First published under the title «Psychologische Typologie»: Suddeutsche Monatshefte, XXXIII, 5 (February 1936). S.264-272. This translation is made from the English edition /15-Vol.6. P.542-555/. Source: www.jungland.ru
Already from the earliest days in the history of science there has been an attempt by the reflective intellect to introduce gradations between the two poles of absolute similarity and difference in human beings. This was realized in a number of types, or «temperaments» — as they were then called — which classified similarities and differences into formal categories. The Greek philosopher Empedocles tried to bring order to the chaos of natural phenomena by dividing them into four elements: earth, water, air and fire. The physicians of that time were the first to apply this principle of separation, in conjunction with the doctrine of the four qualities of dry, wet, cold, warm, to human beings, and thus they attempted to reduce the confused diversity of humanity into ordered groups. Most significant in a series of such attempts was that of Galen, whose use of these teachings influenced medical science and the very treatment of the sick for seventeen centuries. The very names of Galen’s temperaments indicate their origin in the pathology of the four «morals» or «inclinations» — qualities. Melancholic denotes the predominance of black bile, phlegmatic the predominance of phlegm or phlegm (the Greek word phlegma means fire and phlegm was seen as the end product of inflammation), sanguine the predominance of blood and choleric the predominance of yellow bile.
It is evident today that our modern concept of «temperament» has become much more psychological, as in the process of human development over the last two thousand years the «soul» has been freed from any intelligible association with cold chills and fevers or from bile or mucous secretions. Even today’s doctors would not be able to compare temperament, that is, a certain type of emotional state or excitability, directly with the specifics of the blood circulation or the state of the lymph, although their profession and the specific approach to a person from the position of a physical ailment tempt much more often than non-professionals to consider the mental as an end product. , depending on the physiology of the glands. Humors («juices» of the human body) of today’s medicine are no longer old bodily secretions, but turn out to be more subtle hormones, sometimes to a significant extent influencing «temperament», if the latter is defined as an integral sum of emotional reactions. The whole body structure, its constitution in the broadest sense, has a very close relationship with the psychological temperament, so that we have no right to blame doctors if they consider mental phenomena to be largely dependent on the body. In a sense, the psychic is the living body, and the living body is animate matter; one way or another, there is an unrevealed unity of the psyche and the body, which needs both physical and mental study and research, in other words, this unity necessarily and equally turns out to be dependent on both the body and the psyche, and to such an extent that as far as the researcher himself is inclined to that. The materialism of the XNUMXth century affirmed the primacy of the body, leaving the mental status of something secondary and derivative, allowing it no more reality than the so-called «epiphenomenon». What established itself as a good working hypothesis, namely that mental phenomena are due to physical processes, became a philosophical presumption with the advent of materialism. Any serious science of the living organism will reject such a presumption, since, on the one hand, it constantly bears in mind that living matter is still an unsolved mystery, and, on the other hand, there is enough objective evidence to recognize the presence of a completely incompatible gap between mental and physical phenomena, so that the psychic realm is no less mysterious than the physical.
The materialistic presumption turned out to be possible only in recent times, when man’s idea of the psychic, which has changed over many centuries, was able to free itself from old views and develop in a rather abstract direction. The ancients represented the mental and the physical together as an inseparable unity, since they were closer to that primitive world in which the moral crack had not yet run through the personality, and unenlightened paganism still felt itself inseparably united, childishly innocent and not burdened with responsibility. The ancient Egyptians still retained the ability to indulge in naive joy when listing those sins that they did not commit: “I did not let a single person go hungry. I didn’t make anyone cry. I didn’t commit murder» and so on. The heroes of Homer wept, laughed, got angry, outsmarted and killed each other in a world where such things were considered natural and obvious to both men and gods, and the Olympians amused themselves by spending their days in a state of unfading irresponsibility.
