Psychological types Book

My first exposure to Carl Jung occurred about five years ago, when I wanted to learn about the psychology behind the popular Myers-Briggs personality test (my type is INTJ). I learned that the MBTI was based on the psychology of one Carl Jung, who I had never heard of, and thus began a fascinating odyssey into the life and works of the man who was able to penetrate my personality in a way that no other thinker had done. I read his memoirs in Memories, Dreams, Reflections, the seminal conversation he had with his unconscious in Liber Novus, as well as his writings on The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious. But it wasn't until now that I read the work that contains the most comprehensive presentation of Jung's theory of psychological types--and what a treat it is for the devout Jungian.

Jung set out to write this work as an attempt to determine why he, Freud, and Adler were all treating patients with similar ailments and observing similar phenomena, and yet were each coming up with vastly different theoretical explanations of what they were observing. Jung hit on the idea that when dealing with things that are abstract and intangible, like the psyche, religion, or philosophy, these matters are always viewed through the subjective world of the interpreter. Much of man's metaphysical thought through the ages, Jung decided, was a manifestation of a subjective psychological orientation, and this is why metaphysicians through the ages have had such repetitive and seemingly unresolvable disagreements about fundamental ideas.

The implications of this are enormous, and Jung acknowledged that it would take a much more comprehensive study of the history of ideas to flesh out the contours of different subjective impulses and how they influenced human thought than he could provide alone, but he nonetheless attempted a cursory look at how subjective orientations have influenced major thinkers historically in the realms of theology, philosophy, poetry, and finally, in Jung's own age, the budding field of psychology. Early on, there is a fascinating study of two early Christian theologians, Tertullian and Origen. Jung believed that the intellectual differences between the two could be ascribed to the more fundamental difference between "thinking" and "feeling" as psychological functions. Origen, Jung thought, was a "feeler" who engaged in a Christian act of self-sacrifice by denying himself the full usage of his prominent feeling function and instead approaching Christian theology through the lens of the intellect. Tertullian, on the other hand, was a natural "thinker" who made a similar act of self-sacrifice and suppressed his own rationality in order to develop the irrational parts of his personality through his Christian writings.

Later on, we're treated to a Jungian examination of the differing philosophical perspectives of Goethe and Schiller, and how these affected their thought and their famous working relationship with one another. Schiller was an introvert; Goethe was an extrovert. Jung compares Schiller to the pre-socratic philosopher Heraclitus, in that the writings of both men expressed a belief in the principle of enantiodromia: that is, the principle that everything becomes its opposite. This reflects the constant interplay between the dominant and suppressed functions of the personality.

Jung came up with four fundamental psychological functions: thinking, feeling, sensation, and intuition. Each of these four functions may be introverted or extroverted in orientation--but introversion and extroversion for Jung did not have quite the same meaning as they do in today's popular understanding. It isn't simply that introverts are shy and extroverts are outgoing. Rather, introverts perceive things subjectively, in that they insert the inner world of their own personality between themselves and external reality, and take in the external world in this manner, while extroverts attach their subjective selves to the external realm; the world of objective objects and ideas. To briefly illustrate, you might say that an extroverted feeler determines how they feel about something, while an introverted feeler might rather determine how something makes them feel.

Jung's discussion of the nature of the different types makes up a relatively brief portion of the book, but this section would nonetheless be of the most immediate interest to those who want to know what Jung actually said about the different psychological functions. This is a good and necessary endeavor, because in my experience there are many misunderstandings within the typology community (which, as I came to discover, is a pretty active and sizable counterculture in its own right) about Jung's understanding of personality.