One sided conscious attitude

Every act of consciousness is, by definition, selective. To attend to one thing is to exclude another; to choose a direction is to leave other directions unchosen. Jung recognized this not as a failure of mind but as its structural condition. As he writes in Psychological Types:

The activity of consciousness is selective. Selection demands direction. But direction requires the exclusion of everything irrelevant. This is bound to make the conscious orientation one-sided. The contents that are excluded and inhibited by the chosen direction sink into the unconscious, where they form a counterweight to the conscious orientation.

One-sidedness is therefore not a pathology but a necessity — the price of having a direction at all. The question is not whether consciousness will be one-sided, but how far the one-sidedness will go before the psyche's self-regulatory function intervenes.

That function is compensation. Jung elevated it to what he called "a basic law of psychic behaviour" (CW 16, §330): whenever the conscious attitude develops too exclusively in one direction, the unconscious accumulates precisely those contents that consciousness has neglected, and eventually presses them back toward awareness — in dreams, slips, symptoms, moods, or the sudden eruption of the inferior function. The mechanism is not punitive; it is homeostatic, analogous to the body's regulation of temperature or blood chemistry. Stein (1998) describes it as the driving force of individuation itself: "the unconscious compensates ego-consciousness over the whole life span and in many ways — by slips of the tongue, forgetfulness, or miraculous revelations; by arranging accidents, disasters, love affairs, and windfalls."

The typological framework gives one-sidedness its most precise anatomy. Each person develops a dominant function — thinking, feeling, sensation, or intuition — and an habitual attitude, introverted or extraverted. This differentiation is genuinely adaptive; it produces the focused competence that allows a person to function in the world. But the more completely a function is developed, the more its opposite is relegated to the unconscious, where it remains archaic, autonomous, and ungovernable. Jung describes the result in Psychological Types:

When a function is not at one's disposal, when it is felt as something that disturbs the differentiated function, suddenly appearing and then vanishing again fitfully, when it has an obsessive character, or remains obstinately in hiding when most needed — it then has all the qualities of a quasi-unconscious function.

The inferior function, precisely because it is undeveloped, carries an archaic charge. The thinking type's feeling, when it finally breaks through, is not nuanced and discriminating but primitive, moody, and irrational — "just as archaic as the feelings of a savage," Jung writes, in the blunt comparative idiom of his era. Sharp (1987) illustrates the practical consequence: a printer who compensates his one-sided business absorption by incorporating childhood artistic impulses into his products, but in so infantile a form that the business collapses. The unconscious compensation, when it cannot find a conscious partner, simply takes over and produces its own distorted version of what was missing.

The danger intensifies with rigidity. Hoeller (1982), reading Jung's Seven Sermons to the Dead, identifies the Gnostic principle at work: "One-sidedness of conscious orientation has been the bane of Western humanity in general and of modern Western humanity in particular. We forever tend to make the unjustified assumption that if we only did things right we could have one opposite without its partner." The fanatic — political, religious, or psychological — is the extreme case: someone whose conscious commitment has become so total that the compensatory pressure from the unconscious can no longer be integrated and instead erupts destructively.

What the one-sided attitude excludes does not disappear. It accumulates. Neumann (1949) frames this as the fundamental dynamic of the new ethic: the shadow side, split off by the ego's insistence on its own goodness or rationality, does not go away but "demands its share of attention by appearing in the form of a fantasy, a dream, a slip or a disturbance of some kind." Compensation is, in this sense, the psyche's insistence on wholeness against the ego's preference for comfort.

The corrective is not the abolition of one-sidedness — that would mean the abolition of consciousness itself — but what Jung calls the transcendent function: the capacity to hold the tension between the conscious position and its unconscious counterpart until something new emerges that neither side could have produced alone. Von Franz (1980) describes the necessary attitude as a "double, paradoxical" consciousness — certain enough to act, humble enough to remain open to correction. The door must stay ajar.

  • compensation — the psyche's self-regulating counterweight to conscious one-sidedness
  • inferior function — the least differentiated function, most vulnerable to one-sided development
  • transcendent function — the process by which conscious and unconscious contents are brought into productive tension
  • James Hillman — archetypal psychologist whose critique of ego-psychology extends the problem of one-sidedness into the soul's own logics

Sources Cited

  • Jung, Carl Gustav, 1921, Psychological Types
  • Jung, C.G., 1954, Collected Works Volume 16: The Practice of Psychotherapy
  • Stein, Murray, 1998, Jung's Map of the Soul: An Introduction
  • Sharp, Daryl, 1987, Personality Types: Jung's Model of Typology
  • Hoeller, Stephan A., 1982, The Gnostic Jung and the Seven Sermons to the Dead
  • Neumann, Erich, 1949, Depth Psychology and a New Ethic
  • Von Franz, Marie-Louise, 1980, Alchemy: An Introduction to the Symbolism and the Psychology