Psychological Types

Psychological Types (in German, Psychologische Typen) is a book by Carl Gustav Jung, first published by Rascher Verlag in Zurich in 1921. It was translated into English in 1923 and became the sixth volume of his Collected Works. It grew out of Jung's wish to reconcile the theories of Sigmund Freud and Alfred Adler and to define how his own outlook differed from theirs. Jung concluded that Freud's theory was extraverted and Adler's introverted, and he came to believe that much of the bitterness between their followers stemmed from fundamental psychological attitudes that no one had recognised. In his view, each school demonstrated a partial truth that was not generally valid.

The core of the book is a typology that distinguishes two general attitudes, extraversion and introversion, and four functions of consciousness. Two are perceiving or non-rational functions, sensation and intuition, and two are judging or rational functions, thinking and feeling. One function usually predominates through natural disposition and occupies the foreground, while its opposite is pushed into the unconscious. Combining the functions with the attitudes yields eight basic psychological types. The book also surveys the history of typology, from the theological disputes of the early Church to Schiller, Nietzsche, William James and Carl Spitteler, whose epic poem Prometheus and Epimetheus receives the longest chapter.

The work had a lasting influence. Katharine Cook Briggs and her daughter Isabel Briggs Myers, working independently of Jung, developed the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator from its framework, expanding the eight types into sixteen combinations. Jung himself rejected the notion that his typology was a characterology, a system for classifying individual character, and regarded it instead as a means of understanding modes of psychic orientation.