The father of modern typology is C. G. Jung and we begin with his description of the most basic and simplest of the typologies. “The introvert’s attitude is an abstracting one; at bottom, he is always intent on withdrawing libido from the object, as though he had to prevent the object from gaining power over him. The extravert, on the contrary, has a positive relation to the object. He affirms its importance to such an extent that his subjective attitude is constantly related to and oriented by the object. The object can never have enough value for him, and its importance must always be increased.”[i]
The Introvert
The introvert orients himself not by objective data as does the extravert but by subjective factors. He is the subject and all things outside of himself are accepted only if he can make them have subjective meaning. “He holds himself aloof from external happenings, does not join in, has a distinct dislike of society as soon as he finds himself among too many people. In a large gathering he feels lonely and lost.”[ii]
The introvert, for obvious reasons, is at an advantage compared to the extrovert in turning inward and seeking self-reliance. “For him self-communings are a pleasure. His own world is a safe harbor, a carefully tended and walled-in garden, closed to the public and hidden from prying eyes. His own company is the best. Thus the psychic life of this type is played out wholly within.”[iii]
Rollo May answers the inevitable question that introverts might ask in therapy concerning his perceived lack of success in society. Why do I need to conform, to become more like the extrovert? “As I sit now in relationship with my patient, I am assuming that this man, like all existing beings, needs to reach out from his own centeredness to participate with other persons. He now looks at me with mingled suspicion and hope, an effort toward openness fighting in him against the life-old tendency to withdraw behind a stockade and hold me out. This struggle is understandable, for participating always involves risk. If one goes out too far, one will lose one’s identity. But if he is so afraid of losing his own conflicted center—which at least has made possible some partial integration and meaning in his experience—that he refuses to go out at all but holds back in rigidity and lives in narrowed and shrunken world space, his growth and development are blocked. This is what Freud meant when he spoke of repression and inhibition. Inhibition is the relation to the world of the being who has the possibility to go out but is too threatened to do so; and his fear that he will lose too much may, of course, be the case. Patients will say, ‘If I love somebody, it’s as though all of me will flow out like water out of a river, and there’ll be nothing left.’ I think this is a very accurate statement of transference. That is, if one’s love is something that does not belong there of its own right, then obviously it will be emptied. The whole matter is one of economic balance as Freud puts it.”[iv]
For our purposes in this article, Freud’s libido and the false self can be taken as synonymous. The introvert finds his own false self survival strategy threatening and resists to some degree the tendency to seek security, sensation and power. The extrovert, on the other hand tends to embrace false self behaviors.
“The hermit within is the highly introverted part of one’s nature that has been waiting and storing energy in a far off corner waiting for this very moment. Extroversion is usually dominant in the first half of one’s life and that is correct. But when one’s extroversion has run its race and taken one on that very valuable part of life’s journey—then one must consult the hermit deep inside for the next step. We do this very badly in our culture and few people know how to draw upon the genius of their introvert nature for the next step. It frequently happens to a modern person that he is forced into his introversion by an illness or accident or paralyzing symptom of some kind.”[v]
The Extrovert
Jung makes clear the extrovert’s susceptibility to the illusion of P-B. “[He] never expects to find any absolute factors in his own inner life, since the only ones he knows are outside himself. Like Epimetheus, his inner life is subordinated to external necessity, though not without a struggle; but it is always the objective determinant that wins in the end. Not only people but things seize and rivet his attention. It is the same with his interest: objective happenings have an almost inexhaustible fascination for him, so that ordinarily he never looks for anything else. The moral laws governing his actions coincide with the demands of society, that is, with the prevailing moral standpoint. The extroverted type is constantly tempted to expend himself for the apparent benefit of the object, to assimilate himself subject to object.”[vi]
