Psychological Types (German: Psychologische Typen) was published by Rascher Verlag in Zurich in 1921 and in English translation by Harcourt Brace in 1923. It is Jung’s most ambitious attempt at a systematic psychology — a work of theory rather than case study — and it introduced concepts that have entered common language to such an extent that most people who use them have no idea they originate with Jung.
The book’s central argument is that human consciousness operates through two fundamental attitudes — introversion (orientation toward the inner world of thoughts, feelings, and fantasies) and extraversion (orientation toward the outer world of objects, people, and events) — and four functions: thinking, feeling, sensation, and intuition. Each person, Jung argues, has a dominant function and a dominant attitude, producing eight basic psychological types. The inferior function — the one least developed — operates unconsciously and is the source of much psychological difficulty.
The first half of the book is a historical survey — Jung traces the introvert/extravert distinction through the history of philosophy, theology, poetry, and psychology, finding it in the opposition between Plato and Aristotle, Augustine and Pelagius, the nominalists and the realists, Schiller’s naive and sentimental poetry, and the conflict between Freud (an extravert, in Jung’s analysis) and Alfred Adler (an introvert). This survey is simultaneously the book’s most impressive and most exhausting feature: it demonstrates enormous erudition but tests the reader’s patience.
The second half presents the typological system itself, with detailed descriptions of each type and its characteristic pathologies. The influence has been enormous. The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), the most widely used personality assessment in the world, is directly based on Jung’s typology, though Jung himself would likely have been appalled by the MBTI’s reduction of his complex, fluid model to a set of fixed categories.
Collecting Psychological Types
First edition (Rascher Verlag, Zurich, 1921, in German): Cloth binding.
Market values:
- German first edition, fine: $500–$1,500
- English first edition (Harcourt Brace, 1923): $200–$600
- Very good: $80–$200