During his interview with Solomon Shang, the psychologist Carl Gustav Jung tells a very revealing story about two patients of him.
The man was of the extroverted type, and the girl was introverted, “so, naturally, they felt attraction”, sums up Jung with a smile.
One day, the couple was having a rowboat trip in a lake. Now and then, a bird jumped out of a tree and dived into the water for a moment to catch a fish, and they defied each other to guess from which direction would the next bird come.
Intuitively, one would think that the extroverted guy would be more successful; after all, he is naturally more focused on the outer world, while an introspective person is gifted for subtle feelings, hunches and the like. But that was not what happened; in fact, it was the girl who had the biggest success, far above the man’s rate.
Now how is it possible? Because of intuition.
Jung defines intuition as those perceptions, reasonings, cause-effect inductions, etc, made by our unconscious (for a further explanation of what Jung understands as “unconscious”, see here).
We can imagine Jungian intuition as a “fold” inside our consciousness and, inside that fold, a lot of intermediate steps, deductions and perceptions we are not aware of. The girl, all of a sudden, could say “over there”, maybe thinking that it was “just a hunch”, but the fact was that her unconscious had done all the hard work before she spoke out. Perhaps her outer perception was just so-so, but the heavier “machinery” behind, her inner world, was stronger and able to do a lot more with what she caught than her extroverted companion who-was-all-eyes.
I think it is interesting how intuition works, even if, by its own nature, we cannot have control on it. One of Jung’s main ideas is that “the unconscious is really unconscious”. We cannot get there and understand what happens. But, at the same time, Jung warns that it is a part of us, as alive as we are, and it asks for our attention, in very dramatic ways, sometimes.
The unconscious is not a Bogeyman; its warnings are set there for our survival, just like many other of the things developed by mother nature along millions of years. In our dreams, for example, all the characters in dream are the dreamer, but each of them represents a different “role” in order to express needs, warn us about close dangers, etc…
Rational thought is a very useful tool, it was, is and will always be essential for humanity’s survival; but it can be a jail, too. Sadly, very often we still seem to be stuck in a naive belief that reality can be “canned” inside our concepts. What came first, reality or our concepts? Psychoanalysis, good psychoanalysis (because tricksters are legion), could be one of the ways of escape from that jail. If only we admitted what we don’t know…
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Honor your unconscious
A new way of being positive
Sick (but not tired)
The joy of walking
The key, if you ask me…