Digesting Jung: Food for the Journey - Inner City Books

A Psychological Compass 17
modes of adaptation. In the former, the movement of energy is toward
the inner world. In the latter, interest is directed toward the
outer world. In one case the subject (inner reality) and in the other
the object (outer reality) is of primary importance. Whether one is
predominately introverted or extraverted—as opposed to what one
is doing at any particular time—depends on the direction one’s energy
naturally, and usually, flows. 11
Each of the four functions has its special area of expertise.
Thinking refers to the process of cognitive thought; sensation is
perception by means of the physical sense organs; feeling is the
function of subjective judgment or valuation; and intuition refers to
perception via the unconscious.
Briefly, the sensation function establishes that something exists,
thinking tells us what it means, feeling tells us what it’s worth to us,
and through intuition we have a sense of what can be done with it
(the possibilities).
No one function by itself (and neither attitude alone) is sufficient
for ordering our experience of ourselves or the world around us:
For complete orientation all four functions should contribute
equally: thinking should facilitate cognition and judgment, feeling
should tell us how and to what extent a thing is important or unimportant
for us, sensation should convey concrete reality to us
through seeing, hearing, tasting, etc., and intuition should enable us
to divine the hidden possibilities in the background, since these too
belong to the complete picture of a given situation. 12
In everyday usage, the feeling function is often confused with an
emotional reaction. Emotion, more properly called affect, is invariably
the result of an activated complex, which is accompanied
11 Note that introversion is quite different from introspection, which refers to selfexamination.
Although introverts may have more time or inclination for introspection
than do extraverts, introverts have no monopoly on psychological awareness.
12 Ibid., par. 900. Jung acknowledged that the four orienting functions do not contain
everything in the conscious psyche. Will power and memory, for instance, are
not included in his model, because although they may be affected by the way one
functions typologically, they are not in themselves typological determinants.