Psychological Types

Carl Jung

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781315512310
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychologie
• Subtopic: Psychoanalyse

Psychological Types is one of Jung's most important and famous works. First published in English by Routledge in the early 1920s it appeared after Jung's so-called fallow period, during which he published little, and it is perhaps the first significant book to appear after his own confrontation with the unconscious. It is the book that introduced the world to the terms 'extravert' and 'introvert'. Though very much associated with the unconscious, in Psychological Types Jung shows himself to be a supreme theorist of the conscious. In putting forward his system of psychological types Jung provides a means for understanding ourselves and the world around us: our different patterns of behaviour, our relationships, marriage, national and international conflict, organizational functioning.

This Routledge Classics edition includes a new foreword by John Beebe.

Psychological Types

Plato and Aristotle! These are not merely two systems, they are types of two distinct human natures, which from time immemorial, under every sort of disguise, stand more or less inimically opposed. The whole medieval world in particular was riven by this conflict, which persists down to the present day, and which forms the most essential content of the history of the Christian Church. Although under other names, it is always of Plato and Aristotle that we speak. Visionary, mystical, Platonic natures disclose Christian ideas and the corresponding symbols from the fathomless depths of their souls. Practical, orderly, Aristotelian natures build out of these ideas and symbols a fixed system, a dogma and a cult. Finally the Church embraces both natures, one of them entrenched in the clergy and the other in monasticism, but both keeping up a constant feud.

—Heine, Deutschland, I

Introduction

In my practical medical work with nervous patients I have long been struck by the fact that besides the many individual differences in human psychology there are also typical differences. Two types especially become clear to me; I have termed them the introverted and the extraverted types.

When we consider the course of human life, we see how the fate of one individual is determined more by the objects of his interest, while in another it is determined more by his own inner self, by the subject. Since we all swerve rather more towards one side or the other, we naturally tend to understand everything in terms of our own type.

I mention this circumstance at once in order to avoid possible misunderstandings. It will be apparent that it is one which considerably aggravates the difficulty of a general description of types. I must presume unduly upon the goodwill of the reader if I may hope to be rightly understood. It would be relatively simple if every reader knew to which category he belonged. But it is often very difficult to find out whether a person belongs to one type or the other, especially in regard to oneself. In respect of one’s own personality one’s judgment is as a rule extraordinarily clouded. This subjective clouding of judgment is particularly common because in every pronounced type there is a special tendency to compensate the one-sidedness of that type, a tendency which is biologically purposive since it strives constantly to maintain the psychic equilibrium. The compensation gives rise to secondary characteristics, or secondary types, which present a picture that is extremely difficult to interpret, so difficult that one is inclined to deny the existence of types altogether and to believe only in individual differences.

I must emphasize this difficulty in order to justify certain peculiarities in my presentation. It might seem as if the simplest way would be to describe two concrete cases and to dissect them side by side. But everyone possesses both mechanisms, extraversion as well as introversion, and only the relative predominance of one or the other determines the type. Hence, in order to throw the picture into the necessary relief, one would have to retouch it rather vigorously, and this would amount to a more or less pious fraud. Moreover, the psychological reactions of a human being are so complicated that my powers of description would hardly suffice to draw an absolutely correct picture. From sheer necessity, therefore, I must confine myself to a presentation of principles which I have abstracted from a wealth of facts observed in many different individuals. In this there is no question of a deductio a priori, as it might appear; it is rather a deductive presentation of empirically gained insights. These insights will, I hope, help to clarify a dilemma which, not only in analytical psychology but in other branches of science as well, and especially in the personal relations of human beings with one another, has led and still continues to lead to misunderstanding and discord. For they explain how the existence of two distinct types is actually a fact that has long been known: a fact that in one form or another has struck the observer of human nature or dawned upon the brooding reflection of the thinker, presenting itself to Goethe’s intuition, for instance, as the all-embracing principle of systole and diastole. The names and concepts by which the mechanisms of extraversion and introversion have been grasped are extremely varied, and each of them is adapted to the standpoint of the observer in question. But despite the diversity of the formulations the fundamental idea common to them all constantly shines through: in one case an outward movement of interest towards the object, and in the other a movement of interest away from the object to the subject and his own psychological processes. In the first case the object works like a magnet upon the tendencies of the subject; it determines the subject to a large extent and even alienates him from himself. His qualities may become so transformed by assimilation to the object that one might think it possessed some higher and decisive significance for him. It might almost seem as if it were an absolute determinant, a special purpose of life or fate that he should abandon himself wholly to the object. But in the second case the subject is and remains the centre of every interest. It looks, one might say, as though all the life-energy were ultimately seeking the subject, and thus continually prevented the object from exercising any overpowering influence. It is as though the energy were flowing away from the object, and the subject were a magnet drawing the object to itself.

It is not easy to give a clear and intelligible description of this two-way relationship to the object without running the risk of paradoxical formulations which would create more confusion than clarity. But in general one could say that the introverted standpoint is one which sets the ego and the subjective psychological process above the object and the objective process, or at any rate seeks to hold its ground against the object. This attitude, therefore, gives the subject a higher value than the object, and the object accordingly has a lower value. It is of secondary importance; indeed, sometimes the object represents no more than an outward token of a subjective content, the embodiment of an idea, the idea being the essential thing. If it is the embodiment of a feeling, then again the feeling is the main thing and not the object in its own right. The extraverted standpoint, on the contrary, subordinates the subject to the object, so that the object has the higher value. In this case the subject is of secondary importance, the subjective process appearing at times as no more than a disturbing or superfluous appendage of objective events. It is clear that the psychology resulting from these contrary standpoints must be classed as two totally different orientations. The one sees everything in terms of his own situation, the other in terms of the objective event.

