Psychological Types: Jung's Four Functions

Some History and Basics

Photo by Iuliia Dutchak on Unsplash

I’ve never gotten much out of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI). I know what all the letters mean, and I know that tests almost always peg me as an INFJ or INFP. While those are the types I can identify with the most, they still don’t ring particularly true with me. I don’t intend this to be Enneagram or Jungian propaganda. If the MBTI works better for you or has brought insight and ease to your life, that’s worth acknowledging and celebrating.

What I actually want to introduce to you is Jung’s four function model of psychological types. I wouldn’t even bring the MBTI up except that it’s become way more famous than Jung’s model while adopting most of its terms from Jung. It’s hard to write about Jung’s system of typology without people assuming it is the MBTI. Even some of my instructors seem to use the two systems interchangeably.

In contrast to the MBTI, I’ve found more classical understandings of Jung’s model to be fruitful in understanding myself and others. Jung didn’t conceive of his typology system as a system of character analysis or emotional behavioural patterns¹. It was a map of how the consciousness of different people can adapt and orient themselves to the world in different ways.

Some History

Jung’s Psychological Types (1921) was born out of his attempts to understand how he, Sigmund Freud, and Alfred Adler could all come up with such divergent psychological theories and why there could be such animosity between their camps. I admire the humility Jung showed in wrestling with this question when the typical and immediate answer to these kind of things is because they’re wrong and we’re right.

Instead, Jung concluded that their psychological theories and the acrimony between them were “manifestations of a type-antagonism².” I don’t believe any of their theories or disagreements were just the inevitable manifestations of the different ways in which they adapted to the world. I don’t believe this discredits any of their insights either. However, I do think their theories and disagreements were profoundly shaped by their psychological types. This includes Jung and his own theories.

The Basics: Psychological Attitudes

The two psychological attitudes are the aspect of Jung’s model that have become common knowledge, though the attitudes are not always understood in the way that Jung first described them. The two attitudes, introversion and extraversion, describe two different ways that energy and interest can move in people.

Introversion: Energy, interest, and attention are primarily directed towards the inner world. This often, but not always, inclines a person to be more reflective and retiring. Internal factors tend to be the starting point for judgments, perceptions, feelings and actions.³ Generally, introverts tend to rest and recharge in solitude or in familiar, comfortable spaces.

Extraversion: Energy, interest, and attention are primarily directed towards the outer world. This often inclines a person to be more outgoing and candid. In contrast to introverts, external factors are more often the starting point for judgments, perceptions, feelings and actions.⁴ Generally, extraverts are energized by travelling, meeting new people and seeing new places.

The Basics: The Four Functions

This is a much lesser known aspect of Jung’s model. If people have heard of the four functions at all, it’s in the context of the middle two letters of their Myers-Briggs type. The four functions are different ways of orienting to the world. They can be used to orient to one’s outer world (extraverted) or inner world (introverted). Jung believed that each of us has a primary function that we tend to rely upon more than the other three. The four functions are:

Thinking (Myers-Briggs: T): The process of cognitive thought and logical discrimination. Thinking tells us what something is.⁵ Modern culture puts a high value on the thinking function and most education systems are built primarily around sharpening it.

Feeling (Myers-Briggs: F): The function of subjective judgement or valuation. Feeling tells us what something is worth to us.⁶ This is the most commonly misunderstood function due to the different ways we use “feeling” in every day language. The feeling function refers to our capacity to subjectively evaluate what something means to us.⁷ Being a primary feeling-type does not necessarily mean one has high emotional intelligence or is more emotional.

Sensation (Myers-Briggs: S): The process of perceiving through our physical sense organs—our five senses. Sensation establishes that something exists.⁸ Similar to the thinking function, sensation is highly prized in modern western culture. There can be a distrust in our culture of anything that can’t be interacted with through sensation.

Intuition (Myers-Briggs: N. Not be confused with “I” which is the first letter for an “Introverted” type): A form of perception by way of the unconscious. Intuition gives us a sense of what can be done with a thing. The workings of intuition can be mysterious, though not necessarily inexplicable or supernatural. One possible explanation is receptivity to unconscious contents in one’s self and others.⁹ This can manifest as a capacity to pick up on subliminal cues and latent possibilities.

I’ve written more about intuition and feeling because they’re less understood in today’s culture (when intuition is acknowledged as existing at all), and hopefully not just because they’re my primary and secondary functions. I don’t mean to denigrate thinking and sensation—they are just so well understood and prioritized today that things are arguably too tilted in their directions.

The preeminent functions in the western world may have been different prior to the Renaissance and Industrial Revolution. Indeed, the balance may have been tilted too far in the other directions. One way to understand Copernicus and Galileo’s heroic championing of a heliocentric model of the universe is through the functions. We could say that these pioneering astronomers prioritized sensate observations and thinking calculations over the dominant feeling of the time that the earth was more important than the sun, and over their culture’s intuitive sense that humans were at the centre of things.

What’s Next

In the interest of providing a digestible introduction, I’ve skipped over a lot of nuance and detail. The next facets of the model I’ll cover is how an introverted or extraverted attitude interacts with the four functions and how the functions stack on top of each other and interact in an individual.

1. Sharp, Daryl. 1998. Jungian Psychology Unplugged. Inner City Books. 10.

2. Jung, C. G. 1966. Collected Works of C.G. Jung, vol. 7: Two Essays on Analytical Psychology. Para. 64.

3. Sharp, Daryl. 1998. Jungian Psychology Unplugged. Inner City Books. 10-11.

4. Sharp, Daryl. 1998. Jungian Psychology Unplugged. Inner City Books. 10-11.

5. Sharp, Daryl. 1998. Jungian Psychology Unplugged. Inner City Books. 11.

6. Sharp, Daryl. 1998. Jungian Psychology Unplugged. Inner City Books. 11.

7. Sharp, Daryl. 1998. Jungian Psychology Unplugged. Inner City Books. 14.

8. Sharp, Daryl. 1998. Jungian Psychology Unplugged. Inner City Books. 11.

9. Sharp, Daryl. 1998. Jungian Psychology Unplugged. Inner City Books. 11.