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I haven't come across this. I have seen the majority to think that the tertiary is the same attitude as the auxiliary, or in other words, all the other functions have the opposite attitude of the dominant. I've never seen the idea
In the one passage Jung discusses the aux much at all in Psychological Types, he seems to imply it is opposite in every way from the dominant, so this suggests an opposite attitude also. If there are any other passages, perhaps in other works, where he implies something different, then I'd be interested in seeing it.
I've been meaning to plant a more longform post at TC about the attitude of the auxiliary, so, since you asked...
According to Myers, Jung's function model called for the auxiliary function to have the
opposite attitude to the dominant (e.g., Ni-Te for INTJs). But Myers acknowledged that the great majority of Jung scholars —
all but one, she said — disagreed with that interpretation. I think she was mistaken — assuming she wasn't being disingenuous — although it wasn't a very significant "mistake" from Myers' perspective since, although she gave the functions quite a lot of lip service in the first half of
Gifts Differing, she then essentially left them behind in favor of the dichotomies (to her credit, IMHO).
I think the only interpretation that's really consistent with
Psychological Types as a whole — as distinguished from Myers' very selective cherry-picking — is that Jung's function model for an Ti-dom with an N auxiliary was really Ti-Ni-Se-Fe, and I think that's how he viewed himself at the time he wrote
Psychological Types.
Jung said more people were essentially in the middle on E/I than were significantly extraverted or introverted and, because he viewed his eight function-types as four varieties of extravert and four varieties of introvert, that may mean Jung thought that a plurality of people really didn't have a well-differentiated dominant function. But, setting the typeless folks aside, Jung thought that what you might call the
default state of affairs for someone who
did have a dominant function was that their dominant (substantially differentiated) function would have what Jung called their "conscious attitude" (i.e., introverted for an introvert), and all three of the other functions would have the opposite attitude and would basically be "fused" with the other undifferentiated functions in the unconscious.
Describing the F, S and N functions of a Ti-dom, Jung explained:
Jung said:
The counterbalancing functions of feeling, intuition, and sensation are comparatively unconscious and inferior, and therefore have a primitive extraverted character that accounts for all the troublesome influences from outside to which the introverted thinker is prone.
But... notwithstanding that I just referred to that as the "default" state of affairs, Jung also said that, in the
typical case, a person would also have an auxiliary function that, although it was
less differentiated than the dominant, would be sufficiently differentiated to "exert a co-determining influence" in their "consciousness."
I believe Jung's view was that, although the default attitude of the second function was in the opposite direction from the dominant function, that corresponded with the default place for the second function being the unconscious — in an "archaic" state and fused with the other unconscious functions. If and to the extent that the second function was brought up into consciousness and developed ("differentiated") as the auxiliary function (serving the dominant), I think Jung envisioned that it would also, to that extent, take on the same conscious
attitude (e.g., introversion for an introvert) as the dominant function.
In the brief section of
Psychological Types devoted to the auxiliary function, Jung specifically refers to the tertiary and inferior functions as the "unconscious functions" and the dominant and auxiliary functions as the "conscious ones"; and he notes that "the unconscious functions ... group themselves in patterns correlated with the conscious ones. Thus, the correlative of conscious, practical thinking [— i.e., a T-dom with an S-aux—] may be an unconscious, intuitive-feeling attitude, with feeling under a stronger inhibition than intuition." Thirty years later, in
Individual Dream Symbolism in Relation to Alchemy, Jung's model hadn't changed. As he explained:
If we think of the psychological function [sic] as arranged in a circle, then the most differentiated function is usually the carrier of the ego and, equally regularly, has an auxiliary function attached to it. The "inferior" function, on the other hand, is unconscious and for that reason is projected into a non-ego. It too has an auxiliary function. ...
In the psychology of the functions there are two conscious and therefore masculine functions, the differentiated function and its auxiliary, which are represented in dreams by, say, father and son, whereas the unconscious functions appear as mother and daughter. Since the conflict between the two auxiliary functions is not nearly as great as that between the differentiated and the inferior function, it is possible for the third function — that is, the unconscious auxiliary one — to be raised to consciousness and thus made masculine. It will, however, bring with it traces of its contamination with the inferior function, thus acting as a kind of link with the darkness of the unconscious.
As already noted, the majority of Jung scholars believe that Jung viewed the auxiliary function as providing balance between judging and perceiving, but
not between introversion and extraversion. Myers largely rested her case on the sentence where Jung says the auxiliary function is "in every respect different" from the dominant function. And I'd agree that her interpretation would appear to be the best one if all you do is look at that one sentence in isolation. But the trouble is, that interpretation seems inconsistent with way too much else in
Psychological Types. When Jung wrote about how an introvert's introversion gets balanced (or "compensated," as he more often put it) by extraversion (and
vice versa) — and he actually devoted a great deal of
Psychological Types to that issue — he consistently envisioned the I/E balance happening by way of the unconscious, and never by way of a differentiated conscious function oriented in the opposite direction.
