Welcome to The Fifth Function.
I will preface this by saying that my essays are oriented towards people who are already reasonably familiar with MBTI and cognitive functions. However, I will endeavour to make my writing as approachable and as simple to understand as possible for laymen, or those curious about the subject matter at hand, whilst not being overly simplistic.
Most will be familiar with MBTI as a four function model which was based on the works of the renowned psychiatrist of Carl Jung, as postulated in works such as Psychological Types. You will have no doubt taken at least one of these tests online and upon answering a series of questions been given a four letter letter code such as INFJ or ENTJ, and a profile which in intended to resonate with you. As you are familiar with this concept, I don’t believe it is necessary to expand on it any further, at this time.
Upon delving further into the type code you are given, you will discover that the type code represents four cognitive functions which form the basis for your personality. So if you are INFJ, these are introverted intuition (Ni), extraverted feeling (Fe), introverted thinking (Ti) and extroverted sensing (Se). Each of these functions represents a cognitive preference for the user and descend in terms of how much they are preferred.
It should be clear, and it is important to say even for people who have a more advanced understanding of this theory that each function is paired with another. Each function has a specific goal and these goals can conflict with one another, which I will expand on over the course of this and other essays.
However the overall idea of having two pairs of cognitive functions, consisting of two judging and two perceiving functions all with seemingly diametrical objectives is to, in fact, largely balance one another out in the interests of having a healthy psyche. For an INFJ, whose least preferred cognitive function preference is extraverted sensing (Se), which is a data gathering function, this is paired with the most preferred function, introverted intuition (Ni) which concerns itself, amongst other things, with making connections between points of data, reading between the lines and considering how those things will play out over time.
It should be understood that Se is necessary for providing Ni with a picture of the world as it is directly experienced, which will allow Ni to trace paths through the world which may be considered unexpected and unusual. However, while a relationship between these two points is present, tension between them exists.
The easiest way to understand the tension between these two functions, from an Ni-dominant perspective at least, is to imagine that your house is on fire. Se is the firefighter who is standing directly in front of the blaze with a hosepipe witnessing the furnace first hand. While on the radio, comes the voice of the Chief Fire Officer (Ni) from a control room who is telling them to pull back because they believe the fire will spread and if it reaches the nearby petrol station it will blow everyone up. No doubt you will have seen similar scenarios play out on TV and in movies countless times— and over the course of these essays we will consider, amongst other things, real world examples in the form of current affairs, dreams and well known media in the form literature, movies and TV. After all, what are literature, movies and TV if not public dreams or manifestations of the unconscious? — and this will often be followed with the firefighter (Se) responding somewhat insubordinately, that they must enter the building to rescue a child. Their response is based on the immediate reality of the situation rather than what if.
As you will by now have the idea, it is my intention to look at these internal conflicts and also to look at how they manifest in the world at large as projections of the psyche. As we move on, we will look to try and understand how we can resolve these inner tensions and explore how in doing so, we can unlock our full cognitive potential through what Jung called the transcendent function. Or, as I have it here, the fifth function.
How we will go about this owes a lot to works such as From Hell by Alan Moore. I am myself, by no stretch of the imagination a lover of comic books. The methodology of this particular work has however stuck with me over a number of years, so it’s only right I credit it.
Moore’s methodology in From Hell was to treat the Jack the Ripper Murders as the awful secret heart of Victorian England, extrapolating from there to argue that they form the true birth of the 20th Century.
Moore was explicit about this, talking about how From Hell arose from him seeing the title of Dirk Genty’s Holistic Detective Agency. And from there he imagined truly holistic detection, in the form of solving a crime by solving the entire cultural context it occurred in.
“All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages.”
Over several days, I had planned for for this introductory essay to go in an entirely different direction, however, skimming through Twitter earlier, my attention was grabbed by the following tweet:
“Why did the clown from IT stay in the sewer instead of like a Holiday Inn?”
And from here, I realised this was a good opportunity to engage with a concept I very much wish to explore over the next several essays.
To answer this, we must consider what IT the clown and the sewer represent.
