Energies and Patterns in Psychological Type

by John Beebe

This book encapsulates John Beebe s influential work on the analytical psychology of consciousness. Building on C. G. Jung s theory of psychological types and on subsequent clarifications by Marie-Louise von Franz and Isabel Briggs Myers, Beebe demonstrates the bond between the eight types of consciousness Jung named and the archetypal complexes that impart energy and purpose to our emotions, fantasies, and dreams. For this collection, Beebe has revised and updated his most influential and significant previously published papers and has introduced, in a brand new chapter, a surprising theory of type and culture.

Beebe s model enables readers to take what they already know about psychological types and apply it to depth psychology. The insights contained in the fifteen chapters of this book will be especially valuable for Jungian psychotherapists, post-Jungian academics and scholars, psychological type practitioners, and type enthusiasts."

Genres: Psychology, Nonfiction

250 pages, Paperback

First published December 19, 2016

About the author

John Beebe is an American psychiatrist and Jungian analyst.

Reviews

[Anita Ashland · Rating 5 out of 5]

An exceptional book on personality typing and ranks right up there with Marie Louise von Franz and James Hillman's Lectures on Psychological Type as must reading. Beebe developed the eight function model and gives archetype names to the 8 functions. Your first function is the Hero/Heroine function, the second the parent function, and so on. We each have a shadow type, which is the same four functions of your main type but in the opposite orientation. So an INTJ's shadow type is ENTP, for example.

Much depth here and I will be revisiting my Kindle highlights of the book and the book itself as often as I revisit von Franz and Hillman.

[Nu · Rating 5 out of 5]

John Bee's perspectives on the psychological type (personality type) and cognitive functions common among people were quite enlightening.

As you manoeuvre the pages, the reader is provided with a deeper understanding of how people perceive and interact with the world as they move through it.

The perspectives were the most fun to shift through and experience. This "window" into the psyche of sorts was informative and entertaining.

I cannot deny, being of a certain disposition myself, that I found certain perspectives most unimaginable but quite necessary.

An overall great read if people fascinate you.

[Gold Dust · Rating 3 out of 5]

In short, Beebe’s eight function model applied to all of humanity is based on his understanding of himself and his interpretation of a couple dreams he had. Bad foundation; totally subjective. Notes and quotes below.

“I say this lest anyone reading what I have written about the archetypes in this book take the eight- function, eight-archetype model as an unaltering image of inevitable rigidity.” (Preface)

“very few us, whether clients or type practitioners, can actually recognize the eight function-attitudes.” 20

Function - heart/ego - surface persona - evolved/goal
Fi appraising, judging, establishing value
Ti defining, naming, understanding
Ni knowing, imagining, divining
Si verifying, implementing, accounting
Fe affirming, validating, relating
Te planning p, regulating, enforcing
Ne envisioning, entertaining, enabling
Se. experiencing, engaging, enjoying (21-23)

His model is based “on a set of thought experiments” 24

He thought himself ne dom, but He could relate to si more than se.24

P52-53 he defined intuition as dreaming. Sensing as paying attn.
59 si is practical, efficient . “Introverted sensation, I knew by this time, lives on the inside of the body, and seeks to keep it from getting overstimulated, overheated, too tired, too hungry, or too filled with the wrong foods, etc.”
59 ne is “pursues possibilities and takes his energy into the world, leaving his introverted wife at home alone, not giving her much.”
58-59 “Later I came to see that introverted sensation concerns itself primarily with finding order, organizing experience, and monitoring the comfort of the body on the inside, whereas extraverted sensation involves compelling, often shared, experiences of the textures, smells, sights, sounds, and tastes of the world—a direct relationship with reality. Similarly, I decided that introverted feeling is mainly concerned with the values that matter most to oneself, while extraverted feeling seeks to connect with the feelings of others. Extraverted intuition, as friends often verified after some of my uncannily telepathic moments in their presence, seemed rather easily to pick up on what was going on in other people’s minds, and it was certainly seeing possibilities in what was more consciously shared with me that others might never have imagined; whereas introverted intuition, I noticed (for instance, in Jung) looked at the big picture in the unconscious, where the gestalts that moved nations, religions, and epochs lay, even in the midst of apparently ‘individual’ experience. And the two kinds of thinking, though both concerned with defining things, also did so in very different ways: extraverted thinking such as my father’s was interested in definitions that would hold true for everyone, according to ideas everyone might agree with, whereas introverted thinking such as mine had to reflect on whether a particular construction really accorded with the conviction of inner truth, regardless of what the received opinion might be. “

