Projection and Personality Development via the Eight-Function Model

Carol Shumate

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000296167
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychologie
• Subtopic: Psychische Gesundheit in der Psychologie

Jung considered personality development critical for the survival of the human race, not just for personal fulfillment, but how can personality be developed? Carol Shumate shows how John Beebe's revolutionary eight-function/eight-archetype model of personality type can be applied to guide development for each of the sixteen Myers-Briggs types, making explicit the implications of Jung's eight-function model. Based on reports from participants at Beebe's workshops and using examples of historic figures like Abraham Lincoln, this is the first book to detail how the unconscious aspects of the functions tend to manifest for each type.

Projection and Personality Development via the Eight-Function Model can assist readers in realizing the transformation that Jung himself experienced. It will be key reading for Jungian analysts and psychotherapists, academics and scholars of Jungian and post-Jungian studies, and practitioners of psychological type.

Part I

The evolution of psychological type

Chapter 1

An Eastern philosophy in Western clothing

The mind as a projection machine

How is it that individuals blame others for their own faults while remaining blind to those faults in themselves? This phenomenon is most obvious in politics, not just in political leaders but in the partisan positions of their followers. An illustrative example is that of Porfirio Díaz, who became president of Mexico in 1876 by campaigning for presidential term limits—“No Reelección!” was his slogan. He accused his opponent, President Juárez, of election fraud for serving an “illegal” second term, but when Díaz himself won the presidency, he ran for re-election again and again, retaining power for three-and-a-half decades while the opposition chanted his old slogan back at him: No Reelección! He was so unwilling to relinquish power that eventually he had to be thrown out of the country. What happened? Was Díaz a Machiavellian, campaigning on an issue he didn’t believe in, or was he simply unaware of his own dark side? Porfirio Díaz is an excellent example of psychological projection, projecting his own desire for power onto his opponent in order not to see it in himself. Psychological projection enables an individual to be entirely sincere and yet utterly duplicitous, but the psychological cost is severe: It causes an ever-increasing blindness to the one thing we cannot do without—the self. The hard thing, of course, is to identify our projections, because they tend to be unconscious.

C. G. Jung’s pioneering work in analytical psychology was based originally on his experience as a physician working with psychiatric patients who were prone to making paranoid projections without recognizing their often absurd or delusional character. Jung soon realized that projections were not limited to the mentally ill but were intrinsic products of the psyche. He observed that our shadow is that which others see in us but which we ourselves cannot see. Projection is a common response to the shadow. In projecting, we displace qualities we dislike in ourselves onto others, and then, bizarrely, we punish them for being like us. Jung found this to be the common condition of humankind: “Everyone creates for himself a series of more or less imaginary relationships based essentially on projection” (1948/1969b, ¶ 507)—everyone. However, Jung gave us a way out of the solipsism of our projection machines, a portal through which to see the qualities we project onto others, when he outlined four mental functions—thinking (T), feeling (F), intuition (N), and sensation (S)—each having two forms (attitudes), an introverted form (i) and an extraverted form (e) (Fig. 1.1, left), later called “function-attitudes,” a term coined by Dick Thompson (1996). The function-attitudes operate in either a perceiving role or a judging role and comprise a total of eight modes of consciousness, forming eight personality types. Each personality type gives preference to one or two of the eight kinds of consciousness while simultaneously suppressing their opposite poles (Fig. 1.1, right). Unconsciously, each type then projects its less-preferred functions onto others, considering them evidence of others’ inferiority.

Figure 1.1 Jung’s mental functions (left) and polar oppositions (right).

Figure 1.2 Jung’s eight-function model.

The significance of projection for Jung’s typology is evident in the first pages of his book, Psychological Types. As psychotherapist George Hogenson (1983/1994) explained, “What Jung suggests [in Psychological Types] … is that our fundamental experience of the world is based on projection” (p. 124). Psychological Types described the concept of the individual as a historic event, the emergence of personality out of the collective mind. The late Julian Jaynes, author of The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (1976), suggested a possible date for such an event as c. 1400–600 BCE, documented by the Greek poet Homer. Jaynes observed that the gods of the Iliadic poems were projections of the human mind, projections that humans believed were external entities. Personality, that which makes us individuals, gives us some protection from such projections, according to Jung, but if we do not differentiate our preferences, we remain fused with the collective, and “the mind that is collectively oriented is quite incapable of thinking and feeling in any other way than by projection” (1921/1971, ¶ 12). Such a mind is a divided mind, one in which the right hand does not know what the left is doing.

The obvious and extreme example of such collective thinking is that engendered by the Nazis during World War II. Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s minister of propaganda, was able to dictate collective thinking by providing every German household with a radio and monopolizing the airwaves. According to the Nazi message, the German state was inexplicably threatened by impure blood. Hitler’s Mein Kampf is replete with the imagery of syphilis; evidently, Hitler feared venereal disease, and therefore he projected it onto the Jews. In spite of building on such an incongruous belief, the Nazi platform spread by leveraging the human desire to displace evil onto others, thereby undermining the body politic in the same way that an infectious disease undermines the physical body. The need to project is always dictated by just such an illusory desire to be pure, but purity is unobtainable; hence the projections and the scapegoats must proliferate exponentially. The Nazis first decided to purge the Jews, and then they went after the Slavs who also had impure blood; next, they went after gypsies, homosexuals, and Jehovah’s Witnesses; soon they were purging the disabled, the mentally retarded, and the mentally ill; along the way, they swept up all the trade unionists, communists, democrats, and social democrats; and eventually they arrested the intellectuals in the occupied territories—journalists, professors, teachers, and clerics—and still there was no end to the enemies of the Reich. The Nazis even went after each other, as one branch (the SS) targeted another (the SA) for annihilation. As their military forces retreated at the end of the war, they continued to purge the world, burning their own cities and bombing their own ships. The pursuit of purity by projecting unwanted evils onto others ensures a breakdown, as pieces of the self are continually split off and disowned until nothing is left.

