Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

John Beebe is the author of Integrity in Depth and past president of the C. G. Jung Institute of San Francisco. Ernst Falzeder is the author of Psychoanalytic Filiations: Mapping the Psychoanalytic Movement and senior research scholar at University College London.

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"For nearly a century, analytical psychologists have been using Jung's typology without knowing precisely how it came into being. Reading this correspondence one finds oneself eavesdropping on the process of formulation. It is as if one can hear Jung thinking aloud as he develops seminal concepts--extraversion and introversion, the use of thinking and feeling, sensation and intuition--as superior and inferior, conscious and unconscious functions. In this beautifully edited publication, Beebe and Falzeder have made a valuable contribution to Jungian studies."--Anthony Stevens, author of Jung: A Very Short Introduction

"This correspondence between Jung and Schmid-Guisan permits us a lively aperture into the birth and formation of a psychological theory which has enormous implications for understanding human conflict. Each man, seeking the truth of typology, argues from his own psychological bias, critiques the other, and still remains trapped within his subjective limits. Yet from their cordial but nearly fractious contretemps emerges a more evolved explanation of the epistemological frame through which we all construe our world."--James Hollis, vice president emeritus, Philemon Foundation

"Jung's most important contribution to psychology is his typology based on the ideas of introversion and extraversion. These letters constitute a stunning look into the development of this major conceptual scheme in the history of psychology."--John Burnham, Ohio State University

"This collection of letters is important precisely because they were preparatory to Jung's later work. The letters show his process of thinking and are informed, literate, and expressive. The book''s editors know their subject well and their scholarship is sound."--Geoffrey Cocks, Albion College

Aus dem Klappentext

"For nearly a century, analytical psychologists have been using Jung's typology without knowing precisely how it came into being. Reading this correspondence one finds oneself eavesdropping on the process of formulation. It is as if one can hear Jung thinking aloud as he develops seminal concepts--extraversion and introversion, the use of thinking and feeling, sensation and intuition--as superior and inferior, conscious and unconscious functions. In this beautifully edited publication, Beebe and Falzeder have made a valuable contribution to Jungian studies."--Anthony Stevens, author of Jung: A Very Short Introduction

"This correspondence between Jung and Schmid-Guisan permits us a lively aperture into the birth and formation of a psychological theory which has enormous implications for understanding human conflict. Each man, seeking the truth of typology, argues from his own psychological bias, critiques the other, and still remains trapped within his subjective limits. Yet from their cordial but nearly fractious contretemps emerges a more evolved explanation of the epistemological frame through which we all construe our world."--James Hollis, vice president emeritus, Philemon Foundation

"Jung's most important contribution to psychology is his typology based on the ideas of introversion and extraversion. These letters constitute a stunning look into the development of this major conceptual scheme in the history of psychology."--John Burnham, Ohio State University

"This collection of letters is important precisely because they were preparatory to Jung's later work. The letters show his process of thinking and are informed, literate, and expressive. The book''s editors know their subject well and their scholarship is sound."--Geoffrey Cocks, Albion College

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The Question of Psychological Types

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

Acknowledgments.............................................................viiIllustration of First Page of 7 J, 4 September 1915.........................viiiIllustration of First Page of 12 S, 17/18 December 1915.....................ixIntroduction John Beebe and Ernst Falzeder.................................1Translator's Note...........................................................331 J (4 June 1915)...........................................................392 S (24 June 1915)..........................................................483 J (undated)...............................................................554 S (6 July 1915)...........................................................635 J (undated)...............................................................746 S (29 August 1915)........................................................877 J (4 September 1915)......................................................1008 S (28 September 1915).....................................................1159 J (6 November 1915).......................................................13110 S (1–7 December 1915)..............................................14311 S (11–14 December 1915)............................................14812 S (17–18 December 1915)............................................15213 S (6 January 1916).......................................................155Summary of Jung's First Three Letters.......................................159Jung's Obituary of Hans Schmid-Guisan.......................................169Bibliography................................................................171Index.......................................................................179

