Functions Lecture at the Jungian Round Table

Dream alert about a type of personality

I have been interested in Jung’s system of typology for a number of years, but I rarely dream of personality types explicitly! A few days ago I woke up trying to remember: Did they say you have to remove the ENFP? I wasn’t sure what guy had been talked about in the dream, but I was sure the committee in my dream had agreed to get rid of a girl’s teacher.

In this dreamlike Conference Table scene, the adults are seated around a long conference table. A woman, the main character or observer in this scene, is concerned about her daughter’s infatuation with her teacher. Seeing that she has doubts about this situation, the man sitting across from her is moved to provide her with two quotes from materials written by the teacher. He reads these passages out loud and hotly conveys that the teacher is a pervert and child molester!

The man sitting at the far right of the table takes the initiative and hands a gun to the man sitting two spaces away from him. “You have to get rid of the ENFP,” he (or some other guy) says. The guy who gets the gun hands money to the first to make this look like a purchase; his intention here is to exonerate the other from any guilt of the crime. He says, “Here, take twenty dollars,” but the paper bill he hands out is purple, which is the color of a ten dollar bill in our Canadian currency.

I want to start my analysis of the dream with the scene that preceded it, but I want to pause here to provide the reader with the context of this dream.

Context of the dream

As you may have guessed by now, I am quite partial to Jung and I must confess that this has sometimes led me to fantasize that this sentiment could be reciprocated. At one period in my life, I was having dreams that contained multiple elements that had their counterparts in the next day’s readings from Jung’s writings, and these elements were even reaffirmed by synchronistic events. For example, you would dream of a honeycomb and find one in the next day’s reading; then I’d come across the comb-shaped remains of a wasp’s nest on the sidewalk during my two-minute walk from my apartment to the school I attended.

The next day, waking concerned about the lack of a blue in a disintegrating dream rainbow, I felt compelled to read about color in a dictionary only to come across an illustration of a color wheel that falsified cyan, making it appear green instead of blue (I was positive about this, because I was studying additive and subtractive colors at the time). Then the next page in Jung’s writing would be about his concern with the missing blue element in an illustration. A single disintegrating cloud, in the shape of a rainbow, would then mock a clear blue sky during that same day, etc. These synchronicities fostered in me a kind of magical thinking that was not, shall we say, totally grounded in reality. I found it amusing to consider the poetic notion of a disembodied Jung fishing for kindred souls in the sea of ​​our dreams and drawing us to him every time he felt a bite.

My exaggerated fondness for Jung, whom I never met, came to mind the day before the dream we are discussing here, while reading Dr. Mario Jacoby’s contribution to a book entitled Jungian Analysts: Their Views and Vulnerabilities. Dr. Jacoby writes candidly of a period during which he struggled between extreme admiration for his teacher and episodes during which he had to “doubt the whole effort and regard Jungianism as a grandiose illusion.” He was not familiar with the term “inflation” that he used to describe his exaggerated enthusiasm, but the context led me to approximate its meaning with the more familiar word “infatuation,” a term that was later taken up by the dream. It is also important to note that Dr. Jacoby spoke of the atmosphere at the Institute when Jung was quite old, saying that his admirers thought of him as “a wise old Mana personality who lived in a mysterious tower somewhere in the world.” forest”.

Arrangement of features in the first scene

In the Night School dream scene, I have stopped by the side of the road in the field and am washing my hands at the edge of the woods. Here is a secret camping area. Now a police car is here and a school bus has parked at 90 degrees across the street to let the kids off. The policeman asks the driver to meet him at 1:00 and they agree. It doesn’t bother me and I go back to my car.

This scene was followed by the conference table scene linked above, and then I woke up with the warning that “the ENFP must be removed” still ringing in my head. I couldn’t remember exactly which type had been mentioned in the dream, but my curiosity was definitely piqued and my first impulse was to check if the dream material could be linked to a particular type.

