The implications and ramifications of Jung’s amazing discoveries are vast and important. I cannot discuss all of them here, but I want to talk a little about one that I consider particularly important: how introvert and extrovert persons relate to each other.

At the end of the book, regarding human communication, Jung shows himself as a pessimist: in his experience, most of issues between people with different psychological types are dealt with via ‘distraction’, indulgence or misunderstanding. Actual, quality communication seems to be almost impossible when it comes to issues other than general.

But such stance is a pessimism without cynicism: out of that state of things comes the strong need of building bridges between the wildly different introvert and extrovert worlds. As it was mentioned before, each of them represent a different modality in which nature has evolved in order to allow the survival of the whole human experience, and we need them equally if we are to survive as a species.

Moving to the individual dimension, excesses can be harmful on both cases. Extroverts, Jung remarks, think they rule objects but in fact are ruled by them; the risk they face is becoming enslaved by things, and falling into a frenzy of pointless activity, perpetual movement. An extreme extrovert can hardly be regarded as a happy person: there is some kind of ‘thirst’ in them, as if no object were enough, everything becomes disappointing and must be drained and quickly leave room to the next thing.

The objects in the inner world are infinite, just as in the outer world. So introverts, on their side, face the same kind of overwhelm regarding the ‘dark waters’ of feelings, intuitions, premonitions… Introverted, Jung says, are always in danger of seeing a symbol in everything –a capability sometimes handy, impossible for an extrovert, but which in excess can lead to obsession, paralysis and a suicidal isolation from the outside–.

An important precision here: Introvert as I am myself, I have to be very careful when I talk about that type because I can only see it in a partial way, from my point of view (nobody can see one’s own shadow). For the same reasons, I would not like to present here an image too negative or simplistic of extroverts: an introvert cannot understand an extrovert but to a certain extent, and the other way round is also true.

Jung, an introvert too, aware of that same risk in his case, warns that extrovert are essential, for example, for the creation of social bounds. They have the capability of being more ‘general’, gathering elements from different backgrounds, and also a mobility that is not easy for introverts, who ponder everything inside before moving a finger. I like to see introverts like fishes from the deep, while extroverts would be more like those creatures that can run really fast on the surface.

So that takes us to the bulk of the issue: how do they see each other?

We are talking about theoretical magnitudes here: there is no such thing as a ‘pure’ introvert or extrovert. As mentioned before, we all count with all the possibilities, and in the end ‘being’ introvert or extrovert is a question of personal inclination, like preferring bananas to tangerines. But of course the more we dwell on a certain world, the more it develops, and the less we dwell the other, more obscure and difficult can look to us.

So how those ideal introvert and extrovert types relate to each other?

With great difficulty at times. The introvert finds the extrovert noisy and superficial, while the extrovert considers the introvert weird, obscure, slow… During conversation, often both types speak about different things because the thing they value most is different; what the introvert considers subtlety of thought, to the eyes of the extrovert can easily be seen as a really wretched and whimsical interpretation of things; at the same time, in the introvert’s view, the extrovert shows a superficiality difficult to stand: most of his ideas sound cliche to him, borrowed from somewhere else without enough criticism. And, beware, the introvert is often right: an extroverted will rather take ideas, notions and abstract concepts premade, because for this kind of individual the essence of life is in a different place, the material world.

On the other extreme, the risk of the introverted is becoming, in fact, way too theoretical, too far from the physical world, charmed with his own inner wealth. Fine reasoning and logic are a wonderful tool to explore reality; but, in the hands of an extreme or dysfunctional introvert, they can also become a tool for figuring out theories that have nothing to do with reality but ‘sound good’ due to a simulation of internal logic. I’m sure you’ve met people of both kinds.

Hope you enjoyed this new post. I didn’t intend this series to be so long, but it has grown by itself due to the importance of the issue, which does not allow generalities. Next week I’ll give you some more interesting details about the relations between introvert and extrovert, those Ying and Yang of human nature, condemned to understand each other… Well, to try to, at least.

Jung’s Personality Types – part 4 originally appeared on Zerebria on 18 May 2012.

Related posts:

1. Jung’s Personality Types – part 1
2. Jung’s Personality Types – part 2
3. Jung’s Personality Types – part 3

Back to when we left, I’ll repeat the basics of Jung’s personality division. It is based on two different dimensions or parameters: the first one is introversion-extroversion, introverted being those individuals whose natural tendency is to dwell in their inner world, and extroverted those whose natural development leads them outside, to the world of things and external events.

