To develop our authentic individual self, we need to go deeper, into the cultural and phylogenetic layers of the collective unconscious. Importantly, from a leadership point of view, we become more aware of what our culture is repressing—aware of the unintended consequences of the culture even though we are participating in it. This enables us to progress, as individuals and as a society.
Career & Leadership Development
Populism has acquired a negative reputation, and this is especially true now with the presidency of Donald Trump, but many other political leaders have used extraverted sensation tactics and policies to rally the cause of the common man. This is true not only of Andrew Jackson—in whom extraverted sensation (Se) seems to be dominant—but also of Lyndon B. Johnson and Theodore Roosevelt.
Military intelligence is a personality-centric career field because of its reliance on the subjective factor, which tends to creep into every intelligence assessment regardless of how analytically rigorous it attempts to be. To help reduce bias, intelligence professionals have developed brainstorming analytic techniques so that an analytical cell can offset individual biases.
The feeling function has its roots with the archetypal mother. My actual mother had limited tolerance for negative emotions from me. Her outbursts frightened me, and my own feelings terrified me even more. Hillman wrote that the mother-complex, “is the permanent trap of one’s reactions and values from earliest infancy, the box and walls in every situation whichever way one turns.”
The Judging functions influence how we pursue, record, and celebrate goals; but before any action toward a goal is taken, the Perceiving functions influence how we think and talk about them. Goal setting boils down to how different types orient to time, and how people are mentally present varies considerably depending on their preferences for gathering information.
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.