If you want to see what it looks and feels like at a visceral level when extroverted feeling makes an entrance, the last five minutes of Martin Luther King’s I Have a Dream speech is a dramatic example.
According to depth psychologist Jennifer Leigh Selig, who has formally studied Martin Luther King for 18 years, during the first 12 minutes of the speech he stays on script. He had used versions of the I Have a Dream speech in the past, but decided to instead use the speech with the cancelled check metaphor.
After he completes that speech, his close friend Mahalia Jackson leans over and says, “Tell them about the dream, Martin. Tell them about the dream.” He moves the papers aside on his podium and speaks extemporaneously for the final five minutes. That is the five minutes we all know; it’s likely if he had stopped after the first 12 minutes, the speech would not be #1 on American Rhetoric’s top 100 speeches of the 20th century.
The 12:13 mark of the below video is where he makes the shift into extroverted feeling. So you’ll want to watch at least the few minutes preceding that, and preferably the whole thing, so you can get the proper feel for it:
In this shift to extroverted feeling, he transformed himself from a lecturer to a preacher. King’s attorney, Clarence Jones, described the moment like this:
I have never seen him speak the way I saw him on that day. It was as if some cosmic transcendental force came down and occupied his body. It was the same body, the same voice, but the voice had something I had never heard before.
Selig isn’t comfortable typing King even though she has studied him for a long time. She does say: “he functioned most effectively in the public and political arena as an extroverted feeler.”
Does that mean he was INFJ or ENFJ, which are types frequently assigned to him on personality forums? Not necessarily. Selig also says:
In reading King’s autobiographical statements, it is obvious that his thinking function was dominant in his childhood, adolescence, and early adulthood; this is seen most clearly when examining his approach to religion. Jung’s thinking and feeling functions relate to how we make decisions: objectively or subjectively, with the mind or with the heart.
[…] King decided to join the church at five, not because he “believed” nor had any feeling of God, but because he wanted to keep up with his older sister. At thirteen, he questioned the bodily resurrection of Jesus; it simply made no rational sense to him. His studies in college made him even more skeptical of the fundamentalism of religion
Integration: The Psychology and Mythology of Martin Luther King, Jr. and His (Unfinished) Therapy With the Soul of America by Jennifer Leigh Selig, p. 92
In Jungian typology, there is a concept called the “transcendent function.” Marie-Louis von Franz, who was Jung’s close associate for around 30 years, describes it like this:
To the four comes a fifth thing that is not the four, but is something beyond them and consists of them all. That is what the alchemists called the fifth essence, the quintessentia or the philosopher’s stone. It means a consolidated nucleus of the personality that is no longer identified with any of the functions. This is a stepping out, so to speak, of identification with one’s own consciousness and with one’s own unconscious
Lectures on Jung’s Typology by Marie-Louise von Franz and James Hillman
The transcendent function can appear in mid-life and beyond, so it’s likely that was in play during this speech. Selig describes his speaking style in general as one that could open the minds of both thinkers and feelers:
Certainly one reason King was such a powerful speaker was his ability in a single speech or sermon to reach into the hearts of the feelers and address the minds of the thinkers; one reason why King was such a powerful healer was his ability in any given speech to open the minds of the feelers and open the hearts of the thinkers. Only a man who holds those two opposites in harmonious balance within could do as much.
Trying to figure out King’s type is almost impossible to do because of his mythological stature. As Jesse Jackson said: “Thinking about him is like thinking about the prism, the sun shining through a glass from as many angles as you look. You know there is another set of rays, and as many angles as you think about Dr. King, there is yet another set of angles with which to analyze him.”
Instead, we would all do well to ponder how, with our own types, we can create the “beloved community” that was King’s goal by integrating the opposites within ourselves and integrating with others.