The second dimension consists in 4 basic psychological features, present in every subject, although in different proportions and establishing different sets of relations between them: sensation (from ‘sense’, i.e., the capability of perception through the senses), intuition (similar to sensation, but related to the Unconscious; a capability to detect patterns or situations already familiar, present in our library of primal images -i.e. the Unconscious), thinking (intellectual capabilities, directed logic and reasoning), and feeling (identification of a certain stimulus as good or bad).

By superposing those two dimensions, we define a whole range of human possibilities. For example, a person who is extroverted (mostly interested in the outside world), and has intuition as main function, will be the kind of person who chooses a career according to its possibilities of professional development (the intuition is focused on trends, on previsions), even if it doesn’t appeals him personally (feeling being a not so developed function, or maybe sensation and he does not pay much attention to what the job is exactly about).

As a contrast, a person who is introverted (mostly interested in the inner world), with feeling as the main function, will be one of those persons that look quiet on the surface, but whose feelings, deep, elaborated and complex, drive most of their decisions. This particular type of person, Jung remarks, has appeared to him predominantly in women.

In my previous post I talked about the social conditioning that imposes on its individuals a lot of stress to develop their most gifted function damaging the others, a formula that allows great social adjustment, but is also a cause of internal lack of balance and stress in the particular individual, because a human being is more than his most gifted function, and the rest of the entity protests any repression exerted.

Jung is not a person inclined to easy judgments, and he also admits that this way of working has its advantages too, which he has not been the first to notice. The intensification of the primary function allows it a degree of development that would otherwise not been possible. A lot of amazing achievements come from that overstrain. But the poison, as usual, is in the dose. Society asks you to overlook your not so favored functions, not useful for the collective.

The process of getting to know one’s less favored parts and reach an harmonic development is called ‘individuation’. It is a process that perhaps never ends, but is necessary for any human being to advance in his personal development, not to mention to maintain mental sanity. Funny enough, individuation turns out to be the opposite to individualism; a person whose all psychological counterparts are healthy integrated and assumed, is in a way more deeply human and thus more useful to the community and willing to serve it, and prepared with better and more original ideas to do so.

As examples of societies that were organized the other way round, Jung mentions ancient Greece. The stress put on individuation there allowed the appearance of very unique individuals, philosophers, dramatic authors, mathematicians… many of whom reached achievements so great that we are still profiting them. But at the same time, the price was a society based upon a whole majority of population submitted to slavery, dysfunctional like any society that does not guarantee the development of all its individuals, and which finally perished.

In our current Western societies, the biggest menace comes perhaps from the extreme extro-version imposed as the single rule. If you have read this far, you have to some degree an introverted tendency, and give that part of human experience its fair share of attention; but in an environment that disfavors it, it is always worth repeating it: the fact that the inner world is invisible by no means makes it non existing and non active.

An example of the consequences of this lack of balance that comes to mind easily is easy to see in many news reports: those cases, sadly repeated until almost becoming cliche, of guy-who-kills-wife-and-commits-suicide. Those who survive very often declare that ‘they did not what they were doing’, that ‘it all happened like in a dream’. Of course human being is a complex entity and every case will present different peculiarities, but obviously in all of them there was a latent inner world that could have used a lot more of attention.

It’s like hiding dirt behind the door mat and then having it all coming in avalanche into you. In addition, on those cases the media mostly remarks external factors like the use of drugs of alcohol. But use of drugs or alcohol is also very often a symptom, a first warning: many people take that kind of road precisely because ‘they don’t feel well’ — that is all the depth they can reach by their own within the inner world, a world nobody speaks of. Something must be done about the pressure, something must be done about that ‘something’ nobody ever speaks of.

The inner world is there to helps us, and it would do a terrific job if we hadn’t declared a war on it. When asked about the cold war, Jung once said this: “there is no such thing as an H-bomb. The real menace is in human mind.”

I hope this information is worthwhile to you. And don’t become too obsessed to find the ‘right’ interpretation about what is running beneath in you. Those interpretations are like shots in the dark, often too rationally-based (another sign of the time). Very often, all that is needed is a change of stance, all our dark side asks of us for starters is that we admit that it is here. Because no one likes being ignored.

Jung’s Personality Types – part 3 originally appeared on Zerebria on 16 May 2012.

Related posts:

1. Jung’s Personality Types – part 2
2. Jung’s Personality Types – part 1
3. Intuition: how it works

OK, so, summarizing the previous entry, Jung’s division of psychological types is based upon two concepts: introversion or extroversion (the individual’s tendency to focus on his inner world or the world outside), and the four basic psychological features: sensation (perception, stuff that arrives through the senses), feeling (emotions, experiencing as good or bad), thinking (capability of consciously orientate the intellect), and intuition (similar to sensation but based upon the ‘repository’ of images present in the Unconscious -see my previous post-).

