Facing death is an event that challenges how the various functions in the psyche work together in everyone—cooperating, compensating, decompensating, or even in integrating with each other. Since most people in their conscious lives are more familiar with the adaptations of life, not of death, facing death often forces us to face our inferior function.
introverted sensation (Si)
Rather than truly being able to move down to embrace the inferior function, to achieve “integrity in depth,” Nietzsche tries to “overcome” the problem of the personality. His fantastic intuitions are not wholly thought through, and so he is not able to deal with the real task of individuation, which asks us to ground consciousness in the reality of body and mind.
Kowalsky’s self-sacrifice can be seen as the Animus acting as “the door through which all the figures of the unconscious come into consciousness.” His extraverted feeling is giving Stone a much-needed lesson: She must stop holding on to a situation that is no longer life-giving. It is time to let go of her debilitating prison of pain—and of her former self—so she can move forward.
Kirk develops depth and integrity as he learns to harness the power of his dominant function and come to terms with the shadow parts of his personality. Ultimately, he is also able to cultivate his ego-dystonic functions and realize a more integrated and mature self capable of fulfilling his potential for charismatic and visionary leadership.
The type code had another unintended effect, which was to elevate the E-I and the J-P dichotomies to the same level as the functions. I had always thought of myself as an Introvert and nothing else. I had also been taught that I was a Judging type and I had been told that “J’s decide quickly,” but that was not true for me. So there were holes in my preference framework where my experience did not fit what I was taught.
We can oppose this image of the San Francisco Giants to the kind of team we see in some corporations where the different members of the team try so hard to maintain the same corporate persona…On such a team, nobody shows any individual peculiarities …and I’m sure that no real consciousness can emerge from behind such a mask.