53 dom what we are best at
Inf. What we are worst at
He thinks his aux is ti
Ti is own opinions
55 aux is second strongest
56 he thought feeling his tert. Based his theory on himself? Yes. 60: “Since my sensation had turned out to be introverted, on the evidence of the Chinese laundress anima, I decided that the types alternated through the hierarchy of functions in their extraversion or introversion like a system of checks and balances.”
60 we are inefficient in our inferior and destructively neglectful

“Rethinking much of jungian psych and making it my own” (53). “I would only accept something if it was true to my experience, which of course was very Jungian in one way, but would not allow me, in another, to accept the dogma that Jungian psychology had already started to become. “

54 “Jungian notion that feeling was more feminine than thinking.”

56 Beebe’s fitst analyst said introversion and extraversion were on a “continuum”
Beebe was ambiverted. 56-57

He took the mbti test and got entp. 57

Elizabeth Murphy also takes up this theme in her book The Developing Child (1992, pp. 12–13), in which she points out that the superior and auxiliary functions may develop naturally in childhood, but that the tertiary and inferior functions normally do not appear until adulthood. 62

Balance required: “For all the types appearing in practice, the principle holds good that besides the conscious main function there is also a relatively unconscious, auxiliary function which is in every respect different from the nature of the main function” (Jung, 1921/1923, p. 515).

“The relatively unconscious functions of feeling, intuition, and sensation, which counterbalance introverted thinking, are inferior in quality and have a primitive, extraverted character” (Jung, 1921/1923, p. 489, quoted in Myers, 1980, p. 20).

“The second concerns the attitude of the other functions in someone whose superior function is extraverted: “when the mechanism of extraversion predominates . . . the most highly differentiated function has a constantly extraverted application, while the inferior functions are found in the service of introversion” (Jung, 1921/1923, p. 426, quoted in Myers, 1980, p. 20).

So the three functions following dom Introversion must be extraverted. And all but dom are unconscious.

“If you are an introverted feeling type, you can also think introvertedly. You can naturally have all the functions all ways” von Franz “Lectures on Jung’s Typology” 1971/1998 p.64

64: “Following Jung (1926/1989, pp. 56–57; 1963, p. 179ff. and 173ff.), I associated the strong, effective superior function with the archetype of the hero. Tipped off by my dream about the father and son, I added the innovation that the auxiliary behaves like a parent, whether helpful or critical, the tertiary like a child, either divine or wounded, and thus in the language of Jungian psychology a puer aeternus or puella aeterna. Puer aeternus means ‘eternal boy.’”
65: “I am using this term, in tandem with puella aeterna, Latin for ‘eternal girl,’ to refer to the eternal youth in all of us, the brilliant but volatile side of ourselves that is by turns the seemingly immortal Prince or Princess and the helplessly vulnerable, wounded boy or girl.” “There was also an analytical tradition, passed onto me by William Alex, who had been in the first training class at the C.G. Jung Institute in Zurich, that the anima or animus “carries the inferior function.” In her writings, von Franz has associated the inferior function with the anima/animus.” 66: “In my own work on myself and with patients, I most often found the inferior function, with its uncanny emotionality, to have the character of the anima or animus,7 the ‘other’ within us, which becomes profoundly upset when its ideals are not met and nearly ecstatic when they are. It had been symbolized that way by my dreams of the Chinese laundress.”

