Tolstoy noted in Anna Karenina, that “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” So it seems with civilization and personal growth. Beneficial growth for civilizations and persons are born from the creative inner life. We go astray as civilizations and as individuals — generate unhappiness — each in our own way.
The creative inner life is the foundation for permanent well-being. The inner life is a fountainhead of creative inspiration and our access to the infinite and eternal. Material attachments to ego-centricity and self-promotion are temporal.
Jung brilliantly described the creative activity of the inner life with his observations about the introverted psychological types. The inner life is accessed through intuition — our window to a numinous and creative inner life.
The introverted “attitude” — the orientation of four of the types to the inner life — has a kind of intuition built into it, for it is oriented to apprehending the non-material “images” in the inner life, irrespective of the function being introverted. So introverted thinking, feeling, and sensation each hold the attributes of intuition. Since intuition itself is both introverted and extraverted, we could add extraverted intuition for a total of five of Jung’s eight types that attend to the creative inner life.
The three remaining extraverted types — vitally necessary for life in the world — attend to their recognition of the world at large: extraverted sensation, extraverted feeling, and extraverted thinking. Each has a mode of the sensation function built into it — a sensuous recognition of the lively external world. Recognition is the cognitive process of fitting the sensory impressions received from the external world into the memory patterns of the individual psyche.
Meanings are perceived in the inner, super-material domains of the psyche. Meaning is derived from an inner understanding of that outward recognition, for meaning requires the application of the unseen principles and values from the inner world.
Civilization can hardly progress when the majority people devote their interests to the materialistic pursuits of the sensory outer world. Neither can individuals personally grow — develop character and unify complex personality — if they devote most of their time to sustaining their ego-centric attachments and positions in the world.
A creative imagination cannot function successfully on a stage cluttered with resentments, revenge, self-promotion, and bigotry. Yet the modern cultural stage often acknowledges and accepts each of these as legitimate responses to life in the world.
The present and the past are unchangeable. These are the domains of extraverted recognition. Only the future can be altered by the creativity of the inner life. That creativity is expressed in the five psychological types oriented to the abundant value of the inner l ife— the four intensively oriented introverted types — introverted thinking, feeling, sensation, and intuition — and the one, extensively oriented extraverted intuition.
J G Johnston
Author of Jung’s Indispensable Compass
1/15/2024