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

6. VII. 15

Dear Friend,

I did not take your remarks in the first letter as an expression of your personal statement. I contrasted your hypothetical thinking with my hypothetical feeling in hypothesizing that your remarks were your personal conviction. I reacted to this hypothesis, but I was well aware of the fact that it was only a hypothesis. I find it absolutely mandatory that we should give each other the credit to assume that neither of us wants to react in a personal way against the other; but we must, in order to get spontaneous reactions, adopt the attitude that each of us writes as if the one would think in this way, and the other feel in this way.

In order to avoid further misunderstandings, which I believe are looming, I would like, before going into your letter in more detail, to communicate the following views to you. In your first letter you write of two kinds of truth, and you will probably remember that I told you months ago that in my view everybody had to solve two mutually opposed problems. In accordance with my type, I have since called these problems “ideals.” Now I think that what you mean by two kinds of truth, and what I call two ideals, to be identical, but that this duality is actually not identical with the two types, although it seems to be so from the standpoint of each individual. Allow me, the concrete or objective [gegenständlich] (as Goethe calls it)⁸⁶ or symbolic thinker, to make myself clear with the help of an image.

⁸⁶ The German psychiatrist and philosopher Johann Christian August Heinroth (1773–1843) characterized Goethe’s way of thinking as “concrete” or “objective” [gegenständlich]. Goethe fully agreed with this characterization, for example, in his essay “Significant help from a single clever word,” quoted by Schmid later on in this letter.

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