This took place at such an archaic level, at which pre-philosophical man existed and survived. He was completely in the grip of his own emotions. All the passions that made his blood boil and his heart pound, that accelerated his breathing or forced him to hold it completely or turned his insides inside out — all this was a manifestation of the «soul». So he placed the soul in the region of the diaphragm (in Greek, phren, which also means «mind») and the heart. And only among the first philosophers the place of reason began to be attributed to the head. But even today there are tribes among the Negroes, whose «thoughts» are localized mainly in the abdomen, and the Pueblo Indians «think» with their hearts — only a madman thinks with his head, they say. At this level of consciousness, the experience of sensual explosions and the feeling of self-unity are essential. However, at the same time silent and tragic for the archaic man who began to think, was the emergence of the dichotomy that Nietzsche placed at the door of Zarathustra: the discovery of pairs of opposites, the division into even and odd, superior and inferior, good and evil. It was the work of the ancient Pythagoreans that became their doctrine of moral responsibility and the serious metaphysical consequences of sin, a doctrine which gradually percolated through the ages into all social classes, chiefly through the dissemination of the Orphic and Pythagorean mysteries. Even Plato used the parable of white and black horses to illustrate the stubbornness and polarity of the human psyche, and even earlier the mysteries proclaimed the doctrine of good being rewarded in the future and evil being punished in hell. These teachings could not be rejected as mystical nonsense and deceit of philosophers from the “backwoods”, as Nietzsche claimed, or as sectarian hypocrisy, since already in the XNUMXth century BC. e. Pythagoreanism was something of a state religion throughout Graecia Magna (Greater Greece). In addition, the ideas that formed the basis of these mysteries never died out, but experienced a philosophical renaissance in the XNUMXnd century BC. e., when they had a huge impact on the world of Alexandrian thought. Their encounter with Old Testament prophecy led subsequently to what may be called the beginning of Christianity as a world religion.
Now, from Hellenistic syncretism, a division of people into types arises, which was completely uncharacteristic of the “humoral” psychology of Greek medicine. In a philosophical sense, this is where the gradations between Parmenides’ poles of light and darkness, above and below, arose. People began to be divided into hyliks (hylikoi), psychics (psychikoi) and pneumatics (pneumaticoi), highlighting, respectively, material, mental and spiritual being. Such a classification is, of course, not a scientific formulation of similarities and differences — it is a critical system of values based not on the behavior and appearance of a person as a phenotype, but on definitions of an ethical, mystical and philosophical nature. Although the latter are not exactly «Christian» terms, they nevertheless formed an integral part of early Christianity in the time of St. Paul. Its very existence is irrefutable evidence of the split that arose in the original unity of a person who was completely in the power of his emotions. Before that, a person appeared as an ordinary living being and remained in this capacity only a toy of experience, his experiences, incapable of any reflective analysis regarding his origin and his destiny. And now, suddenly, he found himself facing three fateful factors — endowed with a body, soul and spirit, to each of which he had a moral obligation. Presumably already at birth it was decided whether he would spend his life in a hylic or pneumatic state, or in some indeterminate location in between. The firmly rooted dichotomy of the Greek mind made the latter sharper and more penetrating, and the resulting emphasis now shifted considerably to the psychic and the spiritual, leading to an inevitable separation from the hylic region of the body. All the highest and ultimate goals lay in the moral predestination of man, in his spiritual supra-mundane and super-earthly final sojourn, and the separation of the gilic region turned into a stratification between the world and the spirit. Thus the original courteous wisdom, expressed in Pythagorean pairs of opposites, became a passionate moral conflict. Nothing, however, can so excite our self-consciousness and alertness as a state of war with ourselves. It is hardly possible to think of any other more effective means of awakening human nature from the irresponsible and innocent half-sleep of primitive mentality and bringing it to a state of conscious responsibility.
This process is called cultural development. It is in any case the development of the human capacity for discrimination and judgment — consciousness in general. With the growth of knowledge and the increase of critical abilities, the foundations were laid for the subsequent development of the human mind everywhere in terms of (from the standpoint of) intellectual achievements. Science has become a special mental product, far surpassing all the achievements of the ancient world. It closed the crack between man and nature in the sense that, although man was separated from nature, science enabled him to find again his proper place in the natural order of things. However, his special metaphysical position had to be thrown overboard, rejected insofar as it was not provided by faith in traditional religion — from which a well-known conflict between «faith and knowledge» arose. In any case, science has carried out an excellent rehabilitation of matter, and in this respect materialism can even be regarded as an act of historical justice.
