The Question of Psychological Types: The Correspondence of C. G. Jung and Hans Schmid-Guisan, 1915-1916

[4 June 1915]

Dear Friend,

As you know from our previous talks, for the past few years I have occupied myself with the question of psychological types,⁴⁰ a problem as difficult as it is interesting. What originally led me to that problem were not intellectual presuppositions, but actual difficulties in my daily analytical work with my patients, as well as experiences I have had in my personal relations with other people. You remember that our earlier discussions about certain controversial points of analytical psychology,⁴¹ too, seemed to point, in our view, to the existence of two diametrically opposed types.⁴² At the time we took great pains to put the typical differences into words and, in so doing, discovered not only the extraordinary difficulty of such a project but also its tremendous importance for the psychology of human relations in general. Step by step, we realized that the scope of this problem took on extraordinary dimensions, so that, as is always the case in such situations, we somewhat lost courage and the hope that the problem could be dealt with at all.

For one thing we saw very clearly: the problem is not so much the intellectual difficulty of formulating the differences between the types in a logical way, but rather the acceptance of a viewpoint that is diametrically opposed to our own, and which essentially forces the problem of the existence of two kinds of truth upon us.⁴³ Thus we arrived at a critical point of

⁴⁰ On the development of Jung’s thoughts on the question of psychological types prior to this correspondence, see the introduction.

⁴¹ On “analytical psychology,” see the introduction, note 22.

⁴² It is unclear when exactly these earlier discussions had taken place. They probably played a role in Schmid’s analysis with Jung (see the introduction and below).

⁴³ This goes beyond Jung (1913a), where he had asserted only that in psychology these two types had led to the two different theories of Freud and Adler.

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