Age and Function Development
According to W. Harold Grant
"At the age of twelve, the time of puberty which many religious traditions and sociological views have recognized as significant and apt for ritual "passage," the child crossing the threshold into adolescence will, so to speak, shift gears. The automotive image is an apt one, and we might add that the psychic gear shift is more automatic than deliberate. There seems to take place spontaneously a certain disengagement from previous expression of the dominant function, and an inclination to exercise a second function, called the "auxiliary."
"As we have seen, we all need both to receive from life (P) and to contribute to it (J). It seems to make sense to suggest that the two growth periods of childhood (6 to 12) and adolescence (12 to 20) provide an alternating rhythm of P/J or J/P."
"At twenty, in the passage from adolescence to young adulthood, another gear switching experience occurs, and the young person begins a notable development of a third function."
"Finally, at thirty-five, the most interesting and frequently most difficult transition takes place. One finally comes to the stage when the call of God inscribed in the processes of the psyche bids us to allow the least preferred of all the functions, the one in sharpest tension with the dominant one, to find its place in our conscious investment in life. If, for example, from childhood on, extraverted feeling has been the hinge or pivot of our development, now we will be asked, from within ourselves, to give introverted thinking an unprecedented place in the way we deal with life. Note that here too, at the third switching point, the pattern of alternation of both functions and attitudes is followed. We will have more to say, in each of the following chapters, about the emergence of this so called inferior function."[1]
References
[1] W. Harold Grant (1983), From Image to Likeness: A Jungian Path in the Gospel Journey, 21-23
2 Comments
Functions are believed to progressively develop through a user's lifetime and are unofficially 'marked' as developed at certain times. For example, the dominant function appears early in childhood but isn't a concrete, reliable function until the supposed ages of 7-14. The auxiliary function appears within young adolescence and fully develops around 20, followed by the tertiary's development between the ages of 30-40 and finally the inferior's at around the age of 50.
According to Jung, From when we are born to around about six-years old there is no apparent function, our Dominant function starts to, appear in our early years, from about six to twelve years of age; our Auxiliary appears during our teen years (thirteen to twenty); our Tertiary (the opposite of the Auxiliary) in our twenties and early thirties and our Inferior (opposite of our Dominant) in our late thirties through our fifties – the ranges are approximate.
(Keep in mind that these ranges are approximate! I think each person have different levels of maturity, but for me it is very interesting to see the order in which the cognitive functions are developed in the life)
Jung wrote an essay in 1931 entitled, The Stages of Life (from The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche, Volume 8, The Collected Works of Carl Jung) where he talks about his four “life stages” (The Athlete, The Warrior, The Statement and The Spirit) and the process of “individuation” during which we “integrate” the different Jungian functions.
This sequence is part of what Jung called, “individuation”; self-actualisation through a process of integrating the conscious and the unconscious.
The middle years of life are “a time of supreme psychological importance” and “the moment of greatest unfolding” in one’s life (cited in Jacobi & Hull, 1970)
Jung seems to have believed that Personality Type is a developmental process which can be observed through an individual's life. The early phases of our lives help determine the dominance ordering of the four functions (Sensing, Intuition, Thinking and Feeling), and the development of our dominant and auxiliary functions. The later phases help us develop our tertiary and inferior functions
This is mentioned in the book “From Image to Likeness: A Jungian Path in the Gospel Journey”, by W.Harold Grant