An interesting thing to remark is that every human being owns all of these capabilities. When we say that one person belongs to a certain group, for example, let’s say, ‘rational extroverted’, it does not mean that the person is not capable of emotion, intuition, feeling, or of any introverted activity. The division refers only to what is the most developed feature in the person. But in fact we all can, and should, as we’ll see later, develop to the most all of our capabilities, because otherwise we are in risk of living a dissociated live.

Regarding the introverted/extroverted dimension, it is most definitely a preference in each individual. For example, I am for sure an introverted person: living in the inner world is for me the rule, and the outside is the exception. But I always remember what a friend of mine once told me: ‘you can be charming when you want… but you seldom want’.

That is to say, in social, extroverted situations, I can manage quite alright, but that is not comfortable for me, that’s not my natural environment and it represents a strong investment of energy for me. As soon as I can, I’ll better be back home with my books, my records, my computer… my homebase. And a kind of existence that would be a nightmare for any extroverted.

So much for the introverted-extroverted dimension. Regarding the four basic psychological traits, they are all present in every person, but things work in a different way. One of the four traits is usually far more favored than the rest, due to social conditioning, and sometimes to the extent that it can become a tyrant for the other three (Some people even identify the whole of themselves with such a single function – a sure road to neurosis, and yet sadly common nowadays).

That favorite function is usually helped by another one, not as developed, but which acts as ‘fine tuning’ (example: the person that decides emotionally but then supports the decision with a lot of reasoning).

As for the other not so favored two functions, they remain in obscurity. Less exerted, they become more and more regressive, as they are not paid conscious attention. They are what Jung calls the subject’s ‘shadow’, and start to act in a compensatory way. For example: a repressed feeling dimension can appear through highly emotional dreams (night life mirrors the subject’s conscious life), or even, in conscious life, a usually rational and tranquil guy can break now and then into momentary bursts of childish emotion, unexplainable even to him.

It is the shadow asking for its toll. Please notice that those parts in the shade are not negative; what is negative is their repression. It is as if the forgotten traits yelled from the Unconscious ‘hey buddy, I’m here, more balance is required!’.

If the lack of attention to those parts persists long enough,, there finally arrives a second stage when they stop acting in a compensatory way; ignored, with the unconscious taking charge of them, they keep becoming more and more regressive, primitive or child-like, and then they start to act in open opposition to the privileged function. At that state, an open war has started inside, a vicious cycle of neurosis, and a common condition of most of the humans living in modern Western societies.

One way of bringing equilibrium back is simply making those parts of ourselves conscious again. I have experience a lot of times the power of bringing contents to light, speaking them aloud. The process usually requires the support of a therapist, because nobody can see one’s own shadow (that’s why it is called shadow), no matter how blatant it is for other people who watch it.

So much for this time. I hope you enjoyed the read and now are full of questions, and probably paying a lot of attention to yourself. Good luck.

Jung’s Personality Types – part 2 originally appeared on Zerebria on 14 May 2012.

Related posts:

1. Jung’s Personality Types – part 3
2. Jung’s Personality Types – part 1
3. Intuition: how it works

I had read like 6 or 7 of his books, but I was keeping one of his key works, ‘Psychological types’, for a moment when I felt I could read it responsively. At last, that moment recently came last month.

The book is an intellectual pinnacle, perhaps the best and most comprehensive study about the differences of character and temper existing among human beings. Like any peak, it takes some effort to surmount it; but at the other side freedom awaits.

Jung’s classification of human types is not an exercise of fancy, but a confirmation of patterns and schemes he found after the treatment of thousands and thousands of patients. In addition, Jung is horrified with simplification, and repeats every few pages that his models, like everything in science, are approximations for the sake of prediction.

400 pages of historical examples, and the analysis of all the theories about personality previously existing, with all their limitations and partial successes carefully pondered, precede Jung’s classification of human personalities. Unlike other colleagues of him, frequently included in the same label of ‘psychoanalysis’, maybe there is nobody more horrified by oversimplification and the lack of scientific rigor than Jung. It is important for me to repeat it here time after time because a short post must, necessarily, be almost a caricature of these very important issues. That said, here is what I consider the core.

Jung’s model of personality is based upon two important factors or variables: introversion/extroversion, and the four human psychological attributes.

Introversion/Extroversion is the natural tendency of the individual to reside in the inner world (Intro-verted; more interested in subjects), or the outside world (Extro-verted; more interested in objects).

