The plumb line of personality

The superior function and the inferior function are two points along a human line, and that human line is the plumb line of the personality which I call the spine. And I like to think of the superior function as the head of the spine, and the inferior function as the tail of the spine. This definition of the spine is a very real thing. When I discovered that I was an intuitive type, I just knew suddenly – the man who dreamed when he was depressed – had to be some kind of intuitive, and I later realized was an extraverted intuitive, and he also had to be an absent-minded bloke who lost things, and that was my inferior introverted sensation, and I felt my spine in that. Not long after that I dreamt that I was present at the birth of a baby, and I was both the person giving the birth, and I was also the person delivering the baby. If I really knew it, I was also the baby. The baby which was coming out of that healthy sense of spine, was my nature, my psychological type. That sense of self we all have is along that mysterious axis between what we are best at and what we are worst at, which is the spine of our personality, and there is our uprightness, there is our integrity. Another way of saying this metaphorically and analogically is that a personality needs to drop anchor. Some people are pretty clear about what they are best at, but it doesn’t ground them enough. What grounds them is that thing they are not so good at, the thing they can’t control with the conscious mind, the thing they can’t make money at, the thing they can’t will, the thing they can’t push around, the thing that just is and constantly brings them down to earth.

I was in my glory just a few days ago at the time of the election because I consulted the I Ching last January, January of 1992, and I asked about some presidential possibilities, and based on the answers I got I concluded Clinton could win the election, and that Bush would lose the election. Because I can’t contain anything, I let that out at a public lecture in April or so, and then I just lived in dread because if that didn’t come through, my name would be mud. It was a very strange political year, there were many vicissitudes, and Clinton finally won. Bush lost. I was the prophet of all time. I was just exactly what I wanted to be – the great extraverted intuitive prophet. And I was so filled with my happiness, my glory and all the rest that I forgot to write down the time of two of my patients and managed to ignore the writing on my calendar on the third, so I messed up three appointments in a single week. What a nerd this would-be genius turned out to be. That’s the way of the balancing act that the psyche gives us every single time between my marvelous extraverted intuition in my case, and my absolutely rotted, no good introverted sensation that can’t be trusted.

Or one could look at it the other way. One could say that what is rotten is my inflated extraverted intuition, and what is good about me is this humble introverted sensation that makes these mistakes to remind me that I need to pay attention to the here and now, the straight and narrow, and to be humble.

- A Jungian Analyst Talks About Psychological Types: A Visit with John Beebe


See also:
Inferior function
Primary ("superior") function