Jung and Typology, Gnosticism and Christianity

The following are excerpts that I thought were related. I specifically was considering Jung and his views on various ideas. These excerpts give an interesting context to how Jung came to his understanding about the structure and development of the individual. In particular, I found fascinating the connection between trinity as representing hierarchy (including hierarchy as development) and quaternity as representing non-hierarchical structure. By this, it can be shown how the tripartite division of Platonism and Gnosticism relates to Jung’s typology. I was also thinking about Jung’s consideration of Catholic ideas in terms of his relationship with Father Victor White. Jung felt the Trinity was incomplete and conjectured that Catholicism was denying a fourth element in its theological conception of evil.


Quodlibet Journal: Volume 4 Number 2-3, Summer 2002Carl Jung and the Trinitarian SelfMichael J Brabazon

As the alchemists discovered, the spirit Mercurius can be a good friend (as in the Liverpool dream) or the “dark tricephalus”[f], the tempter, deceiver and adversary of the universal hero. By overcoming the chthonic trinity the saviour not only becomes a demi-god but, in bringing the fruits of his victory to the tribe, ensures the spiritual and physical well-being of mankind. One of the stories from Hindu mythology seems to prefigure the struggles of Buddha and Christ with the Evil One. In the case of Hinduism the Christ-like person is the son of a Brahman, Tvashiri, who is eventually killed by the god Indra. Tvashiri, in a bid to outdo Indra, created a three-headed son who possessed wondrous spiritual power which grew at such a rate it promised to absorb the universe. The three heads had the separate functions of reading the Vedas, feeding himself, and observing all that existed: a combination of intellectual, physical and divine sustenance - the totality of life. As in the accounts of the temptations of Christ and the trials of Gautama, the tricephalus Brahman is attacked three times: firstly through seduction by Heavenly maidens; secondly by a thunderbolt thrown by Indra which kills the hero; and lastly by a triple decapitation. The final onslaught, ordered by Indra because the body continued to glow with the light of spirituality, released a great flight of doves and other birds, symbolising the resurrection of the perfected spirit and is analogous to the enlightenment of Buddha and the defeat of Satan in the wilderness. The attacks on Gautama by Mara are variations on the same ideas of seduction, attack by the actual god and attack by the god’s henchman. The Buddha now becomes an enlightened being, losing his old material desires, and brings salvation to mankind.

In the Middle East there existed other notorious examples of the triple heroic test, and cannot be unconnected with the temptations of Christ. In ancient Egypt one of the stories of Se-Osiris (reputedly the greatest Egyptian magician) from the 13th century BC show him in psychic battle with the Ethiopian the Son of Tnahsit who is the agent of Apophis, the Egyptian Devil. As in the other stories, Se-Osiris has to overcome his satanic adversary three times in order to prove himself and gain total victory. Firstly, the Ethiopian manifests a huge serpent in front of the Pharoah, but Se-Osiris picks up this giant cobra, turns it into a small white worm and throws it out of the window. Next the evil protagonist summons a large black cloud which resembles the darkness of the tomb or the dark cloud of smoke from burning bodies. Again, the hero easily decreases the threat to an infinitesimal size and throws it out of the window. The final threat is in the shape of a sheet of flame moving towards Pharaoh, but the good magician reverses its movement back in the direction of his adversary, who is subsequently engulfed and totally defeated.

