John Beebe 'Type and archetype'

Part 1: The spine and its shadow

The idea that each of us has the potential to access the full range of consciousnesses that Jung identified in Psychological Types is an appealing one, and one which, thanks in part to my own work, has been increasingly explored and accepted by a number of type practitioners in recent years.

Known as the eight-function model, the theory does not deny that each of us has just one superior and one auxiliary function on which most of us rely heavily; but it goes further, analysing how our consciousness operates when we find that we must reach beyond these two favoured ways of coming up with intelligent responses to life’s demands.

The eight-function, eight-archetype model of psychological types is based on two observations that are fundamental to its understanding and application.

The first observation is that in the course of our lives, we each actually make use of all the function-attitudes, those eight options of consciousness that Jung originally described in Psychological Types: introverted thinking, introverted feeling, introverted sensation, introverted intuition, extraverted thinking, extraverted feeling, extraverted sensation, and extraverted intuition.

The second observation is that these function-attitudes, though having typical characteristics that 86 years of type research have repeatedly verified, are not expressed in the same way by every individual who deploys them. There is a normal variation, not only in the strength and reliability of the functions, according to the degree of preference and practice that the individual will bring to the expression of each type of consciousness, but also in the role the individual enters when expressing a particular consciousness.

This second observation moves type theory well beyond Jung’s original discovery — clarified and amplified by Isabel Briggs Myers through her seminal insights into the nature of type development — that the function-attitudes arrange themselves as a series of numbered positions, implying a hierarchy of differentiation: i.e. dominant function, auxiliary function, tertiary function, and inferior function.

My own addition to type theory was to recognise that such a numbering of functions implies that there are, rooted in the structure of the psyche, eight positions, one for each function-attitude. This insight led me to postulate archetypal qualities adhering to each of the positions, rather in the way a local genius is said to preside over every town and city in Italy.

Here is a diagram that shows the archetypes that preside over the expression of the first four function-attitudes, in function positions from superior to inferior.

Figure 1: Archetypes associated with the first four function-attitudes (ENTP example)

The diagram shows these relations for a person whose MBTI type is ENTP, but the archetypes associated with the different numbered positions would be the same for the other 15 types as well, even though the function attitudes occupying the four positions vary according to the type.

Within this article I will be concentrating on the pair of archetypes associated with the superior and inferior functions in this diagram, which define an axis (the vertical line in the diagram) that I call the spine of personality, and adding to them two archetypes (not shown in this diagram) of the function positions that form the normally invisible shadow to this spine. (Archetypes associated with the auxiliary and tertiary functions, which form the arms of the diagram, and with their shadows, will be discussed in part 2 of this article.)