Evolving the Eight-Function Model

By John Beebe

John Beebe is the creator of the

eight-function, eight-archetype
model of psychological types.
A Jungian analyst and past president
of the C. G. Jung Institute of San
Francisco, he is the author
of Energies and Patterns in
Psychological Type: The Reservoir of
Consciousness. John has
spearheaded a Jungian typological
approach to the analysis of film
and has written the preface to the
Routledge Classics edition of Jung's
1921 book, Psychological Types.

Eight archetypes guide how the function-attitudes are

expressed in an individual psyche

There’s much talk in the type world nowadays about the Eight-
Function or Whole Type Model, and my name is sometimes brought
up as a pioneer in this area. This chapter establishes the historical
context of what I’ve contributed and explains in my own words what
my innovations have been.

Historical background: Jung’s eight functions

It was C. G. Jung, of course, who introduced the language we use

today: words such as function and attitude, as well as his highly
specific names for the four functions of our conscious orientation
(thinking, feeling, sensation, intuition), and the two attitudes through
which those orientations are deployed (introversion and extraversion).

Establishing the rationale for this language as a helpful basis for the
analysis of consciousness was the purpose of his 1921 book,
 2

Psychological Types. Toward the end of that book he combined

function types and attitude types to describe, in turn, eight function-
attitudes. Regrettably it wasn’t until Dick Thompson published his
1996 book Jung’s Function-Attitudes Explained that we had that term
for these cognitive processes,1 so most Jungians have simply referred
to them as eight ‘functions.’

Nevertheless, for Jung the attitude type was the primary thing, and
the function type a kind of sub-something that expressed that attitude
in a particular way. Accordingly, he organized his general description
of the types in terms of the attitudes, describing first “the peculiarities
of the basic psychological functions in the extraverted attitude” and
then going on to “the peculiarities of the basic psycho-logical functions
in the introverted attitude.”

Jung started with extraverted thinking and extraverted feeling (which

he called ‘the extraverted rational types’) and extraverted sensation
and extraverted intuition (‘the extraverted irrational types’), before
turning to the introverted types: introverted thinking and introverted
feeling (‘introverted rational types’), and introverted sensation and
introverted intuition (‘introverted irrational types’). These were the
eight psychological types in Jung’s original description.

These functions–attitudes were nothing less than capacities for

consciousness residing within any individual—though of course most
people do not differentiate all these capacities for their own use. It
was Jung who taught us that most people pair a rational function with
an irrational one to develop a conscious orientation, or, as he put it,
an ego-consciousness, that for most people involves just these two
differentiated functions.

Despite Isabel Briggs Myers’s later reading of a single sentence in

Jung’s long and often contradictory book (Myers & Myers, 1980/1995,
p. 19; Jung, 1921/1971, ¶669), he never made clear that the attitude
type of the two functions in this two-function model of consciousness
would alternate between function #1 and function #2.

Jung did, however, open the door to the possibility of a further

differentiation of functions, up to a limiting number of four: the fourth
to differentiate being his famous ‘inferior’ function, which remains too
close to the unconscious, and thus a source of errors and complexes.

Jung said relatively little about the third function. He expected that
both functions #3 and #4 would, in most people, remain potentials
only, residing in the unconscious, represented in dreams in archaic
ways and relatively refractory to development except under
exceptional circumstances—such as the individuation process Jung
sometimes witnessed in the analysis of a relatively mature person in
the second half of life, when the archaic functions would press for
integration into consciousness.

Anima/animus: bridge to the unconscious

When Jung’s close associate Marie-Louise von Franz published her

Zurich seminar on the inferior function, in Lectures in Jung’s Typology
(1971/1998), I was already a candidate in analytic training at the C. G.
Jung Institute of San Francisco. Her discussion of the possibilities for
development in this largely unconscious area of the mind was thrilling
to read, and it opened up the four-function model for a whole
generation of analysts.

Von Franz made it clear that we have a choice about developing

function #3, but that the integration of function #4, the inferior
function, is very much under the control of the unconscious, which
limits what we can do with it. Nevertheless, this much of the
unconscious belongs in a sense to the ego—and even provides the
bridge to the Self that the other differentiated functions cannot.