Beebe applied what was true of him onto everyone, and assumed it was good type development. 67

70 He called witch the witch cuz it was supposed to be bad mother. Trickster was like bad child.
72 opposing personality: “oppositional, paranoid, passive-aggressive, and avoidant. This is a shadow that is very hard to see in oneself (it seems to fall in the blind spot of the superior function) and very easy to project onto another person, especially a person of the opposite sex. The archetype of the opposing personality often appears in dreams as a contrasexual figure, but, unlike the anima, the opposing personality is antagonistic to the ego rather than helpful in connecting it to the needs of the Self.

“In meeting a situation that involves another person, extraversion moves to create a shared experience, by reaching out to ‘merge’ in some way with the other person (Shapiro & Alexander, 1975), whereas introversion steps back from the experience to see if it ‘matches’ an archetype within that carries an a priori understanding of what an experience like this is supposed to consist of.” 74

“The demonic personality, then, is that part of ourselves that operates in the shadow to undermine others and ourselves.”75

Chart on p. 76

77 formerly, the inferior was the weakest function but in beebes system it is the eighth that is weakest.

78 demon is our evil side
80 senex is cold old man

“the hero symbolizes what Jung calls the dominant function of consciousness” 88

Te has strong will (88) when it’s the dom function.
“There are, according to Jung, various functions of consciousness that the ego may decide to differentiate to varying degrees in the course of deploying the will. These ego functions, specified in Jung’s theory of psychological types, can be named thinking, feeling, sensation, and intuition, and each can be deployed in either extraverted or introverted ways (Jung, 1921/1971, ¶¶556–671). “

Fi often symbolized in dreams as the judge 90
89 eternal child behaves like se.

Trickster is rebellious. 91
Puts oneself and others in a double bind 93

*Seems beebe is saying his clients are the archeype rather than the function. So he is trying to replace jungs functions with Beebe’s archetypes.

Senex makes “chilling, withering remarks”, critical, saturnine (93-94)

Demon acts out of character 94

Opposing personality is seductive. 94

Functions 5-8 are shadow. “The shadow is repressed because it is felt to be incompatible with a person’s moral values.” 94
Implies everyone is moral. Do all functions have immoral aspects?
Se hedonistic
Si nitpicky, uptight
Ne flighty, unreliable
Ni unrealistic,impractical
Te bossy
Ti arrogant
Fe conforming
Fi selfish

Opposing personality acts like opposite sex (95); manipulative

interesting: “It is the absence of any transmission of father energy that creates the father hunger that leads a young person to seek an actual older male with something to transmit; hence the frequent conflation in young people’s minds of the father with the archetype of the Wise Old Man.” 99

102 senex is a withering self critic, also to anima
Untrusting, like captain hook
Plays cat and mouse with trickster

Beebe abandons the functions and quietly replaces them with archetypes.
Instead of a person being se-dom, the person has identified with the eternal child. Se doesnt even need to be in the child spot.

So in beebes system what u r is not so much ni>fe but an archetype. But ppl online misinterpret.

When a function is in demon position, we use it poorly. 105

Beebe says beast is fe. 105. I disagree.

“The more integrated the person is, and the higher functioning, the harder the time he may have recognizing the demonic side of his personality. “107

109 si “ The person who carries introverted sensation as his dominant ego function can generally understand how any process works and by attending to very small details can verify whether the correct procedures are being followed by those charged with getting work done using that process. Being good at verifying that things are matching up with what should be happening during each present increment of time as the job advances makes a man with this dominant function a good manager, in the sense of keeping accurate work flowing within budget.”

110 anima

“The Yellow Brick Road that she asks Dorothy to follow is itself an image of intuition, which Jung notes is frequently symbolized in fantasy by the color yellow (Jung, 1950/1959a, ¶588, 1950/1959b, ¶697).”

127 beebe has the functions/archetypes as separate ppl in wizard of oz rather than within one person

Si “works behind the scenes, is personally unprepossessing, does not usually call attention to himself, and makes few wasted movements” (132).

Fi 136 “inability to articulate emotion that is nonetheless strongly felt is a particular hallmark of introverted feeling.”

