Exploring the Psyche

by Troy W. Pierce

Originally published in MoonRise News

    There is a story of the ancient world about the Gordian knot, a knot so intricate that not even the wisest could untie it. When Alexander the Great was conquering Asia Minor, the story goes, he was presented with the Gordian knot as a test of his wisdom. Alexander, without hesitation, drew his sword and cut the knot in two. This illustrates two opposite psychological functions and their approaches - Sensation and Intuition.

    Jung had not yet begun his psychological study of alchemy when he wrote Psychological types, but in later works he found the symbolism of the four elements to be illustrative, and to refer to the same psychological reality. Most of Jung's observations take the form of psychological opposites and the tension between them, this is true of the psychological functions he describes. You can combine Earth and Water (dissolve something) and Earth and Fire (burn something), but Earth and Air are a pair of opposites and so cannot be directly combined. This is also true of the functions. Personalities combine Sensation and Feeling, and Sensation and Thinking, but Sensation and Intuition are not initially combined. The first pair, Intuition and Sensation correspond to Air and Earth, and are the perceiving functions. The second pair, Thinking and Feeling, correspond to Fire and Water, and are the judging functions.

    How you approach the world, and what you see there, is what the perceiving functions are about. Alexander saw the knot in a different way than the wise men who had tried to undo it before. His solution must have shocked them, for they themselves had tried and not known how to begin undoing the knot. This is the abrupt 'out of the blue' solution of intuition. The Intuitive type, like the all-embracing element of Air, sees things in terms of possibilities, and as wholes and related systems in context. Intuitive leaps cover great distances, but are leaps through the air, and leave no bridge by which others can follow. Intuitives tend to be very creative, but it tends to be a 'messy' creativity - often with loose ends, obscure references, and unclear results.

    The Sensation function, like the sensible element of Earth, sees things in terms of the senses, concrete reality, distinct objects, and clearly defined concepts. Sensates get from point A to point B by means of following a road, or building a bridge, step by step. Such bridges can be based on solid reasoning or crumble under scrutiny, but for the Sensate the bridge is a necessary path and an integral part of the conclusion. Sensate creativity id less easily recognized than intuitive creativity. Thomas Kuhn, in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, delineated between normal science, the work within a theoretical framework or paradigm, and scientific revolutions, where the theoretical framework is changed. The creativity of Sensates is the creative problem solving or craftsmanship within a standard framework, like normal science, while the creativity of the Intuitive is more likely to break with or change the standard framework. That is why we have Sensate poets like Kipling, and Intuitive poets like Blake.

    Such functional distinctions may arise from the organization of neural networks. The Sensate preferences may arise in the function of a network by inhibiting the spread of neural activation to other subsystems and their related concepts. The Intuitive system may, in contrast, develop connections that spread activation further. If this is the case, the identity function of the network would be stronger in the Sensate network, and the associative function would be stronger in the Intuitive.

    The goal is to gain facility with both perceptive functions, to integrate the elements of Earth and Air in the alchemical vessel of our psyche. The first step towards this is to become aware that our usual way of perceiving is no the only way, there is an opposite we must recognize and attempt to understand. For it is the integration of the disparate elements of ourselves, both conscious and unconscious, that moves us towards wholeness.

        � -1997 Troy W. Pierce