I became aware that the inferior function was often thought by

Jungian analysts to operate in this way because it is ‘carried’ by the
anima or animus, archetypes of soul that can serve as tutelary figures,
representing the otherness of the unconscious psyche, and also its
capacity to speak to us to enlarge our conscious perspectives (Jung,
1921/1971, ¶¶803–811).2 The anima and animus are like fairy bridges
to the unconscious, allowing, almost magically, a relationship to
develop between the two parts of the mind, conscious and
unconscious, with the potential to replace this tension of opposites
with the harmony of wholeness. And it is through the
undifferentiated, incorrigible inferior function that they do their best
 4

work!

Basic orientation: hero/heroine, father/mother,

puer/puella

By then I thought I knew my own type—extraverted intuition, with

introverted thinking as my second function—and I had taken the MBTI
questionnaire, which scored me ENTP, in apparent confirmation of my
self-diagnosis. It was in dreams that I met my anima as a humble,
introverted-sensation type Chinese laundress, and it was she who
could provide me a bridge to the practicalities of life that my conscious
standpoint, ever theoretical, tended to leave out. I think it was also
she who made me consider sorting out the rest of my consciousness.
Which archetypes were associated with my other functions?

I began to watch my dreams. Gradually it became obvious that when

they symbolized my extraverted intuition, it was in a heroic, rather
grandiose way. (In a dream, I once saw President Lyndon Johnson,
architect of the Great Society in my country, as an image of my
dominant extraverted intuition, which gave it a highhanded, crafty
cast, a bit out of touch with the actual readiness of those around me
for the changes that I wanted to introduce in their lives, in the name
of helping them progress.)

My introverted thinking was symbolized by a father in one dream that

found him in conflict with an upset feeling-type son, whom I
eventually recognized as an image of my third function. The particular
son figure in the dream was a persistently immature man in analysis at
the time, whose oscillation of woundedness and creativity fit well the
description Marie-Louise von Franz had given in her classic study of
the “Problem of the Puer Aeternus” (1970), the Latin term suggesting
an eternal boyhood befitting an immortal. I decided that this dream
was referring to an aspect of my own feeling that was inflated,
vulnerable and chronically immature.

In this way, I began to evolve my understanding that the four

functions are brought into consciousness through the dynamic energy
of particular archetypes:

• Hero for the superior function

• Father for the second or ‘auxiliary’ function
• Puer for the tertiary function
• Anima for the inferior function.

My functions were carried into consciousness on the backs of those

archetypes! A great deal of their functioning, even after they became
conscious—that is, available to me as ways of perceiving and assessing
reality—continued to reflect the characteristic behavior of these
archetypes.

Later, I found evidence in the dreams of women for a heroine, a

mother, and a puella aeterna (eternal girl), symbolizing the first three
functions of consciousness in a highly analogous arrangement to the
way my own were symbolized. I could also verify from their dreams
what other Jungian analysts had already established, that the animus
carries the inferior function for a woman—although I came to reserve
that term for a spirit or soul figure operating as a bridge to the
unconscious, and not simply to refer to an antagonistic or
argumentative side of the woman, as some were doing in accord with
the more normal English language use of the word animus, which does
not include its Jungian, spiritual meaning (Emma Jung, 1957).

I went public with these ideas for the first time in 1983, at a
conference for Jungian analysts and candidates at Ghost Ranch in
Abiquiu, New Mexico. There I offered the first archetypal model for
the various positions of consciousness that heretofore had been called
‘superior,’ ‘auxiliary,’ ‘tertiary’ and ‘inferior’ functions. I suggested that
these should be thought of, respectively, as the heroic function, the
father or mother function, the puer or puella function, and the anima
or animus function, in accord with the nature of the archetype that
had taken up residence in each of these four basic locations of
potential consciousness.

Wow! Behind each typological position in the unfolding of conscious,

an archetype was involved, guiding us to be heroic, parental, and even
puerile and contrasexual, as part of what makes us capable of
becoming cognizant of ourselves and the world around us.

The shadow personality: opposing personality,

senex/witch, trickster, demonic personality
 6

At the time I was too dazzled by the seeming completeness of the

four-function model to see that even more delineation was needed to
make sense of what Jung had said we could find in ourselves, if his
vision of a wholeness to consciousness could be realized.

Four functions were still only half the story of how consciousness
arranges itself. Jung said in Psychological Types that, if one takes into
account the all-important attitudes, extraversion and introversion, we
have to realize that there are in all eight functions, or, as we say now,
function-attitudes.

Von Franz had postulated that the greatest difficulties that occur
between people are on the basis of one using a function with a
particular attitude (e.g. extraversion), and the other using the same
function with the opposite attitude (e.g. introversion). I decided to
apply that idea to the situation within a single psyche, in which the
antagonism was not between two people, but between two functions
with opposite attitudes, seeking to express themselves within the
same person.

