C. G. Jung observed that psychological type applies not only to people but to groups, cultures, and nations. For me, examining historical shifts and collective events through this typological lens is the most compelling way to use Jung’s model.
For many years, Jungian analyst John Beebe and other typologists have diagnosed the United States as an ESTJ society. In a healthy, balanced manifestation, ESTJ prioritizes efficiency, structural integrity and fair play. Historian Joanne Freeman has observed that the founders believed that the most important thing that they were doing was creating a process of government—processes that would correct course when human nature faltered. This relies heavily on extraverted thinking (Te) as the Hero function in ESTJ, which places planning, collective organization, and objective processes at its very heart.
Since Watergate in the 1970s, however, our processes have completely broken down. Why?
Beebe offers a profound clue. He suggests that the United States is no longer operating as a balanced ESTJ, but rather as a highly distorted, top-heavy version of the type—one where the top three functions are all pulled into the outer world and are extraverted. In this imbalanced state, introverted sensation (Si)—the function of historical memory, precedent, and anchoring truth—has been replaced by extraverted sensation (Se).
Now that Uranus is in Gemini for the next seven years, sometimes I wonder if extraverted sensation has leap frogged into the Hero position? If Se is now in the driver’s seat, the American psyche has shifted from a structured, process-oriented society to an impulsive, hyper-reactive one. We become a culture fixated on immediate external stimuli, physical consumption, shocking spectacles, and rapid-fire data. We become quick to assume others think like us and lose the patience to listen.
More dangerously, this relegates introverted intuition (Ni) into the inferior position. We lose our collective vision. We lose our capacity for depth and capacity to track meaning, and foresee long-term consequences of our actions. There are countless examples across the entire political spectrum—on the left, the right, and everything in between—of people caught up in reacting to the immediate moment and failing to articulate a cohesive, long term vision. Uranus in Gemini—an air transit associated with the rapid and unstable acceleration of thought and data—acts as a massive amplifier of this chaos and a weakening of the checks and balances.
When our outer processes fail us because we have lost our psychological anchor, where do we turn?
For starters, we can consider how our own typology can contribute to rebalancing the nation’s. There’s a dire need right about now for the depth of introverted intuition, the historical grounding of introverted sensation, the ethical alignment of introverted feeling and the relational cohesion of extraverted feeling.
Finally, we would do well to ponder these words of James Hollis:
Each of us has to find that personal resilience, that sense of interior guidance that allows us to chart our pathway without which we will become subsumed either by psychopathology … or caught up in the fevers and disorders of the world around us” (Hollis, A Life of Meaning).
By cultivating that interior guidance within ourselves, we perform the ultimate act of what James Hillman called “psychological citizenship:” offering a quiet anchor to a world caught in a fever.
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Anita Ashland
AnitaAshland.com
