too intense people

Hello friends!

A dear reader of the site suggested that we write a text about people who are too intense. Intensity basically has two sides: the perception by others of a certain force, brightness, fire, impulsiveness, heat (very suitable metaphors) and the perception that is not always visible to everyone, that is, the intensity that is only felt by the person himself.

And, like everything, this intensity has its positive side and its negative side. Speaking still metaphorically, we can say that it would be like fire: it can heat up or be contained in a useful way as in a combustion engine or it can burn out of control and cause destruction.

Another very common way of referring to an intense person is to say that he has a strong temper. These days, the Sensationalist comedy page posted a (false) news that the Senate had passed a law that prohibited bad people from saying they had a strong temper. And it is in this sense and in others that the intensity would turn out to be negative for others.

The concept of psychic energy

So far, we’ve been talking metaphorically about psychic intensity. Metaphors – a metaphor is roughly understood as an image similar to what we want to refer to – are useful, but they are not psychological concepts.

CG Jung, the creator of Analytical Psychology, elaborated the concept of psychic energy, to replace the Freudian concept of libido.

I won’t go into the minutiae of your book here. Psychic Energy. A simple example will help us understand what he means by psychic energy and we can move on.

Imagine a person’s psychic energy as a cell phone battery. You charge it and in the morning you have 100% energy. This energy can be used in several applications. A little good (50%) for music, a good deal for social networks (27%), another for emails (10%), a little for games (8%), until the display shows that we only have 5% of energy. And, finally, we spend that 5% leaving it on stand-by so that later, at dawn, we can recharge the entire charge.

Psychologically, the process is similar. In the morning, we have 100% energy. We use a good part to stay alive (food, hygiene, transportation), let’s say, 50% and the rest we use according to the needs of that particular day. If we are in love and away from the person we love, we can stay in bed and spend all the other 50% thinking, imagining, daydreaming and remembering how the relationship was and how the future of the relationship could be.

If we have to study, we can use the energy for attention, concentration, logical thinking (25%) and the rest for fun (watching a movie, a series), etc.

The important point for understanding Jung’s theory of psychic energy is that we must always speak in a quantum, in an amount of energy. Of course, we were unable to measure this quantity – the above figures are assumptions based on time and interest.

Another fundamental point is that this total amount of energy is invested in certain activities, according to the stage of life. As we have seen, someone in love spends all their energy thinking about the loved object, a person who has to study for the Enem spends a good part of their energy studying and so on.

And, a detail to complicate matters a little more, it is about the relationship between consciousness and the unconscious. At certain times, a part of the energy (of interest) is not available to consciousness. It’s like a certain amount of energy disappears. In this case, we must certainly look for it in the unconscious, in dreams, fantasies, symptoms or, perhaps, in its reappearance in a new and unexpected interest.

For example, with the end of the relationship, the person in love is no longer able to invest all that psychic intensity (50%) in the relationship. A part of that amount of energy “goes to the unconscious” and, then, the person feels powerless to move, sad, without cheer (no energy to cheer up). This process is sometimes quick and sometimes takes months. However, with time the energy is invested again in another object of interest, a new love, a new job, a new sport or whatever.

types of intensity

What I explained above about psychic energy is valid for everyone. But how to explain the difference between them? How can one person be extremely stable and predictable and another totally unstable and unpredictable? How can someone be cold and distant and another warm?

Well, in this case, we should talk about psychological types. In Jung’s famous book, Psychological Types (which we studied in detail in our Online Video Course, see here), in the first part Jung thinks of two types:

The introverted type – thinking

The extroverted type – feeling

Afterwards, he ends up separating and introducing two new types. He separates the attitude (introvert and extrovert) and therefore establishes 4 types of functions: thinking, feeling, intuition and sensation. In the end, there are 8 basic types regarding only the main function, the most used:

1) Introverted thinking

2) Extraverted thinking

3) Introverted feeling

4) Extraverted feeling

5) Introverted Intuition

6) Extroverted intuition

7) Introverted feeling

8) Extraverted Feeling

As I said, in the beginning Jung thought that extroversion (being turned more to the world than to oneself) was linked to feeling (ability to make value judgments, to know what is good, bad, good, bad, beautiful, ugly, negative, positive…), while introversion (being more turned to oneself than to the world) would be linked to the thinking function (ability to make logical judgments, concept definitions…).

This initial mistake is interesting because it shows us that, for him, a thinking, rational person would be more focused on himself, on his mental world, than on things and other people.

A rational person – a physicist, a mathematician, a philosopher, a research psychologist, for example – would be people who would not be intense in the sense of turning their attention and interest to the world around them. For all its intensity would be turned inward.

Meanwhile, a feeling person would have his whole psychic life turned outward, towards contact with others and all objects in the world. Its intensity would thus be more easily visible.

Although this assimilation between thinking as introversion and feeling as extroversion has been modified in the second part of the Psychological Types, it gives us a direction. People are intense, but in very different ways.

A mystic who spends 90% of his time meditating, a sportsman who spends 90% of his time doing bodybuilding, a biologist who spends 90% of his time cataloging species are intense people, each in their own area and each with their own interests. .

An example that I think is accurate on this issue is Van Gogh. During a period of his life he wanted to be a pastor. He studied ardently to be one. Unfortunately for his wish, he was not approved. All his intensity up to that point, which was directed towards the religious life, was destroyed. After some lost time (energy in the unconscious), he turns his interest to painting and creating a work so original that it gives rise to the expressionist movement.

That is, energy is invested in one area (religion, then painting) and can be shifted from one area to another smoothly, although the transformation process often happens to be tumultuous.

the psychic intensity

But all that said still doesn’t fully explain people who are very intense. That is to say, we must come to understand that they are representatives of a psychological type. However, the type classifies and orders, and leaves out the explanation of causes.

What differs and made a person like Elis Regina different? Leila Diniz? Clarice Lispector? Maysa? And others of the others?

In the text – difficulties of social adaptation – we mentioned the relationships between the individual and society. There are people who are both adapted and original, for example Bill Gates. And there are people who can’t or don’t want to adapt and rebel and are original, like Rimbaud or Kurt Cobain.

In psychiatry, there is a long debate about the causes of mental illness. In short, we talk about 2 types of cause:

– Genetics

– Environmental (food, sleep, life circumstances).

Would these two types of cause explain the differences in someone’s psychic intensity? Perhaps, although a definitive and certain answer remains open.

For example, a great genius in art may have the type of genetics that lead to the use and abuse of drugs. But this use and abuse is also environmental – living with certain people, access opportunities, social protest, self-destruction. It is clear that genius is not conditioned to the use of chemical substances, however, this imbalance is still present in the lives of some.

I like to think that the cause of psychic intensity is in the psyche itself. In other words, the psyche, which animates a body, is its own cause. As it is in development, it may be able to accomplish what it has to accomplish, or not.

And finally, another metaphor is useful. The psyche would be like a seed. A seed has in itself, from the beginning, the model of how it will be in the future. An intense adult was probably an intense child. But in the process of development between the child and the adult, perhaps it grew properly as a plant can and should grow (with sun, rain, fertilizer) or perhaps it grew in a troubled and difficult environment.

In that sense, I think that the intensity has always been there, in the seed. How this intensity will be experienced, however, will depend on the conditions and the direction given.

To conclude, a wonderful quote from Fernando Pessoa:

“Madness, far from being an anomaly, is the normal human condition. Not being aware of it, and it not being big, is being a normal man. Not being aware of it and it being big is being crazy. To be aware of it and that it is small is to be disillusioned. To be aware of it and for it to be great is to be a genius”.

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