Joseph Campbell in The Hero with a Thousand Faces, writes of the triple life force released by the universal hero upon completion of his struggle with the internal monster; the bestowing of the secret treasure, the Holy Grail:

The effect of the successful adventure of the hero is the unlocking and release again of the flow of life into the body of the world. The miracle of this flow may be represented in physical terms as a circulation of food substance, dynamically as a stream of energy, or spiritually as a manifestation of Grace. Such varieties of image alternate easily, representing three degrees of condensation of the one life force.[37]

The hero’s encounters infer a triality of character, with ramifications for typological classification. Tripartite man is a theme as old as that of the trinity, the two being inextricably linked in the relationship of micro and macrocosmic. The origin of much of the tripartite formulations is to be found in the works of Plato, originator of the archetype theory of Form or Idea. Plato’s own threefold division of the soul is into spirit, reason and desire. It is from these three segments that the layers of society in the utopian Republic are derived: the Guardians, the Auxiliaries and the Plebs. Broadly, the philosophers, the spiritually enlightened, rule over and guide society, the military types carry out the directives of the elite, applying the rules to the governorship of the materialistic majority. This hierarchical view of tripartness is counter-balanced by an egalitarian formulation allegorised in the Phaedrus by a charioteer and two horses. One horse is an expression of honour and modesty whilst the other stands for man’s animal desires, with their unity in the hands of the charioteer, the middle conjoining factor. The Gnostics use this platonic schema in their soteriological explanations - the saved spiritual type, the pneumatic, the damned materialists, the hylic, and those with the possibility of choice, the psychic - described in the Jung codex of the Nag Hammadi library.

The multiplication of tripartite theories has produced an overwhelmingly extensive list of variations on the same theme, including Freud and beyond, but I think it worthy of note to mention that it was part of Carl Gustav Carus’ thinking. I say this because he was one of the old-school of psychologists much admired by Jung. Interestingly, Dostoyevsky was also a great fan and one wonders if the three Karamazov brothers, Dmitri, Ivan and Alyosha, characterising respectively blind social obedience, the human intellect and mystical-propheticism, were not Carus-inspired.

In Toynbee-like fashion, it does not seem unreasonable to look for the external organisations and trends associated with the different types. I had initially made a deduction from studies on the history of religious thought that a threefold division could be made along the lines of fundamentalist, developmentalist and prophetic, when I read with interest the post-Jungian division of schools made by Andrew Samuels in Jung and the Post-Jungians[38]: Classical, Developmentalists and Archetypal. Perhaps a trinitarian view could be taken of the foundation of modern psychology employing the God, Man, Nature schema (or as C S Hall and G Lindzey would have it in Theories of Personality: primordial thought patterns; social interest; and sex) for Jung, Adler and Freud? Jung certainly had no qualms about such a unity; he could be both Adlerian and Freudian as the need arose (see Memories, Dreams, Reflections).

The fourfold typology posited by Jung was an update of the ancient Greek formulation based on the humours of the body, which makes perfect sense seen from an homeostatic point of view. However, just as valid is the Vedic counterpart using three humours which also describe three character types, namely kapha, vata and pitta, and restated by the god Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita when he tells Arjuna, “Each has the duty, ordained by his nature, born of the gunas [the threefold, hierarchical hypostases of prakriti]“. Again, both are inherently logical - and apparently complete - systems, but the latter schema is hierarchical and the former egalitarian.

A real hierosgamos would be if tripartite typologies could be synthesised with the four Jungian types with a resulting twelvefold system[g] satisfying both viewpoints and giving a psychological raison d’etre to the zodiacal system, much beloved by Jung. He himself hints at a desire to unite his quaternity with the astrological method:

Since the earliest times, attempts have repeatedly been made to classify individuals according to types and thus to bring order into what was confusion. The oldest attempt of this sort known to us was made by Oriental astrologers who devised the so-called trigons [sets of three star signs] of the four elements, air, water, earth and fire.[39]


James HillmanEGALITARIAN TYPOLOGIESVERSUS THE PERCEPTION OF THE UNIQUE

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A closer look at the way Jung speaks of the types, however, suggests that they too are archetypal. For what determines type? Here the a priori element enters: Jung speaks of a “numinal accent” falling on one type or another (§982). This selective factor determining type is unaccounted for it is simply given. A numinal accent selects our bias toward what becomes our superior function which drives the others into the background (§984). We begin to see that the four types are more than mere manners of functioning. There is something more at work in them, something numinal - and “numinal” means “divine”. And surely when in the grips of our typical set, as we cannot help but be when we imagine ourselves typologically, the structuring power of the type is like that of an archetype or mythologem. Especially the experience of the inferior function, also referred to as numinous, brings with it a radical shift of perspective, as if there has been an ontological shift, an initiation into a new cosmos or archetypal seinsweise.