The result, I realized, was almost always a repression of one member

of such a pair of functions, as a consequence of the conscious
preference for the attitude through which the other member of the
pair was expressing that function. In my own case, I had figured out
that my tertiary function was not only feeling, but extraverted feeling,
and that my inferior function was introverted sensation.
Where were my introverted feeling and extraverted sensation?
Obviously, deep in the unconscious, kept there because they were
shadow in attitude to the function-attitudes that I had differentiated.

Even more in shadow were the functions opposite in attitude to my

first two functions—that is, the introverted intuition that my superior
extraverted intuition tended to inhibit, and the extraverted thinking
that my auxiliary introverted thinking looked down upon.

These four functions—introverted intuition, extraverted thinking,

introverted feeling, extraverted sensation—continued to express
themselves, however, in shadowy ways. What, then, were the
archetypes that carried these repressed shadow functions?

Answering this question led me to take up the problem of the types in

shadow, which has preoccupied me ever since. Work in this area has
to be tentative, because we never fully see our own shadow, but in my
case I began to identify typical, shadowy ways in which I would use the
four functions that lie in the shadow of my more differentiated
quartet of individuated function-attitudes. My introverted intuition,
shadow in attitude to my superior extraverted intuition, has decidedly
oppositional traits: it expresses itself in ways I could variously describe
as avoidant, passive–aggressive, paranoid and seductive, in all cases
taking up a stance that is anathema to the way my superior
extraverted intuition wants me to behave. I decided to call the
archetype carrying this bag of oppositional behaviors the opposing
personality.

Similarly, my fatherly introverted thinking, a patient teacher of

complex ideas, was shadowed by a dogmatic, donnish extraverted
thinking that didn’t listen to, or even care about, others’ ideas. I
decided to call this rather pompous, unrelated figure my senex, using
James Hillman’s (1967/1979) choice of name for an archetype that is
coldly, arrogantly, judgmental, in an old-man-pulling-rank sort of way.
(The Latin word senex, root of our word ‘senator’, means ‘old man’.)

Gradually I realized that women I knew had a similar archetype

carrying the shadow of their normally motherly auxiliary function, and
that this archetype displays many of the ‘negative mother’
characteristics I had learned to associate with the witch figure in
European fairytales (von Franz, 1972).

The shadow side of my eager-to-please but oh-so-vulnerable-to-the-

feelings-of-others internal boy was the trickster, which, in me, with its
confident introverted feeling, could reverse any expectation—to
double-bind anybody who tries to ride herd on the child. (As a little
boy, to taunt my mother when she expected perfection of me, I
actually used to draw the two-faced god Mercurius, although I did not
yet know his mythological identity.)3

Finally, I began to see my extraverted sensation, the shadow side of

my anima introverted sensation, as a demonic personality that often
 8

operates as an undermining oaf, a beastly part of myself that

nevertheless can occasionally be an uncanny source for the infusion of
redemptive spirit into my dealings with myself and others.4

The four archetypes of shadow—opposing personality, senex/witch,

trickster and demonic/daimonic personality—and the function-
attitudes they carried for me—introverted intuition, extraverted
thinking, introverted feeling, extraverted sensation—were all what a
psychologist would call ego-dystonic. That is, they were incompatible
with my conscious ego or sense of ‘I-ness’— what I normally own as
part of ‘me’ and ‘my’ values. Nevertheless, they were part of my total
functioning as a person, uncomfortable as it made me to recognize the
fact.

In this way, using myself as an example, and my years of Jungian

analysis as a laboratory, I eventually came to identify eight discrete
archetypes guiding the way the eight function-attitudes are expressed
within a single, individual psyche.

Although, for convenience of reference, and out of respect for the

traditional numbering of the functions, I am in the habit of assigning
numbers to the function-attitude ‘positions’ associated with these
archetypes, I no longer view the type profile of an individual as
expressing a hierarchy of differentiation of the various functions of
consciousness.

Rather, I have come to regard the positions the types of function-

attitude seem to occupy, when we construct a model of them in our
minds, in a much more qualitative light. It is as if they form an
interacting cast of characters through which the different functions
may express themselves in the ongoing drama of self and shadow that
is anyone’s lived psychological life.

