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Psychological Types by C. G. Jung

The Book That Changed How We Think About Personality

There are books that describe personality, and then there are books that change the vocabulary with which we describe ourselves. Carl Gustav Jung’s Psychological Types belongs to the second category. First published in German in 1921 as Psychologische Typen, the book was translated into English in 1923. It became one of Jung’s most influential works and eventually formed Volume 6 of the Collected Works of C. G. Jung. (Psych Classics). It is also the work behind one of the most familiar psychological distinctions in modern culture: introversion and extraversion. But Jung's book is far more ambitious than a simple personality quiz.

A Psychology of How We Meet the World

Jung was interested in a fundamental question:

Why can two intelligent, thoughtful people encounter exactly the same situation and understand it in completely different ways?

His answer was that people do not simply possess different opinions. They may have different psychological orientations—different habitual ways of directing attention, perceiving experience and making judgments. Jung divided these differences into two broad attitude types:

Introversion
and
Extraversion

But he then added four psychological functions:

Thinking
Feeling
Sensation
Intuition

These functions could operate through either an introverted or an extraverted orientation, producing the eight combinations that form the foundation of Jung's typology. (Psych Classics)

Introvert and Extravert: More Than Being Shy or Sociable

One of the most important things to understand about Jung is that his definitions of introversion and extraversion are more sophisticated than their modern everyday meanings.

Today, an introvert is often described simply as someone who likes solitude, while an extravert is imagined as someone who loves parties.

That is not really Jung's distinction. For Jung, the difference concerned where psychological orientation is primarily directed. The extravert gives greater psychological weight to the object, external circumstances and the outer world. The introvert gives greater weight to the subjective factor—the way an experience is internally received and interpreted. (Psych Classics)

Two people might therefore witness the same event but experience it psychologically in very different ways.

One may ask:

What is happening out there?

The other may instinctively ask:

What does this mean to me?

Neither response is automatically superior. They are different orientations.

The Four Psychological Functions

Jung's second great contribution in the book is his division of consciousness into four fundamental functions.

Thinking

Thinking seeks conceptual understanding.

It asks:

What is this?
How does it work?
What follows logically from this?

A thinking-oriented person tends to organize experience through concepts, relationships and conclusions.

Feeling

For Jung, feeling does not simply mean being emotional.

Feeling is a function of valuation.

It asks:

Is this good or bad?
Is this valuable or undesirable?
How do I stand in relation to this?

This distinction is important because Jung treated thinking and feeling as contrasting ways of making judgments—not simply as reason versus emotion.

Sensation

Sensation concerns what is actually present.

It is the function that notices the concrete:

the colour of an object,
the sound of a room,
the physical details of a landscape,
the texture of an experience.

It is closely connected with immediate sensory reality.

Intuition

Intuition looks beyond what is immediately given. It notices possibilities, connections, patterns and what something might become.

Where sensation says:

“This is what is here.”

Intuition may ask:

“Where could this lead?”

Jung classified sensation and intuition as perceptive functions, while thinking and feeling function as modes of judgment. (Google Books)

The Eight Psychological Types

When Jung's two attitudes are combined with the four functions, we arrive at eight basic combinations:

Attitude	Function
Extraverted	Thinking
Extraverted	Feeling
Extraverted	Sensation
Extraverted	Intuition
Introverted	Thinking
Introverted	Feeling
Introverted	Sensation
Introverted	Intuition

But Jung was not attempting to put every human being permanently into a neat little box.Quite the opposite. His system was an attempt to understand psychological differences and the tensions created when one way of functioning becomes disproportionately dominant. (Psych Classics)

