Cognitive Elements #1 - Overview

One of the great mistakes of online MBTI/Jungian Psychology is to neglect a proper examination of what I will call the Cognitive Elements. The Cognitive Elements combine to form the traditional Cognitive Functions, and those cognitive functions are expressed in terms of those elements, and yet few ever really spend much time trying to explain those elements and simply try to jump straight to the functions.

Jung was obsessed with dualities; opposites and their interplay. The notion permeates his works, and his personality theory is no exception. Thus, his entire system of personality relies upon such concepts, and so everything comes in pairs, which are opposed to each other. They are opposites in that the more you do of one, the less you do of the other, necessarily, and thus as you prefer one over the other as part of your personality, you disprefer the opposite. It is via these opposites and your inclinations toward and against them that Jungian personality and all its realisations are created.

• The Processes are divided first into Perception and Judgement.
• Perception in turn is divided into Sensing vs. Intuition.
• Judgement in turn is divided into Thinking vs. Feeling
• Jung calls these the Cognitive Functions as well, but I will call them Processes to distinguish them from something else, as you'll see later.
• The Attitudes are Extroversion and Introversion.
• The Cognitive Functions are when the Processes are each combined with one of the Attitudes.
• The combinations create 8 cognitive functions overall.
• Extroverted Sensing
• Introverted Sensing
• Extroverted Intuition
• Introverted Intuition
• Extroverted Thinking
• Introverted Thinking
• Extroverted Feeling
• Introverted Feeling
• It's important to remember that the way these words are used in this theory are not necessarily the same as, or even completely consistent with, the way we use them in normal speech. The Attitude terms 'Extrovert' and 'Introvert' especially mean something quite different.