The Inferior Function at the Time of Change
One of the most important tasks at the midpoint of life's path is the awareness of the behavioural patterns and the study of what we missed earlier.
The most important function of the first half of life is the socialisation of a person. We learn to live in a complex world full of implicit rules. However, this acquaintance is not complete. On the contrary, we are limited by the framework of the conditions in which we find ourselves. Place of birth, family characteristics, environment, school — all these factors set the starting conditions that affect how we relate to the world and, more importantly in the context of our conversation today, what paths we choose.
We can talk about freedom of choice as much as we want, but even if it exists, it refers to an adult individual who is able to realise the options and has the resources to freely choose. Freedom is not a gift; it is a privilege and something that sometimes needs to be "knocked out" by force. But today, we will not talk about it, but rather about the limitations that such a situation brings. We do not develop holistically, as we would like, but only within the narrow framework, the "blinders" of the sociocultural context in which we find ourselves. One of the most important tasks at the midpoint of life's path is the awareness of these frameworks and the study of what we missed earlier.
Jungian Psychological Types and Four Functions
This process itself is quite well-known in psychological literature, and different authors may call it by various names. For Jung, it is associated with the concept of the inferior function. Strictly speaking, what I described earlier is the sociocultural influence — how society, cultures, and the people around us shape our personality. However, I missed another important aspect: the biological one.
All people are different. In Jung's time, some biological aspects were not yet known, but now we know that our psyche is also formed under the influence of our genome. People can have different sensitivities of the nervous system. This fact can significantly affect a person's behaviour: if an individual does not have enough "irritation" (in this context, I mean that they do not have enough stimuli to excite the nervous system), they will seek it externally, experiencing a corresponding internal desire. This may well be expressed in a more active lifestyle. At the same time, if the sensitivity of the nervous system is high, then even the slightest external stimulus is enough for satisfaction. Such people may be content with calmer behaviour. In general, the givens with which we are born are not only sociocultural but also biological. Jung reasoned more about the latter while analyzing the former.
In one of his early works, Psychological Types, Jung proposed his own classification of people. Of course, it should be treated as a somewhat simplified model that only systematises known information, but for the purposes of today's conversation, this is more than enough.
Jung suggested that people perceive the world differently. Some need to put everything on shelves to get a life lesson. Others need emotions and feelings to realise something, while some require a corresponding experience. You could notice this in your friends and loved ones — it would seem that the same experience causes completely different consequences.
Jung also saw this and identified four key types, which he called functions: thinking, feeling (and emotions), intuition, and sensation. The first is associated with rational and logical processes. The second is associated with less accurate but still quite logical processes related to assessing the importance of something. For example, you may know that something is very important to you but not be able to explain why. You just know it; this knowledge is quite justified (for example, by previous experience or feelings) but does not have a logical justification. This is exactly what the feeling function is - the ability to assess the importance of a particular experience based on one's own feelings.
Intuition speaks for itself — it is an aspiration into the future and the ability to see relationships that do not yet exist. Visionaries and scientists who make breakthrough research embody this function. The famous character from Harry Potter, Albus Percival Wulfric Brian Dumbledore, was one of those — he built complex and long-term plans, seeing the possibilities of the future. Many of them would seem extremely strange to a rational person and, especially, to a feeling person, but, as we know from the Potter universe, they did lead to success.
Sensation is a focus on the present. I learn only what I feel with my sense organs. The ability to live in the moment and gain life experience through direct experience is about this type of people.
In addition to these four functions, Jung identified two orthogonal ones: extraversion and introversion. I believe that they do not need an explanation: the first indicates a person's outward orientation (in other words, they get a resource from interacting with others), and the second has an inward orientation (accordingly, an individual's interactions with society do not add, but usually take away a resource, while solitude and a calm environment add it). The orthogonality of these functions means that they are not related to each other. This leads to eight possible personality types: extraverted thinker, extraverted feeler, extraverted sensor, extraverted intuitive, and the same for introversion.
The Leading and Inferior Functions
This typology is entertaining, but why am I bringing this up? Because in addition to the systematisation itself, Jung noticed that a person usually has a so-called "leading function." This is how we usually interact with the world — what we use constantly, what is given to us by nature, and what we are predisposed to. You can trace your decisions in the past: what did you base them on? How did you solve problems? How did you overcome difficulties? The leading function, according to Jung, is inherent in us by nature. I would add that there is also a sociocultural context. For example, in the modern world, much contributes to the development of the thinking function, which dominates over the others.
The leading function is the strongest for us, but we are not interested in it now. Instead, we are focused on its opposite: the inferior function. According to Jung, this is the function that, on the contrary, is the least developed. It is connected with the leading function by the quality of opposites. Thinking is opposed to feeling, and intuition is opposed to sensation. If your leading function is thinking, then your inferior function will be feeling, and vice versa.
The inferior function is what we try to avoid because we don't know how to use it. More precisely, it's not even just that we don't know how, but rather that we are not predisposed to it by nature and our development. In the first half of life, a person strives to use their leading function. Sometimes other functions are added to it, but, according to Jung, never the inferior one. Here, in fact, lies the most important conclusion for us: by the midpoint of the path, we can approach with more or less studied three functions, but not all.