The Problem With Being Too One-Sided

One of the fascinating ideas running through Psychological Types is that psychological development involves more than becoming exceptionally good at one thing. A person may develop one function so strongly that other functions remain comparatively unconscious. The highly rational person may have difficulty recognizing feelings. The highly intuitive person may neglect concrete facts. The person who depends heavily on external circumstances may have difficulty hearing an inner voice. The intensely inward person may struggle to respond to the demands of the external world. For Jung, these neglected aspects do not simply disappear. They remain part of the psyche. This is where his concept of the unconscious becomes particularly important. Jung argued that the unconscious can have a compensatory relationship to consciousness: what consciousness neglects may acquire greater importance outside conscious control. (Psych Classics)

Why Jung Wrote the Book

There was also a deeply personal and intellectual background to Psychological Types.Jung had spent years working within the developing psychoanalytic movement and had been closely associated with Sigmund Freud. His eventual differences with Freud, as well as his differences from Alfred Adler, contributed to his interest in the problem of psychological types. Jung later described Psychological Types as an attempt to understand how psychological type influences a person's judgment and relationship with the world. The book therefore wasn't simply an exercise in classification. It was also an attempt to understand why psychologists themselves could look at the same human being and arrive at radically different interpretations. (Google Books)

Jung, Literature, Philosophy and Religion

One of the remarkable features of Psychological Types is how widely Jung ranges.This is not a modern personality manual written around a collection of multiple-choice questionnaires. Jung moves through psychology, philosophy, theology, literature, aesthetics and intellectual history. The original 1921 contents include discussions of the ancient and medieval history of ideas, theological disputes, the problem of universals, Martin Luther and Huldrych Zwingli, and Friedrich Schiller's ideas about psychological types. Jung also examines the Apollonian and Dionysian traditions. (Project Gutenberg). This gives the book an unusual character. It reads partly like psychology, partly like intellectual history and partly like a philosophical investigation into the human personality.

From Jung to Modern Personality Tests

Jung's influence did not stop with analytical psychology. His typological ideas became part of the intellectual background for later personality systems, most famously the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI). But there is an important distinction. The personality-testing culture familiar to us today can make Jung's work look much more tidy and categorical than it actually was. Jung was interested in dynamic psychological relationships, consciousness and the unconscious, dominant and inferior functions, and the development of the individual. His book is therefore much less like: “You are Type X.” and much more like: “This is how your habitual way of approaching life may shape what you see—and what you fail to see.”

The Deeper Idea: Becoming More Whole

Perhaps the most interesting reason to return to Psychological Types today is that Jung's ultimate concern was not classification. It was development. The purpose of understanding one's psychological type is not necessarily to announce:

I am an introvert.

I am a thinker.

It is to recognize the limitations of relying too heavily on one habitual psychological orientation. Self-knowledge can reveal what comes naturally. But it can also reveal what has been neglected. And this leads toward one of the central themes of Jung's wider psychology:

individuation—the development of a more integrated personality.

The goal is not to erase differences within ourselves. It is to become increasingly conscious of them.

Why Psychological Types Still Matters

More than a century after its publication, Jung's book remains fascinating because the questions it asks have not disappeared. Why do some people trust objective evidence while others first consider personal meaning? Why does one person see possibilities while another sees practical details? Why does one person reason through a problem while another evaluates its human significance? And why can people who sincerely believe they are being perfectly rational reach completely different conclusions?Jung's answer is that human consciousness is not a single, uniform instrument. We approach reality through different psychological orientations. And perhaps the greatest danger is not having a particular type. It is assuming that our own way of seeing is the only way of seeing.

The URIBHO Book Shelf

Psychological Types is ultimately a book about difference, perception and self-knowledge. It asks us to look inward—not merely to discover what type of person we are, but to recognize the psychological lens through which we encounter everyone and everything else. That makes Jung's 1921 work considerably more interesting than a personality test. It is an invitation to examine the architecture of consciousness itself.

Book: Psychological Types
Author: C. G. Jung
Original title: Psychologische Typen
First published: 1921
English translation: 1923
Field: Analytical Psychology / Psychology / Philosophy

For readers interested in psychology, philosophy, personality, the unconscious and the history of modern ideas, Jung's Psychological Types remains an extraordinary place to begin. (Psych Classics)