These contrary attitudes are in themselves no more than correlative mechanisms: a diastolic going out and seizing of the object, and a systolic concentration and detachment of energy from the object seized. Every human being possesses both mechanisms as an expression of his natural life-rhythm, a rhythm which Goethe, surely not by chance, described physiologically in terms of the heart’s activity. A rhythmical alternation of both forms of psychic activity would perhaps correspond to the normal course of life. But the complicated outer conditions under which we live and the even more complicated conditions of our individual psychic make-up seldom permit a completely undisturbed flow of psychic energy. Outer circumstances and inner disposition frequently favour one mechanism and restrict or hinder the other. One mechanism will naturally predominate, and if this condition becomes in any way chronic a type will be produced; that is, an habitual attitude in which one mechanism predominates permanently, although the other can never be completely suppressed since it is an integral part of the psychic economy. Hence there can never be a pure type in the sense that it possesses only one mechanism with the complete atrophy of the other. A typical attitude always means merely the relative predominance of one mechanism.

The hypothesis of introversion and extraversion allows us, first of all, to distinguish two large groups of psychological individuals. Yet this grouping is of such a superficial and general nature that it permits no more than this very general distinction. Closer investigation of the individual psychologies that fall into one group or the other will at once show great differences between individuals who nevertheless belong to the same group. If, therefore, we wish to determine wherein lie the differences between individuals belonging to a definite group, we must take a further step. Experience has taught me that in general individuals can be distinguished not only according to the broad distinction between introversion and extraversion, but also according to their basic psychological functions. For in the same measure as outer circumstances and inner disposition cause either introversion or extraversion to predominate, they also favour the predominance of one definite basic function in the individual. I have found from experience that the basic psychological functions, that is, functions which are genuinely as well as essentially different from other functions, prove to be thinking, feeling, sensation, and intuition. If one of these functions habitually predominates, a corresponding type results. I therefore distinguish a thinking, a feeling, a sensation, and an intuitive type. Each of these types may moreover be either introverted or extraverted, depending on its relation to the object as we have described above. In my preliminary work on psychological types¹ I did not carry out this differentiation, but identified the thinking type with the introvert and the feeling type with the extravert. A deeper study of the problem has shown this equation to be untenable. In order to avoid misunderstandings, I would ask the reader to bear in mind the differentiation I have developed here. For the sake of clarity, which is essential in such complicated matters, I have devoted the last chapter of this book to the definition of my psychological concepts.

Note

¹ “A Contribution to the Study of Psychological Types” (1913), infra, Appendix, pars. 858ff., and “The Psychology of the Unconscious Processes,” Collected Papers on Analytical Psychology (2nd edn., 1917), pp. 391ff. [The latter section, on types, was subsequently revised and appears as ch. IV (“The Problem of the Attitude-Type”) of the first of the Two Essays on Analytical Psychology. Cf. also “The Structure of the Unconscious” (1916), in ibid., pars. 462, n. 8, and 482.—EDITORS.]

I
The Problem of Types in the History of Classical and Medieval Thought

1. Psychology in the Classical Age: The Gnostics, Tertullian, Origen

So long as the historical world has existed there has always been psychology, but an objective psychology is only of recent growth. We could say of the science of former times that in proportion to the lack of objective psychology there is an increase in the rate of subjectivity. Hence, though the works of the ancients are full of psychology, only little of it can be described as objective psychology. This may be due in no small measure to the peculiar character of human relationships in classical and medieval times. The ancients had, so to speak, an almost entirely biological valuation of their fellow-men; this is everywhere apparent in their habits of life and in the legislation of antiquity. The medieval man, in so far as his value judgments found any expression at all, had on the contrary a metaphysical valuation of his fellows, and this had its source in the idea of the imperishable value of the human soul. This metaphysical valuation, which may be regarded as compensatory to the standpoint of antiquity, is just as unfavourable as the biological one so far as a personal valuation is concerned, which alone can form the basis of an objective psychology.

Although not a few people think that a psychology can be written ex cathedra, nowadays most of us are convinced that an objective psychology must be founded above all on observation and experience. This foundation would be ideal if only it were possible. The ideal and aim of science do not consist in giving the most exact possible description of the facts—science cannot compete as a recording instrument with the camera and the gramophone—but in establishing certain laws, which are merely abbreviated expressions for many diverse processes that are yet conceived to be somehow correlated. This aim goes beyond the purely empirical by means of the concept, which, though it may have general and proved validity, will always be a product of the subjective psychological constellation of the investigator. In the making of scientific theories and concepts many personal and accidental factors are involved. There is also a personal equation that is psychological and not merely psychophysical. We see colours but not wave-lengths. This well-known fact must nowhere be taken to heart more seriously than in psy-chology. The effect of the personal equation begins already in the act of observation. One sees what one can best see oneself. Thus, first and foremost, one sees the mote in one’s brother’s eye. No doubt the mote is there, but the beam sits in one’s own eye—and may considerably hamper the act of seeing. I mistrust the principle of “pure observation” in so-called objective psychology unless one confines oneself to the eye-pieces of chronoscopes and tachistoscopes and suchlike “psychological” apparatus. With such methods one also guards against too embarrassing a yield of empirical psychological facts.

But the personal equation asserts itself even more in the presentation and communication of one’s own observations, to say nothing of the interpretation and abstract exposition of the empirical material. Nowhere is the basic requirement so indispensable as in psychology that the observer should be adequate to his object, in the sense of being able to see not only subjectively but also objectively. The demand that he should see only objectively is quite out of the question, for it is im...