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Eight-Function Model

Have You Met Your Shadow Side?

The eight-function model can reveal the gold in your shadow

MBTI TypesTo see ourselves as others see us is the rare gift that Jung gave us with his system of eight mental functions. Like the Eightfold Way of Buddhism, “Jung’s eightfold system of mental processes gives us … a way to make conscious parts of our mind we are unaware of – if we can ascertain which of the functions we favor and which we tend to exclude,”  Shumate, Projection and Personality Development, Routledge, 2021. John Beebe’s eight-function, eight-archetype model maps the unconscious and provides a guide to Jung’s eightfold way of individuation. “Gradually, perhaps, consciousness will realize its potential to become conscience” – John Beebe, Energies and Patterns in Psychological Type: The Reservoir of Consciousness, 2017, Routledge, p. 47.

Navigate the Eight Function Model

Testimonials

“I’ve found it useful in my personal and professional life to understand the archetypal pairings, the way the Child feeds the Trickster and vice versa; or that behind the Parent there is a Witch. I notice … the receptive posture toward all the functions and their relationships I could take toward myself and with others. … The turbulent relationship that Te and Ti can have with each other, for example, is a claiming of the spine in the INFP stack. In this reclamation, I feel compassion for myself and as well for others who are different from me.” – Jane McFarland (INFP), MA

“[Now] I can see how the Ne trickster often intruded upon my dreamlife in an effort to reconcile the Ni puer inflation, and with this understanding, I feel more liberated in expressing my auxiliary Se. Shumate reiterates that “Identifying which of these modes of consciousness is most comfortable can enable us to identify the exact locus of our fixed ideas so as to be able to move out of them and experience more fluidity, the better to ride that river of the Way.” (2021, p. 57), and that has been my experience. These considerations, Beebe’s system, and realizing that typology is based on these inherent preferences has had a deep impact on my personal life and self-understanding.” – Zoe Marzo (ISTP), Pacifica doctoral candidate

“The experience of taking the Typology course during the culmination of our Master’s degree has profoundly integrated Jungian theory for me. It is as if the typology preferences discovered by Jung, patterned psychodynamically by Meyers and Briggs, and deepened archetypally by Beebe have embodied analytical psychology into a living cosmos equipt with a map.” – Tasha Spice (INTJ), archetypal cosmologist

“The meeting with oneself is, at first, the meeting with one’s own shadow. The shadow is a tight passage, a narrow door, whose painful constriction no one is spared who goes down to the deep well. But one must learn to know oneself in order to know who one is.” —

CG Jung, CW 9i, ¶ 45

Artwork by Phil Samulski / Web creation by Lars Sahl