“Just as conservative introverted feeling in American politics perennially dismisses extraverted feeling empathy as ‘bleeding heart liberalism,’ so liberal extraverted feeling routinely discounts introverted feeling’s emphasis on individual responsibility as selfish and judgmental.)” 139

Fe John Travolta’s character Vincent Vega in Pulp Fiction (1994) is a far more usual presentation of this side of the American character than Judy Garland’s Dorothy.

“The introverted feeling function concerns itself with the values expressed in the archetypal aspects of situations, often relating to the actual situation by measuring it against an ideal. When the actual is found wanting, introverted feeling can become intensely disappointed. Although it often finds it hard to articulate its judgments, or simply prefers to keep them to itself, introverted feeling also tends to ignore social limits regarding the communication of critical responses, to the point of appearing to depreciate others. It may withhold positive feelings as insincere and fail to offer healing gestures to smooth over difficult situations. In its shadow aspect, introverted feeling becomes rageful, anxious, and sullen. It may withdraw all support for attitudes it has decided are simply wrong, even at the risk of rupturing relationship and agreed-upon standards of fellow- feeling” (see Chapter 15). 144

Henderson’s Cultural attitudes 149. 152.
Social fe, te
Religious, ni si
aesthetic, se ne
philosophic ti fi
Psychological all functions 166
What about pursuing pleasure like tv or games? Fiction books.
Not everyone develops one 159.
“Some individuals seem to function adequately without any cultural attitude, in part by steering clear of engaging too deeply with culture. For example, they may focus more on their immediate family, hobbies, and work and avoid getting into political, religious, philosophical, or aesthetic discussions and concerns.”164

“we sometimes imagine them to have been in the archaic cultures we idealize” 150

Te is rules or laws, plans, organizing. 153

Ni privileges and trusts one’s own perceptions of what is real, fundamental, and of lasting importance over what others may see and think. 154

Beebe says freud is fi dom 159. I disagree. I think Te>ni.

In ch on beebe, maybe say jung thought all functions other than dom were unconscious but beebe made only 5-8 unconscious.

“Von Franz made it clear that we have a choice about developing function #3, but that the integration of function #4, the inferior function, is very much under the control of the unconscious, which limits what we can do with it.” 173

Beebe invented parent archetype cuz of ti dad in dream 174. Son in dream was feeling type.

175 “Behind each typological position in the unfolding of conscious, an archetype was involved, guiding us to be heroic, parental, and even puerile and contrasexual, as part of what makes us capable of becoming cognizant of ourselves and the world around us.” Would that mean te, fe, or ne is how i act as a parent? Or that function parents me?

Senex dogmatic, donnish, didnt listen to or care about others ideas. Hillmans term for cold arrogant judgmental old man. 177

Rather than the functions being in a hierarchy, beebe turned them into an “interacting cast of characters thru which the dif functions may express themselves in the ongoing drama of self and shadow that is anyones lived psychological life” (178). “Although the actual casting of specific function-attitudes in the various roles will be governed by the individual’s type, the roles themselves seem to be found in everyone’s psyche. Hence I regard them as archetypal complexes carrying the different functions, and I like to speak of them as typical subpersonalities found in all of us.
I have spent many years verifying this scheme. Through observation of clients and others whose types and complexes I have gotten to know well, and through the analysis of films by master filmmakers in which archetypes and function-attitudes are clearly delineated, I have concluded that the relationships between these archetypes and the scheme of differentiation that results for the function-attitudes is not merely personal to me, but is actually universal.”

So within everyone is a parent. but the personality of the parent depends on the persons function stack. I imagine my parent being logical and telling me to stop being whatever emotion cuz its not productive or useful. But how can ne or se be parents? They would make bad parents. And my eternal child would be se. But it doesnt make sense for si to be a child.

180-181 beebes chart of all stacks

Functions “are not expressed in the same way by every individual who deploys them.” 184

Those 5-8 functions are even more unused than 1-4 (185)

Beebe called inferior “anima” cuz other analysts associated it with soul or spirit in a person, the opposite sex self 185-186

Dom - the function we are competent in or mastered 187

Inferior is source of shame or enbarrassment 187, unpleasant to use. We idealize 188 and value. 192: feel self-conscious about it.

