Psychologist Carl Jung spoke of a process called ‘individuation’ whereby one gains an elevated degree of self-awareness and is therefore able to take crucial steps toward cultivating his ideal personality (i.e. ‘self actualization’ in Maslownian terms). In layman’s terms, this process is called a ‘midlife crisis’. My proposal is that this is a period of growth that everyone experiences, and the sooner it happens, the easier it is to overcome.
According to social convention and many professional circles of psychology, a midlife crisis is considered a bad thing. For example, a psychiatrist named Sue may claim to have seen this instance many times before. Sue describes it empirically as stress at work and in the family that has accumulated over time, and then it was suddenly unleashed in different forms. This places the blame on the individual for not communicating his inner thoughts and feelings as they arose, so Sue will offer her therapy services to fix the problem by teaching better communication.
A neurotherapist named Ben might also claim to have seen this many times before, but he will take a more materialist approach. Ben will confine the problem to the brain by assuming that something simply went wrong with his neural functioning, and that the matter is beyond his control. He might suggest that the only solution is to undergo neurotherapy in his clinic to realign normal neural pathways in the frontal lobe of the brain.
Both the Sue and Ben, as well as most people in general, see this crisis as a problem that needs to be fixed, and that the only way to do that is via the specific methods in which they have been trained. “I understand. Let me handle it. You can trust me.” is what they will tell their potential patient. Given their wall of shiny degrees in there cozy, inviting office, it is difficult to turn down their offer no matter the cost, as long as they can convince you that you need it.
More likely than not, both Sue and Ben are acting in their own self interests first. They are business people as well as medical professionals. Indeed, the term ‘crisis’ itself carries a derogatory tone, and the professionals have learned to capitalize on that. Their outward warmth, their technical language, their comfortable offices, their alleged understanding the situation, etc. are tactics that they use to keep their business running. That is not to say that their practices are completely useless, but rather, that either service will likely have more or less the same effect for the very same condition because neither comes close to attacking the root of the issue. In fact, they unknowingly focus on fixing the same exact thing (outward communication of inward feelings) since language expressions are actually channeled through the frontal lobe of the brain!
Meet my friend Jay. Jay is 38 years old, and he is an officer in the military. To this point, Jay has led a respectable life of service and duty. He is a devout Christian, goes to church every Sunday, and does community service with his church. He worked hard in high school and in Boy Scouts; he graduated and became an Eagle Scout; he went to college, worked hard, graduated, joined the military as a lieutenant, worked hard, got married, worked hard, had two kids, and then he continued to work hard to maintain that for the years following. Jay is a doer: Make a decision, work hard at it, and you will lead a successful life.
Jay never really questioned the position he was in, and things seemed to be going great, but then, seemingly out of nowhere, he began to have what is commonly known as a midlife crisis. He became a bit depressed and self-conflicted. His temper shortened, and he frequently had emotional outbursts at his wife and kids. With some reluctance, he finally agreed to grant his wife’s request and seek help. He began going to Sue, the psychiatrist, both alone and with his wife. Things seemed to improve for one or two days following each session, but then he would revert back to his ordinary behavior. Sue’s methods weren’t really working for Jay. He got impatient and started to believe that the process was being prolonged, and that he was spending more money than he needed to.
Jay began to seek other forms of help, and then he discovered Ben’s neurotherapy practice. Upon first meeting Ben, he felt a bit more confident moving forward. Ben explained, using much technical jargon, how important the brain is in processing information and making decisions. Though the claim that the brain is important is true, indeed it is necessary, he went on to convince Jay further that his methods were “more scientific” than traditional therapy because they are “backed by modern neuroscientific research”. Jay became convinced that neurotherapy was the answer, and he began treatment. After a few months, however, as Jay’s optimism wore off, so did his patience; his behavior took the same turn that it did before and after psychiatric therapy. He began to feel misled into thinking that these therapists were offering a sure-fire, algorithmic solution that was actually, in some sense, a scam. It turns out that he was right.
