That is perception by way of the unconscious, and you can observe it with intuitive types.
Carl Jung Depth Psychology Facebook Group
Of course, tied in with your typology of—quotes—”introversion” and “extraversion” we know of your concepts of thinking, feeling, sensation, intuition, and it would be very interesting to have some expansion of these particular terms as related to the introvert-extravert dichotomy.
Well, there is quite a simple explanation of those terms, and it shows at the same time how I arrived at such a typology. Sensation tells you that there is something.
Thinking, roughly speaking, tells you what it is.
Feeling tells you whether it is agreeable or not, to be accepted or rejected. And intuition—now there is a difficulty.
You don’t know, ordinarily, how intuition works. When a man has a hunch, you can’t tell exactly ho
w he got at that hunch, or where that hunch comes from. There is something funny about intuition.
I will tell you a little story. I had two patients, the man was a sensation type, the woman was an intuitive type. Of course they felt attracted.
So they took a little boat and went out on the lake of Zurich.
And there were those birds that dive after fish, then after a while they come up again, and you can’t tell where they will come up.
And so they began to bet who would be the first to see the bird.
Now you would think that the one who observes reality very carefully—the sensation type—would of course win out.
Not at all. The woman won the bet completely. She was beating him on all points, because by intuition she knew it beforehand.
How is that feasible?
Sometimes, you know, you can really see how it works by finding out the intermediate links.
Intuition is a perception by intermediate links, and you only get the result of that whole chain of associations.
Sometimes you succeed in finding out, but more often you don’t.
So my definition is that intuition is a perception via the unconscious.
That is as near as I can get. It is a very important function, because when you live under primitive conditions a lot of unpredictable things are likely to happen.
Then you need your intuition because you cannot possibly tell by your sense perceptions what is going to happen.
For instance, you are traveling in a primeval forest. You can only see a few steps ahead.
You go by the compass, perhaps, but you don’t know what there is ahead. It is uncharted country.
If you use your intuition you have hunches, and when you live under primitive conditions you are instantly aware of hunches.
There are places that are favorable, there are places that are not favorable.
You can’t tell for your life what it is, but you’d better follow those hunches because anything can happen, quite unforeseen things.
For instance, at the end of a long day you approach a river.
You don’t know that there is a river, and when you come to that river it is quite unexpected. For miles there is no human habitation.
You cannot swim across, it is all full of crocodiles. So what?
Such an obstacle hadn’t been foreseen, but it may be you have had a hunch that you should remain in the least likely spot and wait for the following day when you can build a raft or something, or look for possibilities.
You can also have intuitions—and this constantly happens—in our jungle called a city.
You can have a hunch that something is going wrong, particularly when you are driv-
appear in the street. And they always try to get something interesting, like a suicide, you know—to be run over, that’s more marvellous apparently.
And then you get a peculiar feeling, and really, at the next corner there is a second nurse that runs in front of the automobile.
Duplication of cases, that is a rule, you know; such chance happenings come in groups.
So you see, we constantly have warnings, hints, that consist perhaps in a slight feeling of uneasiness, uncertainty, fear.
Under primitive conditions you would pay attention to these things, they mean something.
With us in our manmade, absolutely—apparently—safe conditions, we don’t need that function so very much, yet we still use it.
You will find the intuitive types among bankers, Wall Street men; they follow their hunches, and so do gamblers of all descriptions.
You find the type very frequently among doctors, because it helps them in their prognoses.
Sometimes a case can look quite normal, as it were, and you don’t foresee any complications, yet an inner voice tells you,
Now watch out, here is something not quite right.
You can’t tell why or how, but we have a lot of subliminal sense perceptions, and from them we probably draw a good deal of our
intuitions.
That is perception by way of the unconscious, and you can observe it with intuitive types.
Intuitive types very often do not perceive by their eyes or by their ears, they perceive by intuition.
For instance, it once happened that I had a woman patient in the morning at nine o’clock.
I often smoke my pipe and have a certain smell of tobacco in the room, or a cigar.
And she came and said, “But you begin earlier than nine o’clock”—earlier, I said, you call that early ?—”you must have seen somebody at
eight o’clock.”
I said, “How do you know?” There had been a man there that had come at eight o’clock already.
And she said, “Oh, I just had a hunch that there must have been a gentleman with you this morning.”
I said, “Hum, but how do you know it was a gentleman ?”
And she said, “Oh well, I just had the impression, the atmosphere was just like a gentleman here.”
And all the time, you know, the ash tray was under her nose, and there was a half-smoked cigar! But she wouldn’t notice it.
The intuitive is a type that doesn’t see, doesn’t see the stumbling block before his feet, but he smells a rat for ten miles, ~Carl Jung, C. G. Jung Speaking, Page 206-209
Carl Jung Depth Psychology Blog