Our current world is overly extroverted, to the extent that the inner world is not simply badly looked upon: it is considered as ‘non existing’, or ‘whimsical’. This social preference causes a lack of balance in the individuals: those with an extroverted tendency are overstimulated, while introverted are submitted to repressions that can end up bursting quite violently; some of them even never get to know that they belong to that kind, or consider it a ‘flaw’, due to social pressure.

But both tendencies are absolutely natural in human beings; they are ways developed by nature to help humans survive. The problem is the lack of balance between forces; an artificial lack of balance that is easy to see in our world, where there are too many things happening (extroverted behaviors), but without giving them enough thought. People doing a lot of things, but not giving them enough thought. Introverted guys, on their side, can often be erroneously considered ‘slow’ or even a bit retarded; a lot of non visible reflection precedes the action, but action, when it comes, is very very solid and well grounded.

The other key factor is what Jung considers -again, out of the study of his many patients- the human’s four essential psychological features. Essential in the sense that they cannot be reduced to simpler elements. The first two ones are: sensation, i.e., perception of reality through senses; intuition, a similar system of perception, but grounded on the unconscious.

A few words about the unconscious here: it is kind of an archive of images that human kind has accumulated along its 5,000 millions of years of existence (I think that was the amount). When something has repeated in the same pattern along many many many generations, it becomes an archetype, i.e., a primary image that gets filed in the unconscious and can pop up and help you via dreams, intuitions, ‘peculiar’ mistakes, etc.

The proof that the unconscious is inbuilt in human psyche is that Jung studied the dreams and myths of people around the whole world, and also of people from different ages; people who could not communicate with each other, and yet, the images and myths they all used revealed common patterns. Like he says, he found that a black man from the Southern US could show in his dreams themes from Greek mithology, and a contemporary Swiss apprentice could repeat concepts and patterns that belonged to ancient alchemy.

So much for the sensation and intuition. Then there is feeling, i.e. emotional reaction, either positive or negative, to things, and thought, our almighty, yet a bit abused right now, intellectual capacity.

To summarize it, as he puts it in an interview, sensation allows us to know there is something; thinking allows us to know what it is; feeling allows us to know if it is good or bad, and intuition allows us to know about its direction, the trend it belongs to.

I’ll let you digest this information until next post, in case you find all of this as fascinating as I do and stay with me. Good weekend to you all.

Jung’s Personality Types – part 1 originally appeared on Zerebria on 11 May 2012.

Related posts:

1. Jung’s Personality Types – part 2
2. Jung’s Personality Types – part 3
3. Intuition: how it works

It is a funny, automatic phenomenon. I don’t think there is ill will to it. When confronted with one of those frustrating types (they are very frequent on certain IRC channels, for example ), there are several ways you can face it; all of them, I think, related to the old adagio of change reality by changing yourself.

I used to think of them as an anti-ego cure, as an acid test for how many times I started my sentence with lil’ol me. It was annoying, but at least it was useful to try to establish some basic statistics on the matter.

But I found that approach a bit superficial and did not settle with that. The thing is, most of those guys whose attention switches off when they hear the ‘I’ word, give the impression of being, in fact, quite egotistic themselves. Like kids with perception bulimia. It is not that they show an egoless possibility for the wise to consider; it is that for them their own ‘I’ is the only thing that there is. So in fact there is a conflict of two egos, and the one who is most aware has the chance to give up the race.

So then the self-observation process rebuilds itself on a new level: you see one of those guys, and make a game of trying to build the sentences the other way round, with the I at the end to at least attenuate the intensity of that attention killer. And you make fun of those poor guys, and nobody notices the whole thing unless you write a blog post or something

I think (but are you still there?) that is the most sensible way to take this phenomenon.

Those Guys Who… originally appeared on Zerebria on 9 May 2012.

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1+1=2

2-Describe it with the most pedantic, vague and twisted terms you can find:

Manual intertwined bi-term simple addition

3-Reduce the definition to an acronym:

MIBSA

4-Change (very) slightly the technology:

1+0.5+0.5

5-Modify the previous acronym accordingly (and very pedantic):

Manual Intertwined Multi-term Simple Addition

6-Stick in a really bad joke that only a few geeks could understand:

Manual Intertwined Multi-term And Yet Simple Addition

7-Reduce to a new acronym:

MIMAYSA

8-Add a prestigious IT word (suggestions: framework, environment, platform)

MIMAYSA Framework

9-Reduce to a new acronym and add the version number

MIMAYSA-F 4.29

10-Include the previous version of the acronym, for the same price, just in case, because maybe a bunch of geeks do not remember that they can still do the operation the old way (i.e., 1+0.5+0.5=2 is fully compatible with the previous 1+1=2; don’t tell me you didn’t read the manual!)

