I have been following a morning practice as of late that, it now occurs to me, is a perfect exercise for those of us with inferior sensation.

Dominant intuitive types of ENFP, ENTP, INFJ, and INTJ have inferior sensation. This means we can experience overwhelm of the senses and not feel grounded.

I came across a Tik Tok a few weeks ago about sleep paralysis and she recommended a grounding exercise as a way to prevent this and it is helpful for far more than sleep paralysis, of course. You sit on a chair or bench with feet on the ground (don’t cross your legs, this stops the flow of energy). Sit straight up and let the energy in your body drop down. Focus on relaxing every muscle from your scalp, , abdomen, calves, feet. This strengthens your connection to the earth. As an alternative you can lie down on the ground. Do this for at least 15 minutes a day but even 5 minutes will help. If you meditate, you can do it in this position.

I have been do this every morning and listen to Hemi-Sync’s morning exercise while doing so.

Breathing exercises also help with inferior sensation, stress, and anxiety. The physiological sigh is one I have been using lately.

If you have inferior sensation, I’d love to hear about what works for you. Feel free to message me on Instagram or email me.

Today I started a series on YouTube about Jung’s Psychological Types book, which is 100-years-old this year.

Because this book is difficult to read, many type enthusiasts haven’t read it. Some may not even be aware of it. By posting one short video about each of the chapters in Psychological Types, hopefully I can help make this book easier to understand and encourage people to read the book on their own.

I include practical takeaways that you can journal about. I will do an I Ching reading during each video, as Carl Jung was greatly influenced by both Taoism and the I Ching.

Please subscribe to the YouTube channel if you are interested in following along with the series. As the series unfolds I’ll add the links to each video in this post and will include this post on the Best Posts tab on the menu of this website, for easy reference.

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

I’m currently reading Personality by C.A. Meier. Dr. Meier was a close associate of Carl Jung’s, so I’ve been keen to read this book, because Jung published Psychological Types early in his career, so Meier has an understanding of Jung’s thoughts about type later on in his career.

Anyway, Meier talks briefly about how it is hard to type people, so I will provide a summary of that here.

First, Meier says that “in our neighbor the inferior function is more conspicuous than the superior one, because the main function operates naturally, almost automatically, and thus remains inconspicuous.” Also, “it is a common human weakness to see another’s Achilles heel sooner than his strong points.” We tend to look for the negative in others.

Second, in the real world we are dealing with people, not types. Things are always more complicated in the real world.

Third, type can change throughout life. “External influences such as upbringing, family tradition, education, career, the course of one’s life and fate can play a role.” Jung was very clear on this point but it is one that has seemed to be lost in many online discussions of type.

Overall he says that it is easier to make a type diagnosis by a process of elimination. This takes time, careful observation, and interaction with the person.

Becoming a better version of our personality type tends to be the focus of Myers-Briggs and other typology systems.

However, as Steve Myers writes in Myers-Briggs Typology vs. Jungian Individuation:

…as the Jungian analyst Joseph Wheelwright put it, the most important thing about types is detyping. The aim is to give full parity to the inferior so that – as von Franz describes – the conscious structure collapses and something new comes up. This transforms the personality, making it more whole and individual.

Myers-Briggs Typology vs. Jungian Individuation by Steve Myers p. 185

Detyping is the same thing as the “transcendent function” that Jung described in Psychological Types: “Individuation is closely connected with the transcendent function… since this function creates individual lines of development which could never be reached by keeping to the path prescribed by collective norms.”

Anyway, I like that word “detyping.” Rather than focusing so much on being better at a weaker function in the personality, typology should be more about becoming our unique self that transcends a particular personality type.

Sources:

Myers-Briggs Typology vs. Jungian Individuation by Steve Myers

Psychological Types by CG Jung

For greater depth of understanding about personality type, there is nothing better than returning to the source, Carl Jung. In the book C.G. Jung Speaking: Interviews and Encounters, there is a section from pages 304-314 where an interviewer asks him about type.

