Psychological Types

Psychological Types came out in 1921 and grew out of a personal question. After parting ways with Freud, Jung wanted to understand why he and his former mentor saw the same clinical case so differently. His answer was that people look at the world in different ways, which leads them to disagree.

Rather than blaming either side, he came to believe that Freud and Adler, for example, had theories that were valid for different types of people. A theory that works for some may sound absurd to others, which could explain so many disagreements among serious thinkers.

The book is enormous and packed with intellectual history, but it left two widely familiar legacies: the attitudes of introversion and extroversion, and the four functions of consciousness. Those are the ideas we'll sort out here.

Much of the book revisits authors who, according to Jung, had already noticed similar oppositions. He discusses disputes among early theologians who defended faith against reason or vice versa, and poets like Schiller, who distinguished the naive spirit from the reflective spirit.

He also cites Nietzsche's pairing of the Apollonian and the Dionysian: form and restraint on one side, ecstasy and impulse on the other. And he discusses William James, the American philosopher who divided thinkers into the tough-minded and the tender-minded.

For Jung, all these pairings touched on the same point: there are two basic ways of relating to the world. One turns outward, toward objects, while the other turns inward, toward one's own inner life.

In Jung's definition, an extroverted person directs psychic energy toward the object, meaning external people, things, and situations. Their decisions usually depend on what's happening around them and what other people expect or do.

Think of someone who feels at home at a crowded cookout, chats with a neighbor in line at the bank, and can only unwind after getting out and seeing people. This isn't necessarily superficial. It's a way to recharge, think out loud, and learn through interaction.

Jung insists that this isn't a matter of merit. It's a predominant direction of energy. The risk for an extrovert, he argues, is getting lost in the external world, doing everything to please others or follow trends, and losing sight of what they really want.