But one, undoubtedly very important, area of experience, the human psyche itself, for a very long time remained the reserved area of uXNUMXbuXNUMXbmetaphysics, although after the Enlightenment more and more serious attempts were made to make it accessible to scientific research. The first experimental experiments were made in the field of sensory perceptions, and then gradually moved into the field of associations. This line of research paved the way for experimental psychology and culminated in Wundt’s «physiological psychology». A more descriptive approach to psychology, with which physicians soon came into contact, developed in France. Its main representatives were Taine, Ribot and Janet. This direction was mainly characterized by the fact that in it the mental was divided into separate mechanisms or processes. In the light of these attempts, today there is an approach that could be called «holistic» — the systematic observation of the mental as a whole. Much indicates that this direction originated in a certain biographical type, in particular in the type that in ancient times, also having its own specific advantages, was described as «amazing fate.» In this connection I think of Justin Kerner and his Seeress of Prevorst and the case of Blumhardt Sr. and his medium Gottliebin Dittus. However, to be historically fair, I must remember to mention the medieval Acta Sanctorum.
This line of research has continued in later writings related to the names of William James, Freud and Theodore Flournoy. James and his friend Flournoy, a Swiss psychologist, made an attempt to describe the holistic phenomenology of the mental, and also to survey it as something holistic. Freud, like a physician, took as his starting point the integrity and inseparability of the human personality, although, in accordance with the spirit of the times, he limited himself to the study of instinctive mechanisms and individual processes. He also narrowed the picture of man to the integrity of a very important «bourgeois» collective personality, and this inevitably led him to philosophically one-sided interpretations. Freud, unfortunately, could not resist the temptations of the physician and reduced everything psychic to the corporeal, doing this in the manner of the old «humoral» psychologists, not without revolutionary gestures towards those metaphysical reserves for which he had a sacred fear.
Unlike Freud, who, after a correct psychological start, turned back towards the ancient assumption of the supremacy (sovereignty, independence) of the physical constitution and tried to return back to a theory in which instinctive processes are conditioned by bodily ones, I start with the premise of the supremacy of the mental. Since the bodily and the psychic form a unity in a certain sense—although they are quite different in manifestations of their nature—we cannot but attribute reality to each of them. Until we have a way of comprehending this unity, there is nothing left but to study them separately and temporarily treat them as independent of each other, at least in their structure. But the fact that they are not like that can be observed every day on ourselves. Although if we were limited only to this, we would never be able to understand anything in the psychic at all.
Now, if we assume the independent supremacy of the psychic, then we free ourselves from the — for the moment — insoluble task of reducing the manifestations of the psychic to something definitely physical. We can then take the manifestations of the psychic as expressions of its inner being and try to establish certain similarities and correspondences or types. Therefore, when I speak about psychological typology, I mean by this the formulation of the structural elements of the mental, and not the description of the mental manifestations (emanation) of the individual type of constitution. The latter, in particular, is considered in studies on the structure of the body and the character of Kretschmer.
In my book Psychological Types, I have given a detailed description of a purely psychological typology. The research I conducted was based on twenty years of medical work, which allowed me to come into close contact with people of various classes and levels from all over the world. When you start as a young doctor, your head is still full of clinical cases and diagnoses. Over time, however, impressions of a completely different kind accumulate. Among them is a bewildering variety of human personalities, a chaotic abundance of individual cases. The specific circumstances around them, and above all the specific characters themselves, create clinical pictures, pictures that, even with the best will, can only be squeezed into the straitjacket of a diagnosis by force. The fact that a certain disorder can be given a particular name looks completely irrelevant next to the overwhelming impression that all clinical pictures are numerous imitative or stage displays of certain specific character traits. The pathological problem, to which everything boils down, actually has nothing to do with the clinical picture, but, in fact, is an expression of character. Even the complexes themselves, these «core elements» of neurosis, are, among other things, mere concomitants of a certain characterological predisposition. This is most easily seen in the patient’s relationship to his family of origin. Let’s say he is one of four children of his parents, not the youngest and not the oldest, has the same education and conditioned behavior as the others. However, he is sick, and they are healthy. The anamnesis shows that the whole series of influences to which he, like others, was exposed and from which they all suffered, had a pathological effect only on him alone — at least outwardly, apparently. In fact, these influences were not etiological factors in his case either, and it is not difficult to verify their falsity. The real cause of the neurosis lies in the specific way in which he reacts and assimilates these influences from his environment.