Although the actual casting of specific function-attitudes in the various

roles will be governed by the individual’s type, the roles themselves
seem to be found in everyone’s psyche. Hence, I regard them as
archetypal complexes carrying the different functions, and I like to
speak of them as typical subpersonalities found in all of us.
I have spent many years verifying this scheme. Through observation of
clients and others whose types and complexes I have gotten to know
well, and through the analysis of films by master filmmakers in which
archetypes and function-attitudes are clearly delineated, I have
concluded that the relationships between these archetypes and the
scheme of differentiation that results for the function-attitudes is not
merely personal to me, but is actually universal.

The archetypal roles within this scheme are shown in Figure 7.1. An
example of how the model distributes consciousness in an ENFJ is
provided in Figure 7.2. A listing of how the consciousnesses are
distributed in each of the 16 MBTI types is found in Table 7.1.

FIGURE 7.1 Archetypal complexes carrying the eight

functions of consciousness

FIGURE 7.2 Archetypes associated with the eight

functions of consciousness (using ENFJ as an example)

This model of the archetypal complexes that carry the eight functions
of consciousness is my present instrument for the exploration of type
in myself and others. It helps me to see, in just about any interaction,
what consciousness (that is, which function-attitude) I am using at that
given time.

More importantly, the model allows me to see what position that

function-attitude inhabits, and thereby I am pointed to watch for the
archetypal ways in which, as a consequence of being in that position,
that particular consciousness expresses itself.

TABLE 7.1 MBTI types showing pairing of archetypal

roles and types of awareness

I am grateful that this model is leading present-day type assessors to

take a second look at C. G. Jung’s foundational eight-function
description of the types. My hope is that their increasing comfort with
a total eight-function, rather than a preferred four-function, model
will enable them to begin to recognize the combinations of type and
role that emerge, both for good and for ill, as these consciousnesses
differentiate themselves in human beings.
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Notes
1 Linda Berens used the term ‘cognitive processes’ (1999) to refer
to the eight types of consciousness that Jung discovered.
2 I have adopted Jung’s use of Latin when speaking of the anima
and animus (literally ‘soul’ and ‘spirit’) because that language allows
for gender (the anima often being a feminine figure in a man, and the
animus a masculine one in a woman), and because it conveys the
archaic quality of these deep structures of the mind that Jung
uncovered in his explorations of the unconscious.
Jung called them archetypes of the collective unconscious, but when
carrying function #4, the inferior function, I feel they also form part of
the conscious mind’s functioning. Hence, I regard them as ego-
syntonic—compatible with the ego and its preferred function-
attitude—even though carrying values from the unconscious mind
that compensate the attitude of the person’s superior function.
3 In choosing the name trickster for this side of my shadow, I drew
upon Jung’s classic delineations of the trickster archetype (Jung
1948/1967, 1954/1959).
4 As with the opposing personality, the term demonic personality is
my own creation. In developing my model I deliberately left these
terms large and vague to convey the vast stretches of personality
territory involved in these dark and largely unexplored areas of myself
where my shadow typology expresses itself as character pathology.

References

Berens, L. (1999). Dynamics of personality type: Understanding and

applying Jung’s cognitive processes. Huntington Beach, CA: Telos
Publications.
Hillman, J. (1967/1979). Senex and puer. In J. Hillman (Ed.), Puer
papers (pp. 3–53). Dallas, TX: Spring.
Jung, C. G. (1921/1971). Psychological types. In Cw 6.
Jung, C. G. (1948/1967). The spirit mercurius. In Cw 13 (pp. 191–250).
Jung, C. G. (1954/1959). On the psychology of the trickster figure. In
Cw 9,1 (pp. 255–272). Jung, E. (1957). On the nature of the animus. In
Animus and anima (pp. 1–43), New York:
Spring.
Myers, I. B. with Myers, P. (1980/1995). Gifts differing: Understanding
personality type. Palo Alto, CA: Davies-Black.
Thompson, H. L. (1996). Jung’s function-attitudes explained.
Watkinsville, GA: Wormhole. von Franz, M.-L. (1970). The problem of
the puer aeternus. New York: Spring.
von Franz, M.-L. (1971/1998). The inferior function. In M.-L. von Franz
and J. Hillman,
Lectures on Jung’s typology (pp. 3–88). Woodstock, CT: Spring
Publications. von Franz, M.-L. (1972). Problems of the feminine in
fairytales. New York: Spring.

“Evolving the eight-function model” was originally published in the

APTI Bulletin Winter 2005, pp. 34-39.

For more information on the eight-function, eight-archetype model

see Beebe’s Energies and Patterns in Psychological Type: The Reservoir
of Consciousness (Routledge, 2017).