The Extroverted Sensation Type: Inferior Introverted Intuition
The extroverted sensation type is represented in someone whose gift and specialized function is to sense and relate in a concrete and practical way to outer objects. Such people observe everything, smell everything, and on entering a room know almost at once how many people are present. Afterward, they always know whether so-and-so was there and what dress she had on. If you put such a question to an intuitive, he would say he had not noticed and had no idea, and what did she have on? The sensation type is a master at noticing details.
There is the famous story of a professor of jurisprudence who tried to demonstrate to his students the unreliability of witnesses. He had two people come into the room, exchange a few sentences, and then begin to fight each other. He stopped them and said:
“Now ladies and gentlemen, please write down exactly what you saw.”
The professor then showed that nobody was capable of giving an exact and objective account of what had happened. They all missed certain points. Based on this staged incident, he tried to show his students that they should not rely on eyewitnesses too much.
This story illustrates the tremendous individual relativity of sensation. It is only relatively well developed: some are more and others less gifted at it. I would say that the extroverted sensation type would score highest in this field and would probably miss fewest points. The extroverted sensation type has the best photographic apparatus, as it were; he can quickly and objectively relate to outer facts.
This is why this type is found among the good mountaineers, engineers, and business people, all of whom have a wide and accurate awareness of outer reality in all its differentiations. This type will notice the texture of things—whether silk or wool. He will have a certain feeling for the material. Good taste is also generally present.
The Threat of “Mad Fantasy”
Jung says that such people very often give an impression of being rather soulless. Most people have met such a soulless engineer type, where you have the feeling that the man is absolutely dedicated to engines and their oils and sees everything from that angle. He produces no feeling and does not seem to think much either. Intuition is also completely lacking; that is for him just the realm of crazy fantasy.
The extroverted sensation type calls everything approaching intuition “mad fantasy,” completely idiotic imagination, something that has nothing to do with reality. He can even dislike thought, for if he is very one-sided he will consider that thinking is getting into the abstract instead of keeping to the facts.
I had such an extroverted sensation type as a teacher in Natural Science, and we could never put a general theoretical question to him; he would call that getting off into abstract thinking and would say that we should stick to the facts—look at the worm and see what it looks like and then draw it, or look in the microscope and describe what you see there.
That is Natural Science, and all the rest is fantasy and theory and nonsense. He was very good at explaining how factories make certain chemical products, and I still know the Haber-Bosch process by heart. But when it came to the general theory of the interrelation of elements, and so on, he did not teach us much. He said that was still uncertain in science and that it was theory that changed every year and was in constant evolution. So he skipped that side of the work.
Dark Suspicions and Archaic Intuition
Everything that might be a hunch or a guess, anything intuitive, appears to this type in an unpleasant form. If such a person had intuitions at all, they would be of a suspicious or grotesque nature.
This professor once, in quite an amazing way, ventured into graphology. One day I brought him a letter written by my mother excusing me for not having been able to come to his class because I had the flu. He looked at the writing and said:
“Did your mother write that?”
I said: “Yes.”
To which he only replied, “Poor child!”
He only sensed the negative! He was like that. He would get suspicious fits about his colleagues and about the children in his class. You could see that he had some kind of dark intuition of something murky, for his intuition, being inferior, was like a dog sniffing in garbage pails: This inferior kind of intuition was very often right, but sometimes completely wrong! Sometimes he just had persecution ideas—dark suspicions without any foundation. A type who is so accurate on the factual level can suddenly get melancholy, suspicious premonitions, ideas of dark possibilities, and one does not know how these suddenly creep up. That is how inferior intuition came up in his case.
Normally, in the case of the extroverted sensation type, inferior intuition circles round the position of the subject, very often in dark feelings or hunches or premonitions about illnesses he might get, or other misfortunes that might befall him. That means the inferior intuition is, in general, egocentric. Such a person often has a kind of negative, self-depreciative attitude. But if you get such people nicely drunk or very tired, or know them intimately so that they come out with their other side, they can produce the most amazing, weird, eerie ghost stories.
Ghost Stories and Esoteric Movements
I knew a woman who was one of the best mountaineers in Switzerland. She was obviously an extroverted sensation type; only rational facts counted, and everything had its natural causes. She could climb all four-thousand-meter mountains not only in Switzerland but in the whole range of the Alps—the French, the Savoyan, and the Austrian as well.
But on dark evenings afterward, with a good fire burning, she would switch over and tell you the most eerie ghost stories, of the type you normally hear among the shepherds and peasants. It was quite wonderful to see this primitive fantasy coming out of her. The next morning, when she put on her boots, she would laugh it off and say it was all nonsense! What such a person intuits is usually an expression of his personal problem.
Another aspect of inferior intuition in an extroverted sensation type is a sudden attraction to anthroposophy or some other cocktail of Eastern metaphysics, generally of a most otherworldly type. Very realistic engineers join such a movement with a completely uncritical mind and get quite lost in it. That is because their inferior intuition has such an archaic character.
On their writing desks, amazingly enough, one will often find mystical texts, but of a rather second-class level. If asked why they read these books, they will say it is just nonsense, but it helps them to go to sleep. Their superior function is still denying the inferior one.
But if you ask the anthroposophists at Dornach who supplied the money for their buildings, you will find that it came from just such extroverted sensation people. The American nation has a very great number of extroverted sensation types, and this is why such strange movements flourish especially well in the United States, to a much greater extent than in Switzerland. In Los Angeles you can find practically every kind of fantastic sect.
Glimpsing the Collective Unconscious
I remember once analyzing such a type. One day I had a telephone call from him. The man was sobbing at the telephone and said he was overwhelmed.
“It happened—I cannot tell you, I am in danger!”