To be clear, there no logical reason why IT the clown should have stayed in the sewer rather than a Holiday Inn or any other location for that matter. From the perspective of the narrative however, the significance of why Stephen King opted to have IT the clown reside in a sewer rather than a place such as a Holiday Inn is of great magnitude.
The sewer exists below the surface and to make this perfectly blunt, the sewer is the place where all of the shit is. Sewers are both a place which are entirely essential to us as a society at large and yet they are things we are happy to spend our lives being perfectly oblivious to the existence of.
Unlike a Holiday Inn, a sewer is a place where the overwhelming majority of people would not ever wish to venture. It is fair to say, that regardless of your feelings towards staying in a Holiday Inn, it is extremely unlikely that the thought of staying in one would elicit anywhere near the same sense of revulsion and disgust in even their biggest detractors, as the idea of venturing or staying in a sewer would.
In this regard, the sewer represents the unconscious parts of the psyche which hold every negative feeling, every dark day of your life and every bad thing that ever happened to you. It is the place where your fears and shattered hopes and dreams exist below the surface in perpetuity. It is all the things which have been utterly essential in enabling you to go about your life as the person you are today but you would never wish to talk about and you are happier that they swept below the surface. It is the shit.
And the clown? Clowns are at once sweet, silly and funny, embodying a certain childlike innocence whilst at the same time slightly removed from reality. There is something vaguely horrifying about them. A lot of the horror stems from the mask, which presents a sense of otherness. They are at once distinctly recognisable as human but the differences between them and us is accentuated by how we are able to perceive them to be slightly deformed (and with that, more horrifying) versions of ourselves.
IT is one of a number of well known movie clowns in Western culture. Another would be The Joker from the Batman series of TV shows and movies. The Joker like the character of The Batman and other well known villains from that series, embody Jungian archetypes. It should be made clear that there isn’t actually a Jungian clown archetype. There is a trickster archetype which The Joker, and IT for that matter, would largely fall under, but clown and trickster are not necessarily synonymous.
Regardless, we are still able to see IT the clown as a reflection of the unconscious mind. Or as Carl Jung characterised it: the shadow which takes control of the persona. And here, it is worth looking at the etymological root of the word, persona. As Jung was well aware, the word persona is drawn from the Greek or Etruscan word for mask. To make the connection here as simple as possible, we may adopt a mask to navigate social situations and challenges. And at the great risk of creating confusion through mixing definitions, in common parlance, most would better understand this as the concept of ego. Ego in the sense I am referring to it here is essentially an adopted mask. However, in the commonly understood sense to which I’m referring, it tends to go a little bit deeper as the social mask will be supported by a story you tell yourself — or a carefully curated narrative account of your life — the danger of this forms when you start believing your self to be the person in the, if not a largely fictional account, it will generally be at least a heavily curated version of who you actually are, or almost certainly one taking a rather liberal amount of artistic license. From here, we can begin to tie together the symbolism of the sewer and the clown. The sewer is all of the shit we are putting below the surface and forgetting about while the clown is representative of who we actually are once the mask slips. And that is a frankly horrifying proposition.
Thus, the clown will of course appear to be a more corrupted and distorted version of who you actually are. At least in terms of how you self-identify, when you are not acknowledging the parts below the surface —the shit— and you are, instead, only acknowledging the more polished, carefully curated and aesthetically pleasing identity you have constructed at the surface.
The movie IT (as I should be clear, it’s from these I’m deriving my interpretations, due to being more familiar with the two movie versions than with the novel on which they are both based) is fascinating in this regard, as the resolution requires a confrontation with that which lurks below the surface. This is the horror of IT.
However, what we can also learn from IT is that if one is to truly live happily and peacefully, then then there comes a point when you must face up to that below the surface which fills you with revulsion, disgust or even fear. You must acknowledge it’s presence and confront it.
There is plenty more we could discuss here, however, that is all for today and hopefully this will help to provide an introduction to some of the ideas and concepts we will discuss over time.
Thank you ever so much for reading. Speak soon.
Mikey.