Personality types: Jung's model of typology - Inner City Books

Concluding Remarks 99to stay home and find out who they are. But just as introvertsmay be abandoned by their shadows in a noisy bar, so extravertsmay be left high and dry—and lonely—when on theirown.The opposite attitude and the inferior functions regularlyappear as shadow figures in dreams and fantasies. Accordingto Jung's understanding, all the characters that appear indreams are personifications of aspects of the dreamer. 119Dream activity becomes heightened when a function not usuallyavailable to consciousness is required. Thus a man who isa thinking type, after a quarrel with his wife, for instance, maybe assailed in his dreams by images of primitive feeling persons,dramatically illustrating a side of himself he needs toacknowledge. Similarly, the sensation type stuck in a rut maybe confronted in dreams by an intuitive type showing somepossible ways out, and so on.To assimilate a function, a subject broached above in theintroduction (page 22), means to live with it in the foregroundof consciousness. "If one does a little cooking or sewing,"writes von Franz, "it does not mean that the sensation functionhas been assimilated":Assimilation means that the whole conscious adaptation ofconscious life, for a while, lies on that one function. Switchingover to an auxiliary function takes place when one feels thatthe present way of living has become lifeless, when one getsmore or less constantly bored with oneself and one's activities.. . . The best way to know how to switch is simply to say, "Allright, all this is now completely boring, it does not mean anythingto me any more. Where in my past life is an activity thatI feel I could still enjoy? An activity out of which I could still119 See "General Aspects of Dream Psychology," and "On the Nature ofDreams," The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche, CW 8.