An archetypal background for the four functions has already been intimated by Jung himself. He speaks of a philosophical typology in Gnosticism or Hellenistic syncretism (§§14, 964) by means of which human beings could be called hylikoi, psychikol, or pneumatikoi. Jung does not document this typology but Professor Sambursky considers that these terms were applied less to actual persons than to the imaginal persons of Neoplatonism, especially by Plotinus. These imaginal regions and their beings might thus be the archetypal imagination at work in the functions, giving to them each its nominal accent and each its ontological significance as structuring ground of consciousness.

Then hylikoi, or physis, with its attendant ideas of matter, body, actual physical reality would be the archetypal principle in what Jung called sensation; psychikoi, or soul, with its attendant Jungian description of love, value, experience, relatedness, woman, salt, colour would be the archetype within and behind what Jung called feeling; pneumatikoi, or spirit, with its attendant descriptions in terms of light, vision, swiftness, invisibilities, timelessness, would be what Jung called intuition; and finally, not expressly distinguished in this Hellenistic triad, nous, logos, or intellectus, with its capacity for order and cogni-

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tive intelligence, would be the archetypal principle that Jung called the thinking function. (Jung himself identifies thinking with pneumatikoi, §14.)

This archetypal background gives a deeper sense to what Jung says about the four functions. For instance, if sensation so often brings with it an uncomfortable inferiority, and intuition, superiority, the reason is not functional, but archetypal - the one being hylitic and bearing all the aspersions put upon physis in our tradition, the other, pneumatic, windy with the idealizations of the spirit. 28 Or, it is hardly a feeling function, as an ego-disposable mode of adaptation through evaluations, which can support such redemptive features that Jung claims for “feeling” (cf. CW 14, §§328-34; CW 16, §488-91; CW 13, §222, and also CW 8, §§668-69 where his discussion of evidence for soul turns on “feelings”), unless we realize that “feeling” has become a secular psychologism for soul. 29

Furthermore, we now can grasp better that connection which Jung makes between the four functions and the wholeness of the “total personality” (CW 14, §261), or Adam (ibid. §§555-57). For now we would be dealing with the root archetypal structures or cosmoi of Western human being, our four “natures” as Jung calls them (CW 14, §§261, 265; cf. CW 11, §§184-85) which as he says there in Mysterium Coniunctionis, are an archetypal prefiguration of “what we today call the schema of functions”. The four types are thus not mere empirical

28. Practitioners’ descriptions of the puer psychology of young men often call them “intuitive” and airy, needing “sensation” and earth. The older language of elemental natures has been unwittingly associated with that of functional types. Actually, the practitioner is discerning young pneumatikoi whose archetypal basis in spirit cannot be reduced to an over-developed empirical ego-function of intuition.

29. Willeford, “The Primacy of Feeling”, J. Analyt. Psychol.. 21, 1976, pp. 115-133 argues for a special place for the feeling function beyond Jung’s polar equalities. Because Willeford takes feeling to be the function of the “subjective sphere” (an idea which brings us again to Jung’s early identification of feeling with introversion) he is suggesting that its relation with soul is different and more important than that of the other functions.

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functions. They are the physical, spiritual, noetic, and psychic cosmoi in which man moves and imagines. 30

The ancients placed these cosmoi one on top of the other and fantasied the ideal man moving through them from below to above. Jung too imagines the individuating person moving through the functions, not ascensionally in his model, yet still redemptively from one-sidedness to four-foldedness. Although these archetypal powers of the ancients present themselves conceptually, they are nonetheless archetypal persons of the imaginal to begin with.