In comparing many similar cases, it gradually became clear to me that there must be two fundamentally different general attitudes that divide people into two groups, providing for all mankind the possibility of a highly differentiated individuality. Since it is obviously not the case as such, it can only be said that this difference of attitudes is easily observable only when we are faced with a relatively well-differentiated personality, in other words, it becomes of practical importance only after a certain degree of differentiation has been reached. Pathological cases of this kind are almost always people who deviate from the family type and as a result no longer find sufficient protection in their inherited instinctive basis. Weak instincts are one of the first causes of the development of a habitual one-sided attitude, although, in the extreme case, this is due or reinforced by heredity.
I have called these two fundamentally different attitudes extraversion and introversion. Extraversion is characterized by an interest in an external object, responsiveness and readiness to perceive external events, a desire to influence and be influenced by events, a need to interact with the outside world, the ability to endure turmoil and noise of any kind, and actually find pleasure in it, the ability to maintain constant attention to the outside world, to make many friends and acquaintances without much, however, analysis and, ultimately, the presence of a feeling of great importance to be close to someone chosen, and therefore, a strong tendency to demonstrate oneself. Accordingly, the life philosophy of an extrovert and his ethics carry, as a rule, a highly collectivist nature (beginning) with a strong tendency to altruism. His conscience largely depends on public opinion. Moral concerns arise mainly when «other people know». The religious beliefs of such a person are determined, so to speak, by a majority of votes.
The real subject, the extravert as a subjective being, is — as far as possible — immersed in darkness. He hides his subjective principle from himself under the cover of the unconscious. The reluctance to subject one’s own motives and impulses to critical reflection is very clear. He has no secrets, he cannot keep them for long, because he shares everything with others. If something that cannot be mentioned touches him, such a person will prefer to forget it. Everything that can dim the parade of optimism and positivism is avoided. Whatever he thinks, does, or intends to do, is delivered convincingly and warmly.
The mental life of a given personality type is played out, so to speak, outside of itself, in the environment. He lives in and through others — any reflection on himself makes him shudder. The dangers lurking there are best overcome by noise. If he has a «complex», he takes refuge in social whirl, turmoil and allows several times a day to be assured that everything is in order. In the event that he does not interfere too much in other people’s affairs, is not too assertive and not too superficial, he can be a pronounced useful member of any community.
In this short article, I must content myself with a cursory sketch. I simply intend to give the reader some idea of what extraversion is, something that he can bring into line with his own knowledge of human nature. I deliberately began with a description of extraversion, since this attitude is familiar to everyone — an extrovert not only lives in this attitude, but also demonstrates it in every possible way in front of his comrades out of principle. In addition, such an attitude is consistent with certain generally recognized ideals and moral principles.
Introversion, on the other hand, which is directed not at the object, but at the subject and not oriented at the object, is not so easy to observe. The introvert is not so accessible, he is, as it were, in constant retreat in front of the object, giving in to him. He keeps aloof from external events, without entering into relationship with them, and shows a distinct negative attitude towards society, as soon as he is among a fair number of people. In large companies, he feels lonely and lost. The thicker the crowd, the stronger its resistance grows. At least he is not «with her» and does not feel love for gatherings of enthusiasts. He can not be classified as a sociable person. What he does, he does in his own way, shielding himself from outside influences. Such a person tends to look awkward, clumsy, often deliberately restrained, and it just so happens that either because of a certain arrogance of manner, or because of his gloomy inaccessibility, or something done inappropriately, he unwittingly offends people. He reserves his best qualities for himself and generally does his best to keep silent about them. He easily becomes distrustful, self-willed, often suffers from the inferiority of his feelings and for this reason is also envious. His ability to comprehend the object is carried out not due to fear, but because the object seems to him negative, demanding attention, irresistible or even threatening. Therefore, he suspects everyone of “all mortal sins”, he is always afraid of being fooled, so he usually turns out to be very touchy and irritable. He surrounds himself with a barbed wire of embarrassment so tightly and impenetrably that in the end he himself prefers to do something rather than sit inside. He confronts the world with a carefully designed defensive system, composed of scrupulousness, pedantry, moderation and thrift, foresight, «high-lipped» correctness and honesty, painful conscientiousness, politeness and open distrust. There are few pink colors in his picture of the world, since he is supercritical and will find hair in any soup. Under normal circumstances, he is pessimistic and anxious because the world and human beings are not one iota kind and seek to crush him, so that he never feels accepted and favored by them. But he himself also does not accept this world, at least not completely, not completely, since at first everything must be comprehended and discussed by him according to his own critical standards. Ultimately, only those things are accepted from which, for various subjective reasons, he can derive his own benefit.