It would seem, so what? Well, we don't know how to work with the inferior function - to hell with it. We can't know how to do everything, after all. And here is where Jung's genius understood one very important thing: the most important insights and experiences that contribute to our development, we get, strangely enough, precisely through the inferior function. A brilliant thinker abandons his way of life due to an influx of feelings. An emotional and feeling person realises an important experience by thinking and systematising accumulated experiences. A person who is used to living one day at a time suddenly understands that they have no future. A person living in the future realises that they, in fact, have never lived in the present. The inferior function is the key to our development in the second half of life.
By this point, we have learned very well how to work with the leading function. Some, perhaps, have "squeezed" everything possible out of it, which led to a certain dead end. But this dead end can be solved in one way: through a journey into the unknown to one's inferior function.
In practice
Let's park this thought for a while and try to approach it from other sides. First of all, one might object that Jung was an excellent philosopher, and his theories were wonderful, but science has advanced since his lifetime. To this, I will answer that the same thought is perfectly expressed in other directions as well.
Let's take, for example, the most well-known modern direction: cognitive psychology. What quality is important for the comprehensive development of a person? Flexibility and Out-of-the-box thinking — the ability to go beyond the template. This is useful not only in work but also in life. New experiences and sensations make our story more complete and happier. Moreover, neurological studies show that a person trying a new sport or new food develops their cognitive system, which, at a minimum, allows delaying the appearance of degenerative diseases. At most, it allows one to remain an active person right up to the end. The midpoint of the path is a key point here.
By this point, people have usually already learned how to live in this world. For most problems, there are already solutions honed by time and experience. We know how to live. This leads to conservation and potential conservatism in the second half of life. Of course, in reasonable doses, this is useful, but excessive conservatism is not good. I believe that many of you have met adults in life who refused something new, interesting, and possibly more effective because they already had a ready-made pattern of work in their head. New approaches require effort; they require the creation of new neural connections, which requires willpower. Therefore, many refuse it. But then it turns out that the second half is no longer life but "living out" — following those paths that we have already created. Do you want to live like this? Development is impossible without something new, and for this, experiences of something that you have not encountered before are needed.
The same story can be interpreted from an existential position. Rollo May proposed a very important concept of existential guilt — the guilt that arises before oneself for non-choices or for those choices that I did not make. I could have become a doctor, but I became a cook. I wanted to play the piano, but I went to the tennis section. This leads to existential guilt for the unexperienced experience. As you understand, this guilt will constantly accumulate, since a person constantly has to make choices. By the midpoint, we approach with a fairly large baggage of all this, and you can even identify some "clusters" of a certain experience in which we constantly deny ourselves. If we continue to live like this further, it cannot but affect our mood. Existential guilt is a burden that we constantly carry. If we do not begin to at least partially get rid of the heaviest items, then soon our back will start to hurt.
How can this be done? Experience the corresponding experience. Learn to cook. Learn to play the piano. Start doing what, for some reason, was not done before but was really wanted. In general, as we can see, different approaches lead to the same thought: life should become more complete and holistic if we want to successfully overcome the midpoint of the path.
This leads us to the question: what to do? There are some general answers here; however, each life story is unique, so the main layer of work is on the person themselves. Different approaches allow us to approach this issue comprehensively.
The Jungian approach points to the inferior function. This leads to a simple idea: try to determine your leading function. It is not difficult to understand it, since this is what we are good at. Knowing it, it is easy to determine the inferior function as well. Knowing the latter, you can also understand the vector of the answer to the question of what to do: develop it. It is necessary to understand what actions you can take in order to give due attention to it. What are you lacking? Thinking? Try to do something systematic (for example, formal training). Feelings? Choose an experience that will allow you to enhance them - dancing, socialisation, increasing emotionality. Intuition? Try to build long-term stories based on invisible threads of probabilities. Sensations? So, it's time to give yourself free rein and live "here and now." In general, try to find something that might be interesting specifically for you and that will allow you to develop the inferior function.
The cognitive story suggests to us that the midpoint of the path is a time for a completely new experience that will help us not to stop in our cognitive development but, on the contrary, increase plasticity and become more complete. The existential approach suggests in which direction one can "dig." Where there is a lot of guilt, there is also an opportunity to get rid of it. It's time to do what was scary to do before and what we constantly shied away from, but at the same time, it did not disappear anywhere and remained with us.
Instead of Conclusions
In general, the time for change has come. I thought to end this article with this, but I would like to recall one more story. Jung introduced the concept of enantiodromia into psychology. This phenomenon often occurs during crises, including the midlife crisis, and consists of the fact that a person suddenly changes some aspect of their life to the completely opposite. In other words, they abruptly refuse something and go into the complete opposite. I think each of the readers will be able to recall such examples. As they say, from love to hate is one step.
However, enantiodromia is not good. Any extreme leads to unpleasant consequences. It would seem, well, we want to develop the inferior function, which means we need to act differently, so why is this bad? It's because the premise should be, "I want to become more full," and not "I want to give up my past life and start a new one."
The first half of life gives us the most important skills for living in society and the ability to solve emerging problems. This knowledge and experience is useful; they should not simply be thrown away but supplemented with an alternative. A person who cannot cope with their feelings is bad, but so is the person who does not have them at all. The one who does not know how to live in the present is bad, but the one who, like the grasshopper from Krylov's fable, lives only in the present will not be successful either.
Our past does us credit and shows our strengths. One should not give them up. But it also points out to us the weaknesses that it's time to work on at the midpoint of the path.