By this I do not mean to replace intuition with spirit, and feeling with psyche, etc., or to equate them or reduce them. Rather I am maintaining that the functions have been carrying archetypal projections which gives them, and typology, a numinal accent. Types conceal archetypes. The contemporary cult of feeling, for instance, is a disguised psychologistic substitution for cult of soul. The frequent attack on intellect (metaphysics and theology) through Jung’s writings and letters has resulted in poor critical thinking in the Jungian school because the archetypal principle within thinking has been devalued. Unless we recognize the imaginal persons in our personal modes of functioning these modes lose their numinal accent. Only an archetypal appreciation of the functions can take them out of the hands of the ego. Unless the great root principles of Western man’s orientation are seen for what they are, as the modes in which the imaginal operates (functions) in all realms of being, they, and we, are condemned to psychological jargon without numinal accent. Thus we must cling to the types for orientation since they do conceal the archetypal natures of our Western compass.


SPIRITUALITY TODAYAutumn 1988, Vol.40 No. 3, pp. 249-261.James Arraj: Jungian Spirituality: The Question of Victor White

LEVELS OF SPIRITUAL INDIVIDUATION

The first level is the simple discovery of our psychological type and its application in the ways just described as an instrument for understanding human differences within the field of spirituality. Of great value, this is the level at which a significant amount of the present encounter between Jung’s psychology and spirituality is taking place.

The second level can emerge from this acquaintance with typology. We begin to perceive that typology is not only interpersonal, a way we relate to those around us, but also an intrapsychic process that is no different from the process of individuation itself. We begin to feel the pull of the outgoing tide that leads to the fascinating and terrible night sea-journey of psychic transformation. It is only by means of such a journey that we truly begin to grasp what typology really meant to Jung and what are the psychic contents that exist under the names of the shadow, anima, animus, and self. It is this experience that will sensitize us to the psychological dimension that exists and must exist in the whole of the spiritual life. There is literally no place for the spiritual life to take place but in the psyche, and we row grasp this psyche in all its immediacy and in all the continual process which strives for wholeness. Here, too, there can be no objection to the employment of Jungian psychology in the spiritual life, but rather only a sense of gratitude that we can finally deal with the psychological dimension that exists in all our spiritual activities.

There is a third level where this encounter will more and more take place and has taken place in certain individuals like Victor White. The process of individuation as it is found in Jung and many of his followers is wrapped in an epistemological fabric which resists a Catholic understanding of faith. It is abundantly evident. Jung himself comments, for example,

For lack of empirical data I have neither knowledge nor understanding of such forms of being which are commonly called spiritual. From the point of view of science it is immaterial what I may believe on that score, and I must accept my ignorance . . . . All comprehension and all that is comprehended is in itself psychic, and to that extent we are hopelessly cooped up in an exclusively psychic world.(6)Similarly, he indicates that he sees individuation as a more evolved stage of consciousness to which Christianity stands as a deficient stage. If in being guided by Jung to the experience of individuation, we unconsciously imbibe this presentation of it, we will find ourselves in the state in which Victor White found himself — torn on one hand by a living awareness of the reality of the individuation that Jung describes, but sensing that the way it was presented conflicted with his faith.

MBTI Types and Conventional Religion

This started out as just a post about INFJs, but I have some further thoughts about other types as well.

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I was just visiting Typology Central (an all type MBTI discussion board). I was looking at threads about religion. I noticed an INFJ in some of those threads who I know from Global Chatter (an INFP discussion board). He is an interesting guy, but it reminded me of an aspect of INFJs that can annoy me at times.

I discussed this in a post titled Darn Apologists! of mine from my Gaia blog. I'm attracted to INFJs because their Ni gives them a unique (idiosyncratic even) perspective and they can be very independent-minded especially if they're strongly Introverted. However, their Fe can also make them very conventional. Unlinke INFPs, I've noticed that many INFJs belong to more traditional forms of forms of religion. They have a love/hate relationship with social groups. However, their desire to feel like they belong to something larger than themselves is surprisingly strong for an Introverted type.

