[Q, January 2005]
by Dr. Lea Hall
| "…the integration of the personality is unthinkable
without the responsible, and that means moral, relation of the parts to one another. . . .”
C.G. Jung We begin 2005 faced with a puzzle: what's wrong with the other half of Americans? Regardless of whether your candidate won or lost in November, you know that approximately half of America disagreed with you. Our country feels angrily, stubbornly split. On the other hand our agenda as Jungians is a journey toward individual and collective wholeness. So the question is relevant to Q readers: Q is for Quest. Much has been written about thoughtful versus emotional appeals in the recent elections. A popular belief among the mystified losers seems to be that the other party won because of its successful emotional appeal, with its claim to family values and ethics. The hot button issues elevated a narrow slate of moral issues to top priority. Is this the whole story? As Jungians we know that we need all four functions of consciousness: thinking, feeling, sensing, and intuiting. But in regard to ethics, westerners usually focus on the interplay between Thinking and Feeling. An ethic of justice is associated with Thinking, and an ethic of caring is associated with a preference for Feeling. Head and heart: get them together and live integratedly ever after. An old recipe, but no easy job. Jung wrote that although we need to develop each in turn, we cannot use opposite functions simultaneously. Since Americans divide equally on this scale, half exhibiting Feeling and half Thinking preferences, we tend to hear plenty from their two kinds of moral intelligence. To solve this puzzle, I've just read a slim book entitled Pathways to Integrity: Ethics and Psychological Type by Blake Burleson, Center for Applications of Psychological Type, Gainesville, 2001. The author, who builds on John Beebe's work and refers to Angelo Spoto, notes that Thinking- Feeling is not the only relevant dichotomy in ethical interpretation. Roughly three of four Americans prefer Sensation over Intuition. Burleson suggests that a large majority of us, as Sensing types, may be acting on a preference for certainty over wonder , for example. Where a sensing type perceives proof, an intuitive type perceives possibility. Where a sensing type perceives knowledge, an intuitive type perceives guesswork. When these two types of people look at the same event and perceive it in opposite ways, how does it influence their behavior? What if the answers to the puzzle (What's WRONG with those people?) lie not in how we/they think about domestic and foreign policy; or how we/they evaluate the economic benefits of campaign promises made; or how we/they feel about policy toward war and peace, the environment, human rights, health insurance, and Social Security? What if the answers lie in the way we/they perceive current events ? And if that is the case, how could we, once we are conscious of the need, foster the dialectic between Sensing and Intuition? Without the benefit of type theory, three of four Americans may not realize that there is another way to interpret daily experience, may not anticipate the consequences of today's choices, may not perceive the early signs of long-term pattern shifts in the way we dispense justice and the way we care for ourselves and others. How can we work toward integrating Intuition into the American conscience? I write to you not as a type expert or a moral philosopher, but as a pilgrim truly puzzled by recent human events. My New Year's resolution is this: to use what I have. We Jungians possess rich tools in psychological type theory. May these tools help us to understand people whose preferences (and by extension, some of their ethical choices) are opposite to our own. Once we understand, we can communicate. Upcoming Society programs offer opportunities to expand these tool boxes, with four type experts among our fine presenters. See page 6 for a description of Margaret and Gary Hartzler's January workshop on type, John Beebe's February lecture and workshops, and Angelo Spoto's lecture on liminality, film and the natural mind in May . And that's not all. See the Events schedule for programs on active imagination and film, archetypal images in film, and water symbolism. I invite you to join me in the resolution to use what we have. See you at the meetings! ~ Lea Hall |