We have learned that the intellect is a formidable barrier to experiencing Simple Reality. When the extrovert relies heavily on the intellect we have the extroverted thinking type. “When thinking holds prior place among the psychological functions, i.e. when the life of an individual is mainly governed by reflective thinking so that every important action proceeds or is intended to proceed from intellectually considered motives. This type will make all his activities dependent on intellectual conclusions which in the last resort are always oriented by objective data, whether these be external facts or generally accepted ideas. His moral code forbids him to tolerate exceptions; his ideal must under all circumstances be realized, for in his eyes it is the purest conceivable formulation of objective reality, and therefore must also be a universally valid truth, quite indispensable for the salvation of mankind. All those activities that are dependent on feeling will become repressed in such a type—for instance, aesthetic activities, taste, artistic sense, cultivation of friends, etc. Irrational phenomena such as religious experiences, passions, are often repressed to the point of complete unconsciousness.”[vii]
Because the extrovert is enthralled by the illusion of P-B being a conformist and other-directed he is a poor candidate for what Jung called individuation. “This is the extrovert’s danger: he gets sucked into objects and completely loses himself in them.”[viii] The turning inward required in meditation is more of a challenge for the extrovert as well. “The psychic life of this type of person is enacted, as it were, outside himself, in the environment. He lives in and through others; all self-communing gives him the creeps.”[ix]
Rollo May paints a dark future for extroverts and their attempts to create a sustainable community. “But in our day of conformism and the outer-directed man, the most prevalent neurotic pattern takes the opposite form—namely, going too far, dispersing one’s self in participation and identification with others until one’s being is emptied. This is the psycho-cultural phenomenon of the organization man. It is one reason that castration is no longer the dominant fear of men and women in our day, but ostracism. Patient after patient I’ve seen (especially those from Madison Avenue) chooses to be castrated—that is, to give up his power—in order not to be ostracized. The real threat is not to be accepted, to be thrown out of the group, to be left solitary and alone. In this over-participation, one’s own meaning becomes meaningless because it is borrowed from somebody else’s meaning.”[x]
William Barrett asks the crucial question for the people of the global village who have become enamored of the extroverted life-style. “Has the contrary attitude of strict and literal attachment to objects succeeded in resolving all the anxieties of the ordinary man, and has not in fact the rampant extroversion of modern civilization brought it to the brink of the abyss?”[xi]
Ken Wilber will take us to the conclusion of this article with more subtle and detailed distinctions involving introversion and extroversion and the ultimate goal of creating consciousness. “So we need to understand why, for all schools of developmental psychology, this equation is true: increasing development = increasing interiorization = decreasing narcissism (or decreasing egocentrism). In short, we need to understand why the more interior a person is, the less egocentric he or she becomes.”[xii]
Interiorization requires the discipline to reject reaction and choose response in making one’s life a meditation on the present moment by embodying Krishnamurti’s attitude: “I don’t mind what’s happening.” “[For] the development of the species, the organism achieves increased independence from its environment, the result of which is that ‘reactions which originally occurred in relation to the external world are increasingly displaced into the interior of the organism.’ The more independent the organism becomes, the greater its independence from the stimulation of the immediate environment.”[xiii]
“In other words, for developmental psychology, increasing development—increasing interiorization = increasing relative autonomy. In other words, the more one can go within, or the more one can introspect and reflect on one’s self, then the more detached from that self [false self] one can become, the more one can rise above that self’s limited perspective. By acting on the self interiorly, that self is de-centered, and this allows, among many other things, the continuing expansion (de-centering) of moral response from egocentric to socio-centric to world-centric (integral perspective). In short, the more one goes within, the more one goes beyond, and the more one can thus embrace a deeper identity with a wider perspective [Oneness].”[xiv]
“It follows that meditation, as an antidote to egocentrism, would involve a substantial increase in capacity for truth disclosure, a clearing of the cobwebs of self-centric perception and an opening in which the Kosmos could more clearly manifest, and be seen, and be appreciated—for what it is and not for what it can do for me.”[xv]
What remains after this shift in paradigm and identity is a compassionate True self.
[i] Jung, C. G. The Portable Jung. New York: Penguin Books, 1971, p. 179.
[ii] Frager, Robert. Who Am I? New York: Putnam, 1994, p. 109.
[iii] Ibid., pp. 109-110.
[iv] May, Rollo. The Discovery of Being. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1983, p. 20.
[v] Johnson, Robert. He: Understanding Masculine Psychology. New York: Harper, 1989, p. 74.
[vi] Jung, op. cit., p. 183.
[vii] Ibid., pp. 197-199.
[viii] Ibid., p. 185.
[ix] Frager, op. cit., p. 108.
[x] May, op. cit., pp. 20-21.
[xi] Barrett, William. Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy. Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1958, p. 44.
[xii] Wilber, Ken. Sex, Ecology and Spirituality. Boston: Shambhala Publications, Inc., 1995, p. 255.
[xiii] Ibid.
[xiv] Ibid., pp. 256-257.
[xv] Ibid., p. 257.