189 animus develops in second half of life

Ti “names things in fresh ways” 190

192 opposing personality: “paranoid, avoidant, passive- aggressive and seductive ways.” “primary resource of defense, a part of us that tends to lurch forward first when we feel our heroic superior function and its most cherished values to be under attack.”

192 demon: “our most unyielding and unconscious flaws of character.”

195 hero and anima are about identity but parent and child are about caring and being cared for by others

196 “The auxiliary function is parental; it takes the lead in fostering the development of other people, and it often serves as their role model. The tertiary function, by contrast, is more like the left hand of a right-handed person, sometimes original and creative, but always a bit unstable and at times even weaker in its reliability than the inferior function.” Third is vulnerable,not competent. Parent function protects others, not child function

197 “As we move beyond the heroic first function, however, we should recognize that not all of the eight functions follow hero psychology in being measurable by their degree of strength. They do not, in actual experience, follow a descending hierarchy of differentiation from first (superior) through fourth (inferior) to eighth. Rather, the strength, and the kind of strength, a function of consciousness displays is a consequence of the archetypal role associated with it, and archetypes are differently developed in different people. “

198-199 “Some people define their whole lives according to these parameters. They have little curiosity as to who they are, and relatively few goals for themselves, but they are greatly concerned about how they treat others and are treated by them. Such people live more on the horizontal line of Figure 9.1 than on the vertical line. Their consciousness is more organized around what their arms are doing than around what their spine is like. Working with such people, it is often easier to type the way they would ideally like to take care of another person than it is to get them to say what they want for themselves.” Doesnt make sense. Ppl who care more about others than identity would be fe dom but fe dom would have fe at spine, not arms. also problematic to assume we treat all “others” the same. We are dif with our kids, lover, friends, coworkers. (Bossy te with kid, fe caring with lover, ne playful with friends, si stick to business and obeying orders at work)
Not to mention, jungs description of the functions included how they treat others; it was part of their identity, not separate.

“the senex archetype or role can also be thought of as the role of the negative or disapproving father, just as the female equivalent, the witch, can be envisioned as a critical mother who seems impossible to please.” 201

202 parent function - how u take care of others
Witch or senex - how u criticize others pr express disapproval
But my istj mom criticized like si, which is her hero.

The rest of my review can be found here: https://app.thestorygraph.com/reviews...

[Syd Mehrdad Mahrooghi · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a ground breaking book on Jungian typology that seeks deep reflection to be fully appreciated.
After reading this book I feel like how much the stereotypes we have been giving to types are a mere glace at the psyche and how much we can ascend beyond our types limits.
While Jung's original psychological types and the books written by Isabella Briggs Myers focus solely on the four cognitive functions of consciousness, this books delves deep into shadow realm of self that complements what we have known so far and shines the light on the insightful aspects that were overlooked.
Highly recommended.

[ajitesh gogoi · Rating 3 out of 5]

The concepts may help if you're a beginner to the 8-function model and Jung's theory of psychological types. But there's nothing novel for someone well-versed in the fundamentals.

[Chris Masterjohn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bebe was a significant contributor to what is currently understood as Myers-Briggs typing, and this book is a combination of deep insights into psychological type as well as the story of how he made many of his contributions to the field (it's amazing how some things taken for granted by everyone involved in MBTI today originally came from Bebe's dreams!).

I found it incredibly useful in understanding cognitive functions that lie within the "shadow" positions.

[Will · Rating 2 out of 5]

I didn't learn much of anything that I didn't already know. I learn much more from CSJ lectures.

I read 85 pages, then very lightly skimmed the rest. It was boring, but I'm sure it was good, informative, and helpful at the time.

The science has progressed and can be better communicated and elaborated on by other sources.

[Psygnostic · Rating 2 out of 5]

this book was written by a man who knows psychology, but sadly cant express it succinctly and effectively. all of the content was extremely dry and too theoretical

[Marcelo H. · Rating 3 out of 5]

Definitely not an entry into the subject, focuses a lot of clinical work/practice. The most useful was his breakdown of the function models into "gerunds" though there's a lot of analysis left to the reader.