Directed Thinking

We have, therefore, two kinds of thinking: directed thinking, and dreaming or fantasy-thinking. The former operates with speech elements for the purpose of communication, and is difficult and exhausting; the latter is effortless, working as it were spontaneously

Jung's foundational formulation establishing directed thinking and fantasy-thinking as the two fundamental modes of cognition, distinguished by their relation to language, effort, and purposive communication.

Jung, Carl Gustav, Symbols of Transformation, 1952thesis

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Directed thinking or, as we might also call it, thinking in words, is manifestly an instrument of culture, and we shall not be wrong in saying that the tremendous work of education which past centuries have devoted to directed thinking... has produced a readjustment of the human mind to which we owe our modern empiricism and technics.

Jung advances the civilizational argument that directed thinking, equated with verbal thought, is the historically cultivated instrument responsible for the emergence of empirical science and modern technology.

Jung, Carl Gustav, Symbols of Transformation, 1952thesis

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The material with which we think is language and verbal concepts — something which from time immemorial has been directed outwards and used as a bridge, and which has but a single purpose, namely that of communication. So long as we think directedly, we think for others and speak to others.

Jung identifies the irreducibly social and communicative character of directed thinking, rooting it in language as the outward-oriented medium that constitutes its very substance.

Jung, Carl Gustav, Symbols of Transformation, 1952thesis

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all through our lives we possess, side by side with our newly acquired directed and adapted thinking, a fantasy-thinking which corresponds to the antique state of mind... so our minds... still bear the marks of the evolutionary stages we have traversed, and re-echo the dim bygone in dreams and fantasies.

Jung argues for the phylogenetic persistence of fantasy-thinking alongside directed thinking, framing both as co-present strata of the mind rather than as a simple developmental supersession.

Jung, Carl Gustav, Symbols of Transformation, 1952thesis

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directed thinking is the more logical, rational, and scientific type of thinking that Jung used in his discussion of the material... Jung was trained as a scientist and medical doctor, and when he began his research he assumed that directed thinking was far superior to fantasy thinking.

Tozzi documents Jung's initial disciplinary assumption of directed thinking's superiority and traces how the encounter with Miss Miller's fantasies prompted his re-evaluation of fantasy-thinking's archetypal depth.

Tozzi, Chiara, Active Imagination in Theory, Practice and Training, 2017supporting

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the psychic elements now being forced over the threshold are momentarily useless from the standpoint of adaptation, and for this reason are invariably kept at a distance by the directed psychic function.

Jung shows how the directed psychic function — the conscious, adaptive orientation — systematically excludes contents arising from regression, linking directed thinking to the mechanisms of repression and symptom formation.

Jung, Carl Gustav, The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche, 1960supporting

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this mood of reverie is another way of thinking, which is analogous to what Jung describes as non-directed thinking. In non-directed thinking, '[w]e no longer compel our thoughts along a definite track, but let them float, sink or rise according to their specific gravity.'

Romanyshyn deploys Jung's non-directed thinking as the epistemological basis for a research methodology of reverie, positioning it as the productive counterpart to directed thinking in depth-psychological inquiry.

Romanyshyn, Robert D., The Wounded Researcher: Research with Soul in Mind, 2007supporting

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From this we can see how lately the more acute logical thinking, the strict discrimination of cause and effect, has been developed, since our rational and intellectual faculties still involuntarily hark back to those primitive forms of reasoning, and we pass about half our lives in this condition.

Jung contextualizes directed thinking within an evolutionary and comparative framework, emphasizing the recency and fragility of logical, causal reasoning against the vast background of archaic mentality.

Jung, Carl Gustav, Symbols of Transformation, 1952supporting

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Even dream-language ultimately degenerates into jargon.

Jung's critical remark on interpretive reduction in psychoanalysis touches implicitly on the limits of applying directed, verbal-conceptual thinking to the symbolic register of dreams.

Jung, Carl Gustav, Symbols of Transformation, 1952aside

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