The absolute root of a “crisis” is unknown to Sue and Ben because it is, in the conventional sense, unknowable. A crucial part of it deals with knowledge that does not likely have its foundations in the material world, nor is it solvable by simply making a few practical, sure-fire adjustments in one’s everyday life. Therefore, it should come as no surprise that most people like Jay have so much trouble wrapping their minds around something that is different in nature from their materialism-based work and education and their practical, habit-based personal lives, especially when the people who they put their trust and money in are misleading them. It is difficult for them to realize that there is more to themselves than their brains, bodies, and the feedback they gather from the external social and material world. This was exactly Jay’s predicament. He wanted to put his trust into a system to manage his life from the outside-in, but nothing was working. He was forced to turn inward and deal with it himself.
There is a continuous process of personality development in everyone, and without its sufficient maturation, one simply cannot optimally handle the stresses of life. Understanding a midlife crisis, or any crisis for that matter, and taking steps to solve it is a personal journey. It requires one to discover, embrace, and cultivate the auxiliary side of the personality in conjunction with the continuing development of the dominant side. What I am alluding to is certainly not to have solved this puzzle for everyone, necessarily, but rather that it is each person’s job to solve their own puzzle for themselves. There is indeed a highly-effective model one can keep in mind to better understand the self and its place in the world: the cognitive functions as described by Carl Jung.
Immediately, one might question this method. Good. You should, but don’t question it without knowing anything about it, or at least in a way that presupposes bias. It is a continuously developing theory outside of institutional psychology. The reason for this is simply that it does not seem to fit the existing ideology of institutional science on a broader scale: materialism – all reality in the universe is founded on and comprised of quantifiable matter and energy. I have explained in several previous posts, just as well as several professional scientists and philosophers have explained in recent years, why science must move past the materialist worldview in order to progress, no matter the cost. That is not up for debate, so I will prevent any further discussion on the matter by saying this: To dismiss Jungian psychology on the basis of their being “no evidence” for it presupposes that the only evidence is the type that materialism relies on. This is circular reasoning. There in fact has been no materialist attempt to disprove it to begin with. In other words, to stick to such an unsupported principle is to assume it is “guilty until proven innocent”, as in wrong-until-proven-by-materialism. The premise for my proposal here is about people. All people are unique, but there are baseline psychological tendencies by which we operate. This is, as we should all agree, indeed obvious upon any amount of close observation of one’s social environment. That, I will submit, is in itself a form of evidence worthy of a discussion. Having said that…
Each person’s dominant cognitive function, according to Jung, is either introverted or extroverted, and either a mode of judgment or perception. There are two ways of making judgments (thinking and feeling) and two modes of perception (sensing and intuiting). If one’s dominant function is inwardly perceptive, say, introverted intuiting (Ni), then his auxiliary (secondary) function will be an outward mode of judgment, either extroverted thinking or feeling (Te/Fe), to balance out the dominant function.
Of course, everyone necessarily has the capacity to both perceive and make judgments, to extrovert output and introvert input, to think and feel, to sense and intuit; we otherwise would not be able to survive in any social or professional setting. We all do all of those things to varying degrees, indeed. One of those functions, however, is naturally dominant. It is our own personal “standard operating procedure” under normal conditions. When we are confronted with a crisis, we are forced to operate with more depth; i.e. we must work harder do deal with the death of a loved-one than to decide what to wear to go to church, obviously. This does not mean we abide by our SOP more closely than usual. In fact, it implies the opposite: that we must be more flexible about our dominant function. We need balance between our most dominant modes of perception and judgment in order optimally deal with stressful situations. The auxiliary function is what we all struggle with cultivating at some point in our young adulthood to middle-aged lives. It is the one that is more repressed, but it is necessary to use in support of our dominant function if we are to deal with crises healthily.
Whether one is introverted or extroverted in general depends on whether his dominant function is introverted or extroverted. An introvert will likely develop his extroverted auxiliary function earlier in life than an extrovert will develop his introverted auxiliary function because, especially in extroverted-dominated western societies like the United States, functioning in an extroverted fashion is forced upon introverts. Extroverts more easily fit in right from the start, but they have personal crises later in life.
