Cognitive Functions; An Introduction If Carl Jung had been alive today, he might have rolled his eyes at how his ideas have morphed into internet quizzes and personality memes. Let’s explore how he got from, “I observe people’s minds,” to “eight cognitive functions.” Jung published Psychological Types in 1921, in German ( Psychologische Typen ), in which he proposed that humans differ by how they orient to the world (extraversion/introversion) and how they favor perceiving (observing) versus judging (allocating preferences). His original conception had just four “psychic functions” (thinking, feeling, sensation, intuition), each of which could be turned inward or outward. Over the decades, later thinkers unpacked that into what we now call “eight cognitive functions,” a more granular taxonomy built on Jung’s scaffolding. Because Jung wrote in German, his words are slippery. The German Empfinden (feeling/sensation) and Empfindung (sensation or feeling) blur in translation; Ansch...