To say the least, my INFP nature balks at this. INFJs can have these crazy ideas but somehow it often leads back to such conventional worldviews. Maybe its because their ideas are so abstract (Ni) that they seek to ground them through a tradition (Fe). At least, INFJs tend to be extremely nice people. An INTJ is much more of a straightforward in their logic, but I'll take the INFJs conventionalism over an immature INTJ's snarkiness. Its interesting that INTJs are very opposite of conventional in that they're the prototypical conspiracy theorist. Still, maybe that is that same Extraverted Judging function (Fe and Te) being focused with the prevailing social order just in a different way.

I should add that my criticisms of INFJs comes from my fondness for them. I seem very attracted to them as I keep befriending INFJs online and my closest friend is an INFJ. Its possible that I am attracted to the very thing I'm criticizing. They're thinking is more grounded than my own, and it can feel to me to be a bit narrow and plodding. However, this groundedness can also lead to a depth of insight and great knowledge about a particular subject. Overall, INFPs and INFJs have enough similarities to make communication easy while having enough differences to make discussion interesting.

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I was again at Typology Central. I’ve been having a private discussion with an INTP Christian. INTPs as a whole are generally very unreligious even anit-religious. INTPs are clear thinkers though and so its interesting to talk to this guy.

He claims that he has never had an experience of God. God is an idea to him, but an idea that he has been convinced of. He seems to be an Evangelical Christian which is very strange because Evangelism idealizes direct experience. His wife is a more an experiential type. Maybe he trusts the experiences of those close to him.

The reason I bring this up is because its extremely intriguing that an INTP would be attracted to conventional religion. However, it makes more sense now. An INTP has three likely ways of relating to religion. They can outright deny it as irrational. They can accept it as a philosophy and analyze it. Or they can accept the experience of others which might include the collective experience of a tradition.

INFPs swim in subjective experience, but INTPs don’t. An INTP can’t rely on their own experience. Even if they had a potentially spiritual experience, they’d be reluctant to trust it. This would be true of NTs in general.

This relates to my dad who is an ENTJ. His father was a minister and he grew up observing the hypocritical difference between his father at church and his father at home. He became agnostic and stayed that way for much of his life. As he grew older, he was attracted to conventional Christianity because it appealed to his dominant Extraverted Thinking which desires principles of social order.

As he became more involved in his 50s, he had some experiences that felt spiritual to him. He didn’t seem to want to call them God and so defined them as being of the Holy Spirit. I suspect (based on Beebe’s archetype model) this is his aspirational Introverted Feeling finally manifesting. Still, my dad submits his experience to the conventional interpretation. The experience is nice but secondary to him. What he really likes about church is being around people and having an important leadership role to play.

All of this is somewhat of a new insight for me. Typically, conventional religion is described as being mainly attractive to SJ types. My mom is an ISTJ and she definitely isn’t the questioning type and is content to follow an external authority. However, I’m now beginning to realize there are reasons why other types would also be attracted to conventional religion.

INFPs might be one of the types that is least attracted to conventional religion, but I’m not sure. INFPs are more attracted to religon than NTs in general. However, INFPs are extremely independent-minded and extremely self-certain… which could describe INTPs as well.

An INFP has their own direct experience and so they don’t have to rely on other’s experience. An INFP has a solid Introverted Feeling that doesn’t need the external grounding that Introverted Intuition needs. An INFP finds annoying the Extraverted Feeling tendencies of many religious groups. An INFP is unwilling to follow like sheep as SJs like to do.

The only thing that would bring an INFP to conventional religion would be their Introverted Feeling. If their inner experience corresponded with a particular tradition, an INFP could become quite the zealous believer. Nonetheless, even then such an INFP would still tend to keep their religious experience as a personal matter. I doubt INFPs would make good prosyletyzers. An INFP prosyletyzer would probably just annoy people. I’m partly basing this on the one INFP fundamentalist I know who can be very annoying when talking about his beliefs… a total lack of objectivity and logic… pure emotion and defensiveness.

