The competent, professional, independent persona that I had painstakingly crafted over my entire adolescence and adulthood was taken from me. The woman who had climbed the ranks to become a successful executive at the pinnacle of the corporate world, with her glamorous jet-setting lifestyle, was gone. I had experienced an enormous personal defeat and, having no recourse left, I realized I had reached rock bottom.
Culture & Politics
In this patriarchal and heavily capitalistic culture that privileges the thinking functions, feeling seems to dominate the unconscious collective psyche. In the rise of cults of personality in their contemporary manifestation, the inflated extraverted thinking function establishes a goal; then anything that does not adhere to that universal aim is excised. In this crusade-like paradigm, connection to the genuine feelings and needs of a diverse community is lost as unhealthy extraverted thinking tightens its grip on power.
A typological analysis of the psychological forces constellated in Trumpism helps explain the situation in the United States today. The co-occurrence of the savior and trickster archetypes represents an awareness that a catastrophe has already happened that must be consciously integrated. A psychological—as opposed to a political—understanding of the forces at work in the collective psyche is necessary.
The modern emphasis on self-awareness seems to have taken our psychological development about as far as it can for now; further progress requires the pendulum to swing towards attending to our interrelatedness, toward Self-awareness. The two most active and influential sociopolitical worldviews of our time, conservatism and progressivism, are both demonstrably collective in orientation.
Often extraverted sensing leaders are considered more authentic than other types. Trump’s supporters viewed him as trustworthy (“honest,” “outside of the political corruption,” and “not a liar”) while they viewed Clinton as untrustworthy (“belongs behind bars,” “cannot be trusted,” and “nothing but lies”). Even Clinton’s own supporters expressed concern about her trustworthiness.
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.
Igniting the spark of opposites produced during conflict can provide an opportunity for holding the tensions between the one-sided attitudes. The process requires confronting and embracing the forces of unconscious qualities, along with holding the tension and uniting of opposing forces, in order for the full expression of an individual’s potential to be revealed.
Individuation calls us to fight the dragon head-on. The struggles of relationship—whether with another person or within a culture—are opportunities. We can flee and seek a quick-fix, taking what my husband calls “tequila shot” flights to numb the discomfort until the next situation arises. Or we can remain within the oyster shell and endure the uncomfortable rubbing.
The alien invasion can then be viewed as a necessary fragmentation of the psyche, occurring when the ego is too rigidly identified with the dominant function. The crisis brings renewal by breaking apart the ego identity so that the previously unrealized functions can be differentiated and integrated, thereby transforming the conscious attitude.
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.