MIMAYSA-MIBSA-F 4.29

11-As ‘Framework’ is already reduced and nobody will notice it, add yet another prestigious IT word

MIMAYSA-MIBSA-F 4.29 Environment

12-Repeat

MIMAYSA-MIBSA-F-E 4.29 Platform

13-Version 5.17 is out! Stick a fancy symbol to make clear that you accept either version 4.29 or superior:

MIMAYSA-MIBSA-F-E 4.29+ Platform

14-Place an ad:

___________________________________________

DEVELOPERS WANTED

Requirements: MIMAYSA-MIBSA-F-E 4.29+ Platform

___________________________________________

Beautiful!

How To Make Your Own Computer Acronym originally appeared on Zerebria on 7 May 2012.

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3. A geek graduates

Charlot imagines an ideal morning routine; he wakes up, says hello to his darling, then goes to the door and indolently takes a grape that hangs in there from the luscious garden outside. It takes only a few seconds before a cow arrives, and allows itself to be milked for the breakfast coffee.

My words will never replace the grace and rhythm of the images, so watch the film if you can. It is poetry in motion, and incredibly current (for example: it is impossible not to remember the production chain scene whenever you go to a supermarket).

But, going back to the dream house scene, it is worth a thousand courses on creative visualization. That’s the way to dream, damn it, that’s the way to dream…

Visualizing Big originally appeared on Zerebria on 4 May 2012.

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Then go visit a couple of productivity forums. You’ll find them stuffed with things like ‘Drowning in email’, ‘He cannot be reached by email anymore, too overwhelmed’, ‘Help me process (terrifying number here) emails’, etc, etc, etc.

I wonder how many technological advances fulfill the same paradigm. Misuse, overuse, and it becomes more and more difficult to determine who’s the master and who’s the slave. In addition, of course, making distinctions as such requires some wisdom, or knowledge at the very least: things far out of reach for those for whom information suffices.

That kind of people seems to be the majority right now, but I hope this tide will withdraw soon. It is quite inhuman, if you think about it: man was born to create, and you cannot create anything out of information snippets; they all are equivalent, only intelligence establishes the criteria for what’s valuable and what must be rejected…

Well, intelligence and anti-spam filters

Case: Email originally appeared on Zerebria on 2 May 2012.

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That man, in my view, is our rational-discursive part. A part I’ve discussed -and satirized- in other places of this blog.

The predominant role our culture grants to such part of our selves is just a trend; something that can change with the times. Intellect is just one of our powers, and a very big one for that matter, but woe to those who identify their whole self with their intellect! It would be like deducing that you are a screwdriver out of the fact that you can drive screws. You are that, but you are much more than that.

You are an alive being, and your different powers need to keep in proportion. Any excess in one area -beyond necessary, isolated moments-, can and will have consequences.

So how to deal with the overwhelming predominance of the ‘little man’, the 24-7 perennial voice within? Fighting it with reasoning (‘OK, so I have to stop being so rational’) would be like fighting fire with fire: big arson.

But a part of you does not have to fight other. Just take charge of your intelligence, and once in charge, out of generosity, decide to commit suicide now and then. Say it with those literal words: ‘Now I will commit suicide’.

Such a determination, irrational in itself, born out of emotion, will make some room for you to enjoy the always absent here-and-now for a while. And you don’t have to worry because, a bit like in ‘Groundhog Day’, you know the little voice will be back again and again… There is so much to bitch about, isn’t there?

“OK, Then I’ll Commit Suicide” originally appeared on Zerebria on 30 April 2012.

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His biggest contribution is usually considered to be his original conception of time (for which he coined the term ‘duration’). However, if you’re interested, I think the best introduction to his writing is his short study on laughter; it is not too metaphysical, and the sample jokes he uses are sometimes very funny.

One of Bergson’s ideas I recall often is that one’s being is a single impulse that comes along, flowering and modifying as it goes. Such impulse, Bergson affirms, begins at the moment of conception, within your mother’s womb.

I find very beautiful to think that, everything that I’m doing right now, I did or I will do, no matter how much tings can change, is part of a single, multiform continuum. (On their side, mum and dad also came from their own original impulses, etc…)

Adopting this working model, a funny consequence in the practical sphere is that we all are 9 months older than what we used to think. Makes sense to me; pre-birth life is life just like the other, isn’t it? But of course we’re such social beings…

Bergsonian Bounce originally appeared on Zerebria on 27 April 2012.

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