Jung spent substantially more of
Psychological Types talking about extraversion and introversion than he spent talking about all eight of the functions put together. In the Foreword to a 1934 edition of the book, Jung explained that he'd put the eight specific "function-type" descriptions at the end of the book for a reason. He said, "I would therefore recommend the reader who really wants to understand my book to immerse himself first of all in chapters II and V."
Chapter II is Jung's detailed discussion of Schiller's
Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man, and centers around Schiller's insight, as a Ti-dom, into the specific kinds of "barbarism" found in the dominant Christian culture as the result of its one-sidedly extraverted orientation. Jung, as a fellow Ti-dom, concurred with much of Schiller's analysis, and noted that the extraverted one-sidedness of the culture (and its consequential barbarism) had only gotten worse since 1795 (when Schiller wrote).
At 110 pages, Chapter V is the longest chapter in the book, and it centers around a detailed analysis of Spitteler's
Prometheus and Epimetheus — which, as Jung notes, very much parallels his interpretation of Schiller. Jung calls
Prometheus & Epimetheus "a poetic work based almost entirely on the type problem," and explains that the conflict at the heart of it "is essentially a struggle between the introverted and extraverted lines of development in one and the same individual, though the poet has embodied it in two independent figures and their typical destinies." Epimetheus (embodying the extraverted attitude) represents the established, traditional Church and the (by Spitteler's time, as both he and Jung saw it) barbaric influence of its one-sidedly extraverted attitude on Western culture, while Prometheus tries to bring about a religious reformation/renewal as a result of the introverted orientation that causes him to represent the view that God is to be found within each man rather than outside him.
And the central focus on extraversion/introversion, and the things Jung thought
all extraverts and
all introverts tend to have in common, runs through every chapter of
Psychological Types other than Chapter X — the only part of the book with any substantial description of the eight functions.
As Jung saw it, the dynamics of the human psyche revolved first and foremost around a single great divide, and that divide involved
two all-important components — namely, introversion/extraversion
and conscious/unconscious.
And for Jung, to a much greater degree than Myers, a person's unconscious played a large role in motivating and influencing their ordinary thoughts, feelings and behavior. Jung thought that, for a typical person on a typical day, something like half of their speech and behavior might well be the product of their unconscious functions, and Jung said it was sometimes hard to tell the consciously-sourced stuff from the unconsciously-sourced stuff. He said one way to figure out which was which was to be on the lookout for the "archaic" (or "primitive") aspects that tended to be charactistic of unconscious-based stuff. So, under ordinary circumstances, the one-sidedness of an introvert's conscious side would be "compensated" on a daily basis by extraversion from the unconscious. But Jung noted that, as time passed, there could be a tendency for the one-sidedness to increase — possibly by greater development of the dominant function (potentially a positive thing for some purposes) — which in turn would mean that the unconscious stuff got repressed to a greater degree and failed to provide adequate "compensation," resulting in a build-up of dammed libido in the unconscious. (Jung's break with Freud was, alas, far from total.) This could lead to neurotic symptoms, and maybe things would end up being resolved in a relatively undramatic way or maybe the person would end up needing Jung's professional services.
Jung viewed the conflicting aspects of extraversion and introversion as so fundamentally opposed that it was ultimately impossible to truly reconcile them in terms of anything in the nature of conscious reasoning. Instead, Jung said extraversion and introversion could only be reconciled in a kind of inchoate and fragile way, by a process he referred to as the "transcendent function," through which a "symbol" would arise from the unconscious that would allow the repressed unconscious libido to surface in a constructive way and unite with the conscious — but only temporarily, because "after a while the opposites recover their strength." Jung explains that "the creation of a symbol is not a rational process, for a rational process could never produce an image that represents a content which is at bottom incomprehensible."
Contrast all that with Myers' notion that everyone's
conscious side includes both an introverted and an extraverted function that, in a reasonably well developed person, work together to keep the person balanced both in terms of judgment/perception
and extraversion/introversion.
Again, the psychodynamics of the conflict between extraversion and introversion was really Jung's great theme in
Psychological Types — as he emphasized in that 1934 foreword. If you asked someone trying to defend Myers' interpretation how an opposite-attitude auxiliary function could have been missing in action through all those chapters where the E/I battles raged, they might point to the fact that the section of Chapter X devoted to the auxiliary function was
extremely brief — an afterthought, really — and so the E-vs.-I aspect of the auxiliary's role was just something Jung
didn't happen to mention. But I'd argue that, if Jung thought the auxiliary function played any substantial role in terms of a person's E/I psychodynamics, (1) there's no way the auxiliary function would have ended up being a brief afterthought at the end of Chapter X, and (2) there's no way all the many passages in the first nine chapters where extraversion and introversion repress each other and fight each other and compensate each other would have been written in the way they were — i.e., with the E/I psychodyamics consistently and
exclusively framed as parallelling the conscious/unconscious divide.
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