In the Night School scene there were conveniently four energy groups that I could distinguish, and I have classified them thus, assigning each one of them one of the four Jungian functions (Thinking, Feeling, Perceiving and Intuition):

• Intuition appears as the main protagonist, the woman who has just finished exploring the forest. The forests are mysterious and far-reaching, and the context of the dream supports the idea that the forests are related to Jung, who is sometimes called a visionary. In waking life, I became aware of the fact that Intuition was one of his strong functions. In this scene, the stream of consciousness seems to emanate from this female character, so I’ll take this introverted insight as the dominant feature.
• The car connected to this character could easily be the polar opposite of Intuition, Extraverted Sensing, in the lower function position: Sensing because the vehicle is on a scenic route, extroverted because of the rising sun (as opposed to the darkness of the forests explored by the Introverted Insight function), and lower because the vehicle is parked and empty.
• In the dream, there are children inside the bus, making the bus an expression of introverted feeling: it is about people, but internally. The unconventional way in which he has parked the bus shows originality, something that befits an introverted role.
• The policeman, who represents law and order, can be assigned the role of Logical Thinking. The flashing police lights and the respect for tradition and conventional values ​​indicate that in this case we are dealing with extraversion.

If I understand Jung’s system of typology correctly, the arrangement of the four functions in this Night School dream scene, with the introverted and extraverted polarities as noted above, finds a match in the INTJ personality profile. Interestingly, this is exactly the type I got on my most recent personality test.

New arrangement of functions.

In the next scene, the conference table scene, there are again four active participants and they are communicating in pairs, but the INTJ formation appears to have disbanded. Let’s see if there’s a recognizable guy in this scene though.

• The function of Thought now appears as the main seat of consciousness, whereas before Intuition dominated. Note that the dominant role manifests itself once again with my own gender, in the form of the woman for whom the meeting has been called. She does not speak, but internally reflects, so we are again dealing with an introverted type.
• The man who is judging the master and really freaking out, in the telling way our lower function often does in waking life, is definitely the extroverted emotional counterpart to the first function.
• Without hesitation, the man on the right quickly assesses the situation, simultaneously focusing on the problem and its drastic solution. I see it as the function of Extraverted Intuition.
• In waking life, when Intuition is extraverted, then the Sensory function must be introverted, and if the same dynamic is respected in this dream scene, that role would fall on the last active character, the one who receives the weapon. But what would be the point of choosing an introverted role to achieve an external action, one might ask? The key factor to note in this case is the fact that this willing cooperator is focused on the meaning he attaches to the goods being exchanged. Your thoughts about the objects replace the objects themselves. The docile man who receives the gun then represents the introverted sensory function.

Other observations

In the conference table scene, while the daytime personality type has been dismantled, much more is revealed. The arrangement of the characters around a conference table suggests that each function is aware of all the others, and this seems to be the case:

• The sentence uttered by the man on the right indicates that the slanderous manifesto from the Excited Feeling feature has had a major impact on the Insight feature.
• The introverted Thinking function (mother) deals with an image of her daughter, a thought that the Feeling function had subtly brought to her attention in the previous scene. By parking the school bus on its side, the Feeling feature blocked traffic and forced others to stop and consider their actions. She seemed to be saying “Would you like your own child to attend such an unlikely school?” Or perhaps, “Isn’t your attraction to this teacher a bit childish and irregular?” Now, the main character has begun to integrate the Feeling function’s view of the situation.
• The detection function (the man receiving the gun) is aware of the intuition function’s concern about being blamed; this element was more covered up in the first scene and only hinted at by the washing of hands.
• In waking life, Sensation is the fourth or lower function, the one that Marie-Louise Von Franz calls the open door, and therefore the one that can most easily access unconscious material. Perhaps this function has understood before any of us that the command uttered by the Intuition function to “remove” a specific type is to be understood symbolically: it is merely type labels which must be removed. The ten dollar bill being offered in the dream is exactly half the amount declared: This could be the detection function’s way of suggesting taking a middle path and not focusing so much on personality types.

In the final scene, the roles have completely reversed their original polarities: those that were extroverts are now introverts, and vice versa. Note also that the degree of sharing between functions has intensified dramatically. What was merely hinted at in the first scene or known only from a feature has now become shared knowledge.

You will recall that in the Night School dream scene, the functions were patterned after my INTJ personality type. There is nothing shocking in the scene, nor is much work being done. If it stood alone, the Night School scene wouldn’t be very instructive, if I may pun.

Conclution

When functions manifest in a dream as characters or objects expressing the introverted and extroverted attitudes that are usual for those functions in waking life, or in other words, when they constellate to form the dreamer’s usual personality type, the sleep is probably a reflection of the person’s conscious waking attitude.

On the other hand, when the functions disguise themselves as characters with atypical attitudes, this reversal of polarity seems to facilitate the exchange of information between them. The knowledge available only to the relatively unconscious third and fourth functions during the waking state can then be transferred during sleep to the higher functions, and this is when the real dream work occurs.