Political Party, Morality, Personality, Gender

Here is a very insightful article:

What makes People vote Republican?
Professor Jonathan Haidt’s key article for www.edge.org annotated from a Spiral Dynamics perspective by Dr Bruce L Gibb; September 2008.

The author explores why Liberals don't understand the human motivation behind moral behavior. The specific morals aren't important nor even their inherent 'goodness'. Rather, morality is about the social order it helps create. Or at least that is what morality is about on the level of group behavior. This might be where it is helpful to differentiate ethics from morality.

I learned about this aspect of morality from my morally conservative parents. They argue for abstinence. I've mentioned to them such things as the fact that research shows abstinence programs lead to more pregnancies (and I suspect more venereal diseases as well) and that kids develop sexually about 4 years earlier than when my parents were kids (maybe because hormone in food and estrogen-like compounds in bottles). But these facts didn't matter to my parents sense of morality. Right is right. This could be interpreted as the embracing of ignorance, but my parents are smart and they're very good at rationalizing their views (especially my dad).

This seemingly strange thought process is explained by this paper. The purpose of condemning sexuality isn't about whether people are actually able to follow the rules perfectly. The rules are there to create conformity through guilt and punishment. And they work. They suppress the individual for the sake of social order. The moral rules are red herrings that distract away from the fundamental issue. Maybe that is part of the power of such morality. People obsess over the surface details and the underlying motivating force can work unconsciously.

The article also discusses Spiral Dynamics which is also helpful. In a sense, many liberal elites are more highly developed morally, but only in certain ways. People have the tendency to deny previous vmemes (approxamately equivalent to levels). So, the rational ability to not be controlled by one's emotions is great in being objective and can lead to great understanding. The problem is that isn't where most of society is morally centered. In developing one's morality, one needs to stay grounded in the fundamental moral sense that remains true for all humans. Development transcends and includes. If liberals try to exclude what they deem as irrational, then they won't sway many voters.

Obama probably won because he knew how to rhetorically touch upon the emotional core of an argument. If the Democratic party is smart, it will take heed and learn the lesson well.

I want to bring up one other aspect to all of this that is only briefly mentioned in the article:

"But now that we can map the brains, genes, and unconscious attitudes of conservatives, we have refined our diagnosis: conservatism is a partially heritable personality trait that predisposes some people to be cognitively inflexible, fond of hierarchy, and inordinately afraid of uncertainty, change, and death. People vote Republican because Republicans offer ‘moral clarity’ - a simple vision of good and evil that activates deep seated fears in much of the electorate."

These traits correlate with MBTI. In particular, Intuition and Sensation correlate with liberalism and conservativism. Relevant to this article are the percentages of the population. I've seen research that shows that Sensation is more common, but I've also seen research that shows that women have a tendency towards Intuition.

This brings to my mind the percentages also of the Judging functions. Thinking and Feeling also show bias respectively to men and women, but I was just reading another statistic that showed that men were fairly split between the two even while women tended strongly toward Feeling. That is interesting as Thinking (specifically Extraverted - TJ) also seem correlated to moral conservativism, and definitely seems like a personality factor that would be favored by the blue vmeme (hierarchical social order). The reason that is interesting is because morally conservative cultures also tend to be patriarchal.

One other personality division I'd bring up is Hartmann's boundary types. Thin boundary types lean towards the liberal, and thick boundary types lean towards the conservative. This may because thin boundary types tend to have a strong sense of empathy meaning that they experience people as individuals rather than as mere social entities. Also, these boundary types correlate to MBTI and most specifically with the Perceiving functions of Inution and Sensation.

For the record, my parents are both TJ types and my mom is an STJ. I, on the other hand, am a liberal NFP raised with a heavy dose of green vmeme (despite my parents conservativism).