Of particular note is what Jung said about introverted intuitive types (what today we would call INTJ and INFJ):

So you see, if the introverted intuitive were to speak of what he really perceives, practically no one would understand him. They learn to keep things to themselves, and you hardly ever hear them talking of these things. That is a great disadvantage, but it is an enormous advantage in another way, not to speak of the experiences they have in that respect and also in their human relations.

For instance, they come into the presence of somebody they don’t know, and suddenly they have inner images, and these images give them more or less complete information about the psychology of the partner.

It can also happen that they come into the presence of somebody they don’t know at all, not from Adam, and they know an important piece out of the biography of that person, and are not aware of it, and they tell the story, and then the fat is in the fire.

So the introverted intuitive has in a way a very difficult life, although one of the most interesting lives, but it is often difficult to get into their confidence. [emphasis mine]

C.G Jung Speaking, p. 311

In this section of the book Jung also tells a funny story about an intuitive type, where the woman noticed through intuition that Jung had seen a male patient earlier than morning, even though she was completely oblivious to the physical clue of a half-smoked cigar right in front of her. This prompted Jung to say:

The intuitive is a type that doesn’t see, doesn’t see the stumbling block before his feet, but he smells a rat for ten miles.

C.G. Jung Speaking p. 309

If your type is introverted intuitive, I’d love to hear if the above insights from Jung resonate with you. Instagram is a good place to message me.

We suffer more in imagination than we do in reality, the Stoic philosopher Seneca said.

For all the talk out there about how sensation types and intuitive types differ, I think they both struggle equally with suffering in imagination.

By sensation types I am speaking broadly of the four types that have dominant sensation: ISFJ, ISTJ, ESTP, and ESFP. Intuition is their inferior (weakest) function, especially when the person is younger or overwhelmed by life circumstances at a given time.

People who have a tendency towards having a sensation type (most of us are not a pure type) can have difficulty seeing into the future and predicting the outcome of an action. They struggle to see beyond what is in front of them. Therefore their vision of what the outcome of a decision or situation might be can be inaccurate and trigger unnecessary anxiety.

The four dominant intuitive types are: INFJ, INTJ, ENTP and ENFP. Intuition is their dominant (strongest) function. More often than not, people who have a tendency towards having an intuitive type are correct in connecting the dots and gauging the outcome of a decision or situation. This can cause anxiety as well.

Both sensation and intuitive types need to develop practices to help them face situations with equanimity. Above all, sensation and intuitive types should rely on each other’s strengths in order to better face reality and minimize suffering in imagination.

I love the term “centroversion,” which I discovered when reading Steve Myers’ book:

Another associate of Jung, Erich Neumann, describes this new attitude as the personality embarking on a third direction, which is neither extraversion nor introversion but ‘centroversion.’ This is his own term for a new direction that is equivalent to individuation.

Myers-Briggs Typology vs Jungian Individuation: Overcoming One-Sidedness in Self and Society by Steve Myers p. 118

Our personality type makes us aware of how we are one-sided. In Jungian typology, the goal is to use our type as a stepping stone to individuation where we transcend our type and leave it behind. Myers says that “individuation begins only when we try to differentiate the inferior function.” When we give the inferior “full parity with the dominant” our consciousness collapses into the unconscious. We lose the certainties we used to have about life and confront the contents of our psyche. Marie-Louise von Franz describes it as follows:

When the fourth function comes up … the whole [conscious] structure collapses … This, then, produces a stage … where everything is neither thinking nor feeling nor sensation nor intuition. Something new comes up, namely, a completely different and new attitude towards life in which one uses all and none of the function all the time.

Lectures on Jung’s Typology by Marie-Louise von Franz and James Hillman p. 27-28

Ideally, the older we get, the more we should NOT fit the personality type of our younger years. We should become less one-sided. Myers conducted research for his PhD that involved gathering data on typological one-sidedness by country through an online self-report questionnaire. The results show that, both in the East and in the West, one-sideness actually increases with age. In my next post I’ll take a look at ways we can avoid becoming increasingly one-sided as we age.