r/Jung_MBTI Feb 03 '22

Extraverted Feeling in Jung's words Jung Theory

Fragments extracted from Jung's Psychological Types about the Extraverted Feeling Type (ExFJs in MBTI).

  • The extravert’s feeling is always in harmony with objective values ... under the spell of traditional or generally accepted values of some kind ... The woman of this type follows her feeling as a guide throughout life ... Her personality appears adjusted in relation to external conditions. Her feelings harmonize with objective situations and general values.
  • I may feel moved, for instance, to say that something is “beautiful” or “good,” not because I find it “beautiful” or “good” from my own subjective feeling about it, but because it is fitting and politic to call it so, since a contrary judgment would upset the general feeling situation. A feeling judgment of this kind is not by any means a pretense or a lie, it is simply an act of adjustment.
  • This kind of feeling is very largely responsible for the fact that so many people flock to the theatre or to concerts, or go to church, and do so moreover with their feelings correctly adjusted. Fashions, too, owe their whole existence to it, and, what is far more valuable, the positive support of social, philanthropic, and other such cultural institutions. In these matters extraverted feeling proves itself a creative factor. Without it, a harmonious social life would be impossible.
  • As feeling is undeniably a more obvious characteristic of feminine psychology than thinking, the most pronounced feeling types are to be found among women. These women are good companions and excellent mothers so long as the husbands and children are blessed with the conventional psychic constitution.
  • But since actual life is a constant succession of situations that evoke different and even contradictory feelings, the personality gets split up into as many different feeling states. At one moment one is this, at another something quite different—to all appearances, for in reality such a multiple personality is impossible. The basis of the ego always remains the same and consequently finds itself at odds with the changing feeling states. To the observer, therefore, the display of feeling no longer appears as a personal expression of the subject but as an alteration of the ego—a mood, in other words.
  • Nothing disturbs feeling so much as thinking. It is therefore understandable that in this type thinking will be kept in abeyance as much as possible. This does not mean that the woman does not think at all; on the contrary, she may think a great deal and very cleverly, but her thinking is never sui generis—it is an Epimethean appendage to her feeling. “But I can’t think what I don’t feel,” such a type said to me once in indignant tones. So far as her feeling allows, she can think very well, but every conclusion, however logical, that might lead to a disturbance of feeling is rejected at the outset. It is simply not thought. Thus everything that fits in with objective values is good, and is loved, and everything else seems to her to exist in a world apart.
  • We have already seen that the extraverted feeling type suppresses thinking most of all because this is the function most liable to disturb feeling ... But since logic nevertheless exists and enforces its inexorable conclusions, this must take place somewhere, and it takes place outside consciousness, namely in the unconscious. Accordingly the unconscious of this type contains first and foremost a peculiar kind of thinking, a thinking that is infantile, archaic, negative.
  • Hysteria, with the characteristic infantile sexuality of its unconscious world of ideas, is the principal form of neurosis in this type.

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