Supplemental Essay: Extreme One-sidedness 

 

In his book The Essential Jung, Anthony Storr described Carl Jung's theories on one-sidedness as follows:

 

"Jung considered that habitual attitudes were nearly always carried too far, so that the thinker neglected his feelings, while the intuitive paid too little attention to the facts given by sensation. Introverts were caught up in their inner worlds; while extraverts lost themselves in the press of events. In Western man, because of the achievements of his culture, there was an especial tendency toward intellectual hubris; an overvaluation of thinking which could alienate a man from his emotional roots. Neurotic symptoms, dreams and other manifestations of the unconscious were often expressions of the 'other side' trying to assert itself."[1]

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"Jung found that those who consulted him because of the emptiness of their lives were one-sided in their development: too much identified with their predominant attitude and function. Since everyone has both an extraverted and an introverted potential, and also needs all four functions (thinking, feeling, sensation and intuition) if he is to live life fully, it follows that one task of analysis is to help the patient become aware of neglected aspects of his personality."[2]

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Carl Jung himself refers to the Dominant function as the "directed function" or "valuable function." In his book Psychological Types he says that many people identify with their "directed function," which represents an undeniable advantage in that "a man can best adapt to collective demands and expectations; moreover it also enables him to keep out of the way of his inferior, undifferentiated, undirected functions by self-alienation."[3]

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One-sidedness is necessary for proper functioning on the day-to-day level; but people require occasional connection with their shadow function as well: "Thus every directed function demands the strict exclusion of everything not suited to its nature: thinking excludes all disturbing feelings, just as feeling excludes all disturbing thoughts. Without the repression of everything alien to itself, the directed function could never operate at all. On the other hand, since the self-regulation of the living organism requires by its very nature the harmonizing of the whole human being, consideration of the less favored functions forces itself upon us as a vital necessity and an unavoidable task in the education of the human race."[4]

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Link: Return to Intuition (N)

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~Posted January 12, 2024