It is telling that, while the German nation as a whole accepted responsibility and made reparations, some of the perpetrators of the worst atrocities refused to believe in the atrocities that they themselves had committed. Perhaps an individual who gives himself over to the collective mind can go so unconscious as to be unable to see through the delusion of projection, unable to take any responsibility for its effects. Perhaps willed blindness, if maintained long enough, becomes genuine amnesia.

According to Jung, we come into the world grounded in the collective unconscious: “Man is not born as a tabula rasa, he is merely born unconscious. But he brings with him systems that are organized and ready to function, … and these he owes to millions of years of human development” (1909/1949, ¶ 728). These organized systems are archetypes—prototypical personifications of hereditary instincts. Jung found archetypal motifs to be remarkably consistent across cultures. Archetypes may even be the source of our projections. Jaynes’ description of the Homeric gods could be a definition of Jungian archetypes: “The gods were organizations of the central nervous system and can be regarded as personae in the sense of poignant consistencies through time, amalgams of parental or admonitory images” (1976, p. 74). While these archetypes, like the Homeric gods, gift the individual with instinct, it is only by separating from the collective and by differentiating preferences among the mental functions that the individual can become conscious and begin to operate autonomously, able to see through his own projections and those of others. Paradoxically, such differentiation itself also engenders projections. Jung recognized that a preference for any of the eight-function-attitudes created a characteristic weltanschauung (worldview) or mindset with associated blind spots. Projections are inevitable, a necessary stage in the process of individuation, but with his eight-function-attitude scheme, Jung gave us a way to recognize them, and thereby to see ourselves as others see us.

Types and archetypes

Jung’s theory of archetypes developed concurrently with his exploration of what he called the “type problem,” although these two aspects of his theory are often viewed as separate. Hogenson (2004) observed that while Jung first used the term archetype in 1919 (p. 37), the development of his thought goes all the way back to his work on the word association test (p. 40). Typically, typology is viewed as dealing only with consciousness and archetypal psychology as dealing with the unconscious, and there is a tendency among depth psychologists to dismiss typology for that reason. And yet, the period which Jung called his “confrontation with the unconscious” (1961/1963, pp. 170–199) was the same period when he was designing his type system. In 1912, on the precipice of his midlife crisis, Jung had a revelation. His description of this moment shows how myths and types were connected in his mind:

I was driven to ask myself in all seriousness: “what is the myth you are living?” I found no answer … so … I took it upon myself to get to know “my” myth, … for … how could I when treating my patients make due allowance for the personal factor, for my personal equation, which is yet so necessary for a knowledge of the other person, if I was unconscious of it? (1911/1952, p. 25)

Because the term “personal equation” came to signify for Jung an individual’s psychological type, this passage shows that the two strains of his theory—myths and functions, archetypes and types—were as intertwined from the outset as consciousness and the unconscious must be.

When Jung’s type system finally emerged, it depicted the psyche as a system of polarities according to which the unconscious compensates the conscious personality. He hypothesized that the unconscious operates both on a personal level and a transpersonal (collective) level. Whereas the archetypes inhabit the collective unconscious, the personal unconscious is inhabited by complexes (Jung, 1959/1969, ¶ 88). Meanwhile, the conscious personality develops chiefly around one or two of the eight mental functions, with a third and fourth function trailing after in only a semi-conscious state. Those four functions tend to float on the surface of the sea of unconsciousness, at times submerged in it and, at other times, emerging from it as needed. When the first or superior function is in use, the fourth or inferior function will be submerged, and vice versa (Fig. 1.2). As an individual matures, the functions become more accessible to consciousness and fluency among them increases. However, the first function (now called the dominant) always remains prominent, and the fourth function, the inferior function, always remains primitive. The inferior function lies so close to the deepest levels of the unconscious that it is often contaminated by the contents of the unconscious. Nevertheless, the inferior function plays a positive role too in allowing the individual access to insights from the unconscious. According to Jung, the archetypes that occupy the transpersonal unconscious can facilitate the navigation to one’s personal shadow, where partly repressed emotional ideas express their autonomy as psychic conflicts—complexes or disturbing mental states or behavior.

Figure 1.3 The Myers-Briggs model.

The extent to which Jung’s typology was appreciated can be gauged by the remarkable popularity of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator® (MBTI®), the assessment tool created by the mother-daughter team, Katharine Cook Briggs and Isabel Briggs Myers, to codify Jung’s system. Katharine Briggs, one of the first American followers of Jung, had been searching for a complete theory of personality when she discovered Psychological Types. She read it the moment it was translated (1923) and introduced it to her daughter, then aged twenty-six and married (Isabel Briggs Myers). Briggs and Myers were not trained psychologists. Most research universities in America did not admit women as students nor employ them as faculty in 1921,¹ the publication date of Psychological Types. However, Briggs and Myers were unusually well-educated² and unusually dedicated: Briggs spent decades researching personality theory, and Myers worked with professional psychologists over decades³ to develop and validate an assessment instrument. Jung had alluded to a second function contributing to personality, the auxiliary function, suggesting that the types tend to use the superior function most habitually but avail themselves of a second function as well. Jung’s comment that the auxiliary differed from the primary function “in every respect” led Briggs and Myers to deduce that this second function differed in both attitude (extraverted/introverted) and in kind (judging/perceiving). They were also influenced by Dutch psychiatrist Johannes van der ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsements
• Half-Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations of Jung’s Collected Works
• PART I The evolution of psychological type
• PART II Tables
• Biographies
• Index