Now this was not a hysterical person, and he did not have a latent psychosis or anything of the kind. You would never expect him to behave in this way. I was astonished and asked him if he would be able to go to the station and buy a ticket and come to Zurich (he was living in another town). He said he thought he could manage, so I told him to come.
By the time he arrived he had snapped back into his superior sensation and brought me a basket of cherries—which we gaily ate together. I said: “And now what?” But he could not even tell me! In the meantime, by getting to the station and buying the cherries, he had got back into the upper level again. He had been attacked for a minute from the other level, and the only thing I got out of him was:
“For a minute I knew what God was! It is as if I realized God! And it shook me so much that I thought I would go mad, and now it is gone again. I remember it, but I cannot convey it any more, and I am no longer in it.”
There, via the inferior function, intuition, he suddenly had the whole collective unconscious and the Self. In a second—like a flash—it all came up and completely shook the upper part of his personality, but he could not hold it. That was the beginning of the coming up of inferior intuition, which shows its tremendously creative and positive, as well as its dangerous, aspect.
Intuition has that quality of conveying a tremendous amount of meaningful content simultaneously. He saw the whole thing in one second; it came up for a minute, and then it went again. There he was munching cherries, back in his flat, ordinary, extroverted sensation world. That would be an example of the first genuine appearance of inferior intuition in such a type.
The Grip of the Inferior Function
A great danger comes from the grip the inferior function can get on a whole personality. I once knew an extroverted sensation type, a very efficient builder and good businessman, who had made a tremendous amount of money. He was very practical, but he built horrible houses. Only, the gadgets in them were perfect, so that people liked to live there even though from an artistic point of view the houses were awful. He was a good skier, dressed very well, admired women, and had the kind of refined sensuality an extroverted sensation type can display.
This man fell into the hands of an intuitive woman twenty years older than himself. She was a wild, fantastic mother figure and enormously fat. In her case this represented lack of discipline: introverted intuitive types are often terribly immoderate and exceed their reasonable limits both psychically and physically because of their inferior sensation. This woman lived only in her fantasies and was absolutely incapable of supporting herself financially. It was the typical union where the man provides the money and looks after the practical side of life, and the woman contributes the fantasy aspect.
I once went skiing with him. I was bored to tears! The only thing he might have talked about in an interesting way was his business, but he did not talk of that to women, and otherwise he had nothing to say except that the sun was nice and the food not bad. To my great surprise, this man invited me to the anthroposophs at Dornach to see a play. The Goetheanum was his “spiritual mother” and held a great attraction for him.
He was absolutely gripped by the play, so moved that he was completely carried away. Afterward I was tactless enough to say that it was too high-up for me and that what I was longing for was a steak!
He was shocked out of his wits by my materialism. I was only about eighteen at the time and would be wiser now. But that was how his intuition worked. On the one side, it was projected into this woman, and on the other side there was Dornach. He tried to break with the woman, having realized the mother-son relationship, and hoped to park his inferior intuition in Dornach instead.
This was certainly a step forward from just having it projected into a mother figure, for at least it was an attempt to assimilate it on an inner level. This is why my remark was so especially tactless. How the attempt worked out I have no idea, for I lost contact with him. But one should never make depreciative or hurtful remarks if people come out with their inferior function. It is terribly touchy.
Concrete Projections: The Fly Story
Another example of inferior introverted intuition, but this time really inferior, illustrates the disgusting form and desperate abyss into which the inferior function can lead. Recently, in an American science fiction paper, I read the story of a man who invented an apparatus by which people could be dematerialized and rematerialized. He could, for instance, be here in Zurich and then suddenly materialize in New York. By means of such an apparatus it would be possible to dispense with airplanes and ships.
First he experimented with ashtrays and later with a fly. A few mistakes occurred at the beginning, but after the adjustment of several wires it seemed to work with the fly. In case anything went wrong, he wanted to be the first victim; so he put himself in the apparatus. Unfortunately, the experiment got stuck on the way, and he came out the other end with the head of an enormous fly!
He tried to contact his wife, and covering up his head with a cloth so that she could not see it, he told her she must try to free him and gave her various instructions. But nothing worked, and finally, in desperation, he asked her to kill him; out of kindness to him, she did.
Afterward the story becomes one of the usual criminal types. When he is dead and buried, the woman goes mad and gets put into an asylum. But then the first fly is found, the one that now has the man’s head. The family, out of piety, has the fly put into a matchbox, which is sentimentally deposited on the tomb and an inscription states that the deceased was “a hero and a victim of science.”
I have spared you most of the disgusting and perverse details in the story, which are expounded with great gusto.
There one sees how inferior intuition takes shape in a sensation production. Since the story is written by a sensation type, it gets disguised as completely practical sensation. The fly would represent inferior intuition, which gets mixed up with the conscious personality.
A fly is a devilish insect. In general, flies represent involuntary fantasies and thoughts that annoy one and buzz around in one’s head and that one cannot chase away. Here, this scientist gets caught and victimized by an idea that involves murder and madness. In order to save the life of his wife, the family puts her into a lunatic asylum where she spends her time trying to catch flies, hoping to find the one that might be a part of her husband.
At the end of the story the commissioner of police talks to the author and says that the woman was, after all, just mad. One sees that he would represent collective common sense—the verdict finally adopted by the writer, who admits that all this is just madness.
If the writer had established the continuity of his inferior function, and had freed it from his extroverted sensation, then a really pure and clean story would have come out. In genuine fantasies, such as those of Edgar Allan Poe and the poet Gustav Meyrink, intuition is established in its own right. These fantasies are highly symbolic and can be interpreted in a symbolic way. But a sensation type always wants to concretize his intuitions in some way. ~Marie-Louise von Franz and James Hillman, Lectures on Jung’s Typology, Page 28-31
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