Chapter One

Dear Friend,

As you know from our previous talks, for the past few years I have occupied myself with the question of psychological types, a problem as difficult as it is interesting. What originally led me to that problem were not intellectual presuppositions, but actual difficulties in my daily analytical work with my patients, as well as experiences I have had in my personal relations with other people. You remember that our earlier discussions about certain controversial points of analytical psychology, too, seemed to point, in our view, to the existence of two diametrically opposed types. At the time we took great pains to put the typical differences into words and, in so doing, discovered not only the extraordinary difficulty of such a project but also its tremendous importance for the psychology of human relations in general. Step by step, we realized that the scope of this problem took on extraordinary dimensions, so that, as is always the case in such situations, we somewhat lost courage and the hope that the problem could be dealt with at all.

For one thing we saw very clearly: the problem is not so much the intellectual difficulty of formulating the differences between the types in a logical way, but rather the acceptance of a viewpoint that is diametrically opposed to our own, and which essentially forces the problem of the existence of two kinds of truth upon us. Thus we arrived at a critical point of the greatest order, because we had to ask ourselves, in all seriousness, whether the existence of two kinds of truth is conceivable at all. Since we are both not professional philosophers, but at best mere dilettantes (and, being dilettantes, we love philosophy, in contrast to the professionals who practice it), this was a nearly hopeless problem for us, because viewing the world in the light of two truths seemed at least a highly daring acrobatic feat to us, for which our brains, insufficiently trained in this specialty, were hardly adequate.

I do not know how you have tried to come to terms with this. I would guess that you, true to your character, have simply gone ahead with your life, assuming that everybody can have his own personal views, views that can freely lead their own separate existence without disturbing the harmony of the world mechanism, even if they are not in accordance with other views. But as I am one of those people who must a priori always have a viewpoint before being able to enter into something, I could not be reassured by simply going ahead in my personal relations; to allay my concerns, I needed the points of view provided by the pragmatic movement in modern philosophy. Although I make no secret of my highest esteem for someone like Schiller or William James, I also have to confess that pragmatism leaves me with a somewhat stale feeling. I cannot help it: it is a bit "business-like." It is a bit like my feelings concerning the saying, ubi bene, ibi patria, which I have never much liked either. As I belong to that category of people who never take the element of feeling sufficiently into account, as opposed to the intellect, it was necessary that I should not neglect to also ask my feeling for its opinion in this matter. A man of your kind, however, who is as much devoted to feeling as I am to the intellect, comes to the help, not of the intellect, but of the feeling in the other. And that is why it is to a thinker who probably belongs to your type—namely, the romantic, as Ostwald called him—to whom I owe a notion that freed me from that certain staleness of pragmatism. It was Bergson who gave me the notion of the irrational. What I like is the unmistakable hypostasization of this notion. As a consequence we get two intimately connected, mutually dependent principles: the rational and the irrational. It gives me pleasure to think of them as hypostatic, because then I can acknowledge their existence also morally. I think you will understand that I do not practice philosophy here but rather make psychological confessions to you, which cannot hurt even the specialist, because in psychology thoughts are toll free, being psychology themselves. We have long ceased to pride ourselves that we could rise above psychology by thinking. This latter viewpoint is one of the medieval privileges of our academies, hallowed by their venerable age. The Archimedean point outside of psychology, with the help of which we would be able to unhinge psychology, is hardly likely to be found.

So (naturally) I called my viewpoint rational, and the viewpoint opposed to mine irrational. Thus, your viewpoint fell into the category of the irrational. As the irrational cannot be further understood at all, I came to the conclusion that one truth must remain unintelligible to the other. With this, I drew a thick line between you and me, because I also said to myself: you are as irrational to me as I am irrational to you. This would create a definitive but hopeless situation, satisfying for the intellect but depressing for the feeling. In this situation, I remembered that we are in possession of a very nice analytical method, which we use every day with our patients, and the excellent results of which basically consist in bringing together and balancing the antagonistic forces in the human soul, so that even the antagonism, which previously had an inhibiting effect, becomes a step leading one up in life.

Thus, when one of my patients dreams of a Herr Müller and then tells me during the analysis that this Herr Müller is a very disagreeable person, cantankerous in his moods and...