124 Part II Psychodynamic Theories
and Adler reveal that the opposite appears to be true: Freud was personally some-
what introverted, in tune to his dreams and fantasy life, whereas Adler was person-
ally extraverted, feeling most comfortable in group settings, singing songs and
playing the piano in the coffeehouses of Vienna. Yet Jung held that Freud’s theory
was extraverted because it reduced experiences to the external world of sex and
aggression. Conversely, Jung believed that Adler’s theory was introverted because
it emphasized fictions and subjective perceptions. Jung, of course, saw his own
theory as balanced, able to accept both the objective and the subjective.Functions
Both introversion and extraversion can combine with any one or more of four func-
tions, forming eight possible orientations, or types. The four functions—sensing,
thinking, feeling, and intuiting—can be briefly defined as follows: Sensing tells
people that something exists; thinking enables them to recognize its meaning; feel-
ing tells them its value or worth; and intuition allows them to know about it with-
out knowing how they know.Thinking
Logical intellectual activity that produces a chain of ideas is called thinking. The
thinking type can be either extraverted or introverted, depending on a person’s
basic attitude.
Extraverted thinking people rely heavily on concrete thoughts, but they may
also use abstract ideas if these ideas have been transmitted to them from without,
for example, from parents or teachers. Mathematicians and engineers make fre-
quent use of extraverted thinking in their work. Accountants, too, are extraverted
thinking types because they must be objective and not subjective in their approach
to numbers. Not all objective thinking, however, is productive. Without at least
some individual interpretation, ideas are merely previously known facts with no
originality or creativity (Jung, 1921/1971).
Introverted thinking people react to external stimuli, but their interpretation
of an event is colored more by the internal meaning they bring with them than by
the objective facts themselves. Inventors and philosophers are often introverted
thinking types because they react to the external world in a highly subjective and
creative manner, interpreting old data in new ways. When carried to an extreme,
introverted thinking results in unproductive mystical thoughts that are so individu-
alized that they are useless to any other person (Jung, 1921/1971).Feeling
Jung used the term feeling to describe the process of evaluating an idea or event.
Perhaps a more accurate word would be valuing, a term less likely to be confused
with either sensing or intuiting. For example, when people say, “This surface feels
smooth,” they are using their sensing function, and when they say, “I have a feel-
ing that this will be my lucky day,” they are intuiting, not feeling.
The feeling function should be distinguished from emotion. Feeling is the
evaluation of every conscious activity, even those valued as indifferent. Most of