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

29. VIII. 15

Dear Friend,

Your letter gives me the impression of being very helpful in clarifying the situation.

Let me begin right away by explaining my view regarding the question of the teacher in more detail. I have always agreed to call her an ideally oriented extravert insofar as she only follows her ideal type, that is, the feeling type, or, to revert to my previous image, she is ideally oriented because she only sails. But in my view she uses a still archaic sailing boat, with which she can sail only with favorable and strong wind, and when there is no such wind, she blames the wind for not being able to get ahead. In my opinion someone is an archaic, ideally oriented extravert, then, who believes it depends on the wind, on the object, whether he is a good or poor sailor, someone who holds the object responsible and thus violates it. The ideally oriented extravert does not typically have the unpleasant quality of expecting the object to make the wind for him to sail with. This attitude is nearly always present, however, in hysterical, pathological cases, and also in coarse, uncultivated extraverts. A rather sensitive and aesthetic extravert can very well be ideally oriented, but he knows that, if he cannot go on sailing, it is not the fault of the object but of his own inability to make use of every wind current. The greater his values, the better will he be able to develop his sailing skills, and he will finally learn the art, unknown in antiquity, of “sailing against the wind.” An extravert of any aesthetic sensitivity does not take possession of the object itself, as you write, but, just as the introvert takes possession of the idea of the object, the extravert takes possession of the feeling for the object.¹²⁸ Only

¹²⁸ This differentiation depends on the assumption that the ideal introvert has already been orienting himself to the object via the thinking function in

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