For him, any thoughts and thoughts about himself are a real pleasure. His own world is a safe harbor, a carefully guarded and fenced garden, closed to the public and hidden from prying eyes. The best is your own company. He feels at home in his world, and only he himself makes any changes in it. His best work is done with his own resources, on his own initiative and in his own way. If he succeeds after a long and exhausting struggle to master something alien to him, he is able to achieve excellent results. The crowd, the majority of views and opinions, public rumor, general enthusiasm will never convince him of anything, but rather make him hide even deeper in his shell.
His relationships with other people become warmer only in conditions of guaranteed security, when he can put aside his protective distrust. Since this happens to him infrequently, then, accordingly, the number of his friends and acquaintances is very limited. So the psychic life of this type is entirely played out within. And if difficulties and conflicts arise there, then all doors and windows are tightly closed. The introvert withdraws into himself along with his complexes, until he ends up in complete isolation.
Despite all these features, being an introvert is by no means a social loss. His retreat into himself does not represent a final renunciation of the world, but is a search for a solace in which solitude enables him to make his contribution to the life of the community. This personality type is the victim of numerous misunderstandings — not because of injustice, but because he himself causes them. Nor can he be free from accusations of taking secret pleasure in mystification, because such a misunderstanding brings him a certain satisfaction, since it confirms his pessimistic point of view. From all this it is not difficult to understand why he is accused of coldness, pride, stubbornness, selfishness, self-satisfaction and vanity, capriciousness, and why he is constantly exhorted that devotion to the public interest, sociability, imperturbable refinement and selfless trust in powerful authority are true virtues and testify to a healthy and energetic life.
The introvert quite understands and recognizes the existence of the above-mentioned virtues and admits that somewhere, perhaps — just not in the circle of his acquaintances — there are beautiful spiritual people who enjoy the undiluted possession of these ideal qualities. But self-criticism and awareness of his own motives quite quickly lead him out of the delusion regarding his ability to such virtues, and the incredulous sharp look, sharpened by anxiety, allows him to constantly discover donkey ears sticking out from under the lion’s mane in his associates and fellow citizens. Both the world and people are for him troublemakers and a source of danger, without providing him with an appropriate standard by which he could eventually navigate. The only thing that is undeniably true for him is his subjective world, which — as sometimes, in moments of social hallucinations it seems to him — is objective. It would be very easy to accuse such people of the worst kind of subjectivism and of unhealthy individualism, if we were beyond any doubt about the existence of only one objective world. But such a truth, if it exists, is not an axiom — it is only half the truth, its other half is that the world also exists in the form in which it is seen by people, and ultimately by the individual. No world simply does not exist and does not exist at all without a penetrating subject who learns about it. The latter, no matter how small and imperceptible it may seem, is always another pillar supporting the entire bridge of the phenomenal world. The attraction to the subject therefore has the same validity as the attraction to the so-called objective world, insofar as this world is based on psychic reality itself. But at the same time it is also a reality with its own specific laws, which by their nature do not belong to derivatives, secondary ones.
The two attitudes, extraversion and introversion, are opposite forms that have made themselves felt no less in the history of human thought. The issues raised by them were largely foreseen by Friedrich Schiller and form the basis of his Letters on Aesthetic Education. But since the concept of the unconscious was still unknown to him, Schiller could not reach a satisfactory solution. But, in addition, philosophers, who are much better equipped to go deeper on this subject, did not want to subject their thinking function to a thorough psychological criticism and therefore remained aloof from such discussions. It should be clear, however, that the inner polarity of such an attitude has a very strong influence on the philosopher’s own point of view.
