding yourself and how you will be most satisfied with your profession or job.

So Jung started things, and Myers Briggs and Ned Hermann continued using these same concepts. Today, we have many different applications of Jung’s work—all true, valuable, and helpful in defining who we are.