This dream simile for the inferior function is also particularly fitting in that this function tends to have, in a negative way, a barbaric character and to cause possession. If, for example, introverts fall into extraversion, they do so in a possessed and barbaric way. I mean barbaric in the sense of being unable to exert conscious control, being swept way, being unable to put a brake on, unable to stop. This kind of exaggerated, driven extraversion is rarely found in extraverts, but in introverts it is like a car without brakes that goes on without the slightest control of consciousness. That is a rather well-known fact, because the inferior extraversion of introverts has to manifest outside, socially. An introvert may become disagreeable and arrogant, pushing and shouting so loudly that the whole room has to listen and everybody must notice. Such inferior extraversion may suddenly pop out in this way when an introvert is drunk. The introversion of the extravert is just as barbaric and possessed but not socially visible because an extravert disappears right out of life if possessed by barbaric introversion. He goes completely mad his own room, but it is not visible to other people. Extraverts who fall into their primitive introversion walk about looking very important. In dark allusions they assure everybody that they are having very deep mystical experiences about which they cannot talk, they are so important and so deep. In an important kind of way they indicate that they are deeply steeped in active imagination and the process of individuation, and you know that you must leave at once, because they have to work on that. And then they sit in a possessed way for hours, unable to relax and unable to pull out of it. If you ring them up, they say they are deep in their process of individuation and cannot go to a tea party just now, and this is thrown at you with a kind of defensive attitude. You have a strange feeling of a barbaric kind of possession. If this happens to them in the form of yoga, or Anthroposophy, then there will be that same display of something mystical of great importance going on and of an unfathomable depth into which they have now dived. There is a mixture in it, for actually they are constantly threatened with switching back to their extraversion, which explains their overemphasis on lack of time and wanting no contact with anybody. They would love to switch over to their extraversion and go to every tea party and every dinner party, so in a kind of defensive way, they say, “No, this is absolutely forbidden; now I am in the depth of the psyche.” Very often in this phase people are sure that they are the type that they now have to live. For instance, extraverts who are in the phase where they should assimilate introversion will always swear that they are and always have been introverts and that it has always been an error to call them extraverts. In this way they try to help themselves to get into this other side, which for them is so difficult to acquire. If they try to express their introverted inner experiences, they generally do so with overexcitement. They become terribly emotional and want to take the floor and have everybody listen. That is because to them it is so tremendously unique and important.
This barbaric quality of the inferior function which is mixed up with the other attitudinal type is one of the great practical problems and constitutes the great split of the human personality, for not only has one to switch from one function to another, but with the fourth function one definitely has to switch to the other attitudinal type, and then one risks (or even cannot avoid) being temporarily possessed by the opposite attitude and thereby become barbaric and unadapted. One can thank God if one’s opposite function is only personified by primitive people in dreams, for it is very often represented by Stone Age people or even by animals, so that the inferior function has not even reached a primitive human level; it is still completely on an animal level. The inferior function in that stage dwells, so to speak, in the body and can only manifest in physical symptoms and not yet on a human conscious level, not even a primitive one. When you see, for example, how sometimes an introverted intuitive stretches in the sunshine with such enjoyment of his inferior function, you have absolutely the feeling that he is like a dog sitting in the sunshine enjoying the sun or food; his sensation is still on the level of a dog or a cat or some other domestic animal.
Feeling in a thinking type very often does not go beyond the dog level. It is more difficult to imagine that the feeling type thinks like an animal, but even that is true; these people have a habit of making banal statements which one feels any cow, cat, or dog could have made if only they could speak, for they move in a realm of complete generalities… I have often been struck by the fact that feeling types think in exactly the same way [as my dog], for when you try to explain something to them, they may draw a completely general conclusion, some sweeping assertion which does not fit the situation in any way, and they do the most stupid things. Primitive thinking started in their heads, and they drew some kind of amazingly unadapted conclusion, which led to entirely wrong results. Thus you can often say that the thinking level of the feeling type is about on the dog’s level; it is as general and helpless and stiff as you can observe it in the higher animals.
In general, in most normal societies, people cover up their inferior function with a persona. One of the main reasons why one develops a persona is so as not to expose inferiorities, especially the inferiorities of the fourth function, which is contaminated with one’s animal nature, one’s unadapted emotions and affects.
- Marie Louise von Franz, Psychotherapy
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