Jung's Psychological theory of Types / The 4 Egos

Intro Excerpt


The Four Ego Faculties


According to Jung, the Ego - the "I" or self-conscious faculty - has four inseperable functions, four different fundamental ways of perceiving and interpreting reality, and two ways of responding to it.
Jung divided people into Thinking, Feeling, Sensation, and Intuition types, arranging these four in a compass.

The four ways of interpreting reality are the four ego-functions - Sensation, Thinking, Feeling, and Intuition. These consist of two diametrically-opposed pairs. Thinking is the opposite of Feeling, and Sensation the opposite of Intuition. So, suggests Jung, if a person has the Thinking function (an analytical, "head"-type way of looking at the world) highly developed, the Feeling function (the empathetic, value-based "heart"-type way of looking at things) will be correspondingly underveloped, and in fact suppressed. The same goes for Sensation and Intuition. Sensation is orientation "outward" to physical reality, and Intuition "inward" to psychic reality.

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