For the extravert, the object is a priori interesting and attractive, just as the subject or psychic reality is for the introvert. Therefore, we could use the expression «nominal accent» for this fact, by which I mean that for the extravert the quality of positive meaning, importance and value is assigned primarily to the object, so that the object plays a dominant, determining and decisive role in all mental processes. from the very beginning, just as the subject does for the introvert.
But the nominal emphasis does not decide the matter only between subject and object — it also selects the conscious function, which is mainly used by this or that individual. I distinguish four functions: thinking, feeling, sensation and intuition. The functional essence of sensation is to establish that something exists, thinking tells us what it means, feeling what its value is, and intuition suggests where it came from and where it is going. I call sensation and intuition irrational functions because they both deal directly with what is happening and with actual or potential realities. Thinking and feeling, being distinctive functions, are rational. Sensation, the function of «reality» (fonction du reel), excludes any simultaneous intuitive activity, since the latter is not at all concerned with the present, but is rather a sixth sense for hidden possibilities and therefore should not allow itself to be influenced by existing reality. In the same way, thinking is opposed to feeling, since thinking should not be influenced or deviated from its goals depending on sensory evaluations, just as feeling usually deteriorates in the captivity of too much reflection. These four functions, placed geometrically, form a cross with the axis of rationality at right angles to the axis of irrationality.
The four orienting functions, of course, do not contain everything that is contained in the conscious psyche. Will and memory, for example, are not included there. The reason is that the differentiation of these four orienting functions is, in fact, an empirical sequence of typical differences in functional attitude. There are people in whom the nominal emphasis falls on sensation, on the perception of facts, and elevates it to the only defining and overriding principle. These people are reality oriented, fact oriented, event oriented, and in them intellectual judgment, feeling and intuition recede into the background under the all-encompassing importance of real facts. When the emphasis falls on thinking, the judgment is based on what value should be attributed to the facts in question. And on this meaning will depend the way in which the individual deals with the facts themselves. If feeling turns out to be nominal, then the adaptation of the individual will depend entirely on the sense value that he ascribes to these facts. Finally, if the nominal emphasis falls on intuition, then actual reality is taken into account only to the extent that it appears to harbor possibilities that become the main driving force, regardless of the way in which real things are presented in the present.
Thus, the localization of the nominal accent gives rise to four functional types, which I first encountered in my relationships with people, but did not formulate systematically until much later. In practice, these four types are always combined with the type of attitude, that is, with extraversion or introversion, so that the functions themselves appear in an extraverted or introverted version. This creates a structure of eight descriptive function types. It is obvious that within the framework of an essay it is impossible to present the very psychological specifics of these types and trace their conscious and unconscious manifestations. Therefore, I must refer interested readers to the above study.
The purpose of psychological typology is not to classify people into categories—that in itself would be a rather pointless undertaking. Rather, its purpose is to provide critical psychology with the opportunity to carry out methodical research and presentation of empirical material. First, it is a critical tool for the researcher, who needs points of view and a guideline, if he is to reduce the chaotic excess of individual experience to some sort of order. In this respect, typology can be compared to a trigonometric grid, or better still, to a crystallographic system of axes. Secondly, typology is a great help in understanding the wide variety that takes place among individuals, and it also provides a clue to the fundamental differences in current psychological theories. Last but not least, it is an essential means for determining the «personality equation» of the practical psychologist, who, armed with an accurate knowledge of his differentiated and subordinate functions, can avoid many serious mistakes in working with patients.
The typological system I propose is an attempt, based on practical experience, to provide an explanatory basis and a theoretical framework for the limitless variety that has hitherto prevailed in the formation of psychological concepts. In such a young science as psychology, the limitation of concepts will sooner or later become an inevitable necessity. Psychologists will someday be forced to agree on a set of basic principles to avoid controversial interpretations if psychology is not going to remain an unscientific and random conglomeration of individual opinions.