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

EDITORS’ NOTE: This summary is quite obviously from Jung’s own hand, presumably written when considering the correspondence for publication. The translation is based upon the text as published by Iselin (1982, pp. 122–30).

Jung: Correspondence with Schmid

A person with intellectual abilities instinctively prefers to adjust to the object by way of thinking (abstraction), whereas a person whose feeling exceeds his intellