I was flipping through Haas and Hunziker's Building Blocks of Personality Type today. I've read it once or twice before. One thing that caught my eye was a table suggesting that the dominant function was developed by age 12, the auxiliary by 20, the tertiary by 35 and the inferior by 50. Okay, I suppose in many cases the auxiliary could develop by 20 (I'd extend that to as late as 24, personally) but the tertiary by 35 and the inferior by 50? That seems a bit optimistic.
In general, the more conscious the function, the easier it is to develop and the faster you reach maturity with that function. The dominant function is the most conscious, and therefore development of it can come rather quickly. It's the one we'll probably always remember having and being good at. The auxiliary is partly conscious (or unconscious, depending on what translation you're using--same difference IMO)and, for people who aren't socially well-adjusted, can develop in an imbalanced way, never being fully realized. The remaining two we'll have less finesse, with our use of the fourth function being, as described by Von Franz, primitive. Reaching the fourth function takes work--as in serious, psycho-spiritual work, and most of us just aren't that motivated.
I think the problem stems from some confusion about what is actually involved in mastering a function. The more popular usage of functions being "cognitive" is misleading--it makes it seem like it's something that just sort of happens in the brain, maybe we pick up a book or a nice toy to stimulate that sort of "learning" and we're plowing away through the functions. However, it's really an issue of degree of consciousness, and so each function must be fully brought up into consciousness before the next function can be assimilated. In Psychotherapy, Marie-Louise Von Franz states
The process of assimilating the functions is not in any way easy. To assimilate a function really means to live at least a few years completely with that one function in the foreground before you can claim that you have assimilated it. If you once do a little bit of cooking or sewing, that doesn't mean you have assimilated your sensation function and if you do a little bit of thinking on a Sunday afternoon, that does not mean that you have assimilated your thinking function. People often have great illusions about that. It means that the whole emphasis of life, for awhile, lies on that function.(pgs 132-133, emphasis added.)
With so much involved, it seems a lot to expect that the average person will have developed all four functions by the time you're fifty. I just turned 42 a couple of days ago and I can honestly say that sensing is still pretty far out of reach for me. I can begin to poke at it little bit, like by taking an encaustic painting class. The first time I signed up for the class at my local art center, I heard the teacher's safety warnings, heard her horror stories about people that didn't listen to said warnings and, despite being fascinated by the medium, I just couldn't bring myself to come back. I'm too spacy, I thought, I'm too inattentive to the world around me. I can't do that! I'll scar half my face or lose a finger or something. It nagged at me, though, so a year later, I signed up again. It was a five week class. I missed the first class. Then the second. I forced myself to go for the third class, then made the rest. The work I produced was horrible. I cautiously used the heat gun once. I wouldn't touch the blow torch. I recently signed up for it again. Now, I have my own iron, and I'm determined to master getting the work to the level of smoothness I want, even if I have to re-take the class continuously for the next two years.
Still, that's how the inferior function tends to work. We only begin, very slowly and very cautiously, to address it in mid-life. I'm old enough now to know many people that are well over 50. My 80 year old ENTJ father can engage his introverted feeling perhaps more than he did when I was a kid, but it's far from being mastered, and he still often uses his feeling in a very ENTJ-ish way. I have ENFJ in-laws in their 60s where it isn't entirely clear whether the auxiliary is intuition or sensing, since they exhibit both (and I defer to my husband's childhood memories on this one) but there's little indication that introverted thinking activities carry much interest for them. Incorporating your fourth function in an individuated way, then, seems a lot like coming to terms with your enneagram fixation: it takes a lot of deliberate psycho-spiritual work and if it's too easy to do, then you've probably settled on the wrong type.
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