Jay, for example, is Te (extroverted thinking) dominant, which means he is an extrovert with left-brained thinking tendencies. He is outgoing, decisive, and abides by cold, hard, logical systems (e.g. mathematics, law, protocol, etc.) to make judgments about reality. This is very useful in his military environment which values this type of rule-based reasoning very highly. He has a wide circle of social and professional connections and makes a good living. From the outside-looking-in, he is viewed as a success by his peers; the American dream is very Te-focused, and Te-dominants (and Fe) are the most likely to buy into it. However, on a more personal level, as he is learning in his midlife, he is only outwardly, not inwardly, organized. An introverted thinking-dominant (Ti) personality, by contrast, will have a well-structured, internal set of logical rules and principles, but to other people, he may seem outwardly messy and disorganized because he dismisses conventional rules.
For his entire life to this point, Jay has identified himself based on the rules that he followed (by his commanding officer at work, by the Bible in his moral decisions, and by his wife at home). He lived the first half of his life constantly focused on planning for the future and managing himself in an outward fashion. He was accustomed to getting things done – acting now and thinking later. Now that things have settled down, there is no more planning to be done. What is he to do?
The answer is: Don’t do anything. Think. Process. Reflect. Jay’s most obvious problem is that he was not able to turn inward and think independently, apart from the rules set before him. He had been so busy living up to standards external to himself, he had never even considered himself to be a conscious, independent, introspective being. In fact, he was afraid to because he naively associated introspection with feelings, and feelings with weakness. That, after all, is the popular opinion in American culture.
Jay’s midlife crisis is common among all left-brained judging (Te or Fe dominant) personalities, who encompass about half of the American population according to psychologist David Keirsey who was a leader in modernizing Jung’s principles in the 70s and 80s. This process manifests itself in different ways and at different times.
First thing’s first: we need to change our terminology. This crisis is not really a “crisis” at all, in fact; it is a period of growth whereby the extrovert discovers the introverted side of his or her personality, or the introvert attempts to align his internal rules with outer reality. Jay’s dominant function, as I have mentioned, is called extroverted thinking. It is a way of making judgments: being quickly decisive and taking impartial action based on established rules. What he lacks is a cultivated ability to inwardly process the information that he is acting on. That function is a mode of perception. Jay’s perceiving function, once cultivated, will act as the support for his decision-making, and will improve that process to a huge degree. The perceiving function specific for Jay is called introverted sensing (Si). This function collects data based on personal experience, traditions, and principles for the sake of themselves. His personality suits the military and other managerial positions perfectly. When his auxiliary Si is underdeveloped, he follows the rules and doesn’t question them, while almost entirely neglecting his own interests.
What it means for Jay to develop his auxiliary Si function is to improve the way he collects and interprets data and flexibly adapts his existing principles to the constantly-changing environment. This is an internal process. It will improve the way he perceives himself in relation to the data as well as the way he perceives the data itself. He will use this introverted Si perception in conjunction with his dominant Te judgment to make well-rounded decisions.
I used Jay as an example because he possesses the most common type of Jungian personality construction among men in the United States (ESTJ according to Myers-Briggs). The most common type for females (ESFJ) is very similar (Fe/Si dominant/auxiliary instead of Te/Si). If you don’t relate to Jay or his Fe counterpart, that is fine. There are 14 other forms of cognitive functioning, according to Jung. And that is not to take anything away from the individuals within each of those categories. As with anything, there is an immeasurably wider variety of uniqueness among individuals within each group than there are generalized differences among the groups themselves. Having said that, Jungian cognitive typology is not more than a guideline, albeit a very effective one, to keep in mind as one deals with the struggles of life. At the same time, however, don’t blame anyone other than yourself if you reject the system out of principle alone amid a personal crisis.
Cheers!
Overthought Consulting 
