Yes, I've read Psychological Types and I understand the history. Jung didn't intend his work to be used in the way that it has though. I just think a lot of the stuff that has been done in his name is so fanciful and speculative that I can't take it seriously. Much along the lines of the criticisms you've made.
Obviously, I'm not going to disagree too strongly with this synopsis. It seems that some people just like to make up things about how functions are ordered, how they relate to one another, and so on, without realizing that it is always "just a typology", not a science. Just an ordered way of labeling concepts, so that we can talk about things in a coherent way.
As long as we don't lose track of which properties we've put in which bucket, we're good.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but he didn't talk about the functions in the way that they have come to be spoken about. He distinguished between the attitudes (introversion and extroversion) and 4 functions (T/F, S/N). Where he spoke of the "introverted thinking" type, he was talking about an introvert with a preference for thinking over feeling judgment (not a "Ti-dom"). I think this distinction is more useful than talking about 8 distinct functions and a whole manufactured hierarchy of supposed strengths and weaknesses. An extrovert who prefers feeling makes sense. Fe as a function? Meh. Seems people can even agree what it does/doesn't do
This is an interesting point, and I don't reject it in its entirety, but I think you might be missing something. Indeed, we could redo our typology labels as "In, It, If, Is, En, Et, Ef, Es" instead of "Ni, Ti, Fi, Si, Ne, Te, Fe, Se," and we're still talking about the same things.
I must emphasize that he is talking about functions separately from types. There is a bit in his description of extroverted thinking where he talks about introverted thinking (p. 194 of
The Portable Jung):
But -- and now I come to the question of the introverted intellect -- there also exists an entirely different kind of thinking, to which the term "thinking" can hardly be denied: it is a kind that is oriented neither by immediate experience of objects nor by traditional ideas. I reach this other kind of thinking in the following manner: when my thoughts are preoccupied with a concrete object or a general idea, in such a way that the course of my thinking eventually leads me back to my starting-point, this intellectual process is not the only psychic process that is going on in me. I will disregard all those sensations and feelings which become noticeable as a more or less disturbing accompaniment to my train of thought, and will merely point out that this very thinking process which starts from the object and returns to the object also stands in a constant relation to the subject. This relation is a sine qua non, without which no thinking process whatsoever could take place. Even though my thinking process is directed, as far as possible, to objective data, it is still my subjective process, and it can neither avoid nor dispense with this admixture of subjectivity. Struggle as I may to give an objective orientation to my train of thought, I cannot shut out the parallel subjective process and its running accompaniment without extinguishing the very spark of life from my thought. This parallel process has a natural and hardly avoidable tendency to subjectify the objective data and assimilate them to the subject.
[Bolded emphasis is mine. Any errors in this quote are mine.]
In other words, in this section his is explicitly talking about introverted thinking, and later on in his introverted thinking section, he references the fact that he discussed it here. He obviously regards the human mind as having both objective and subjective thoughts, and that the extrovert cannot avoid subjectivity nor can the introvert avoid objectivity. It is, in fact, his opinion that it is
excessive objectivity or subjectivity that causes problems and neuroses. The
person is not extroverted or introverted, except as a "type." And he did not limit his types ("archetypes") to just extroverted and introverted, but expressed each in terms of a function.
Therefore, I must disagree with your assessment here:
Yeah. I think it's a mistake to read it that way. Functions don't have "attitudes", people do.
I believe my quote above indicates that Jung believed functions have attitudes, and that people express both the objective and subjective forms within themselves, though they may strongly emphasize one or the other. That we have parallel thought process, both conscious and subconscious, which carry either objective or subjective attitudes, and that it is impossible for a human not to have these - that they can be suppressed into the unconscious to varying degrees, but they do not stop operating.
I can see why Jungians read that and interpreted it in terms of function attitudes, but I just don't see enough support for it.
Even in that excerpt, Jung talks about Introversion and Extroversion as "mechanisms" or modes, in their own right. This doesn't make sense if they are intrinsically linked to functions.
I believe, based on my quote and other readings, he was generalizing what Extroversion and Introversion meant; that the objective/subjective attitudes are their own independent property, and that it's useful to use this property in psychological analysis because it is readily visible.
He talks about functions being "employed" in extroverted or introverted ways. That is, energy is directed via these functions in an introverted or extroverted way. That doesn't support the idea that Introverted Feeling is a different process from Extroverted Feeling. Merely that introverted feelers and extroverted feelers are likely to use the "feeling function" in different ways. A critical distinction.
Maybe this should be split off into a separate thread.
Actually, I think it belongs in this thread. It adds a great deal of clarity.
I've some ideas from another quote of his that I want to expand upon, where he contrasts the subjective from the objective functions in a general way, showing how they are largely at odds with one another. This "at odds" appears to me to totally describe the Fe/Fi differences, which very strongly parallel the Te/Ti differences, said parallel allowing me to effectively show Fe users how to put the subjective shoe on the other foot. I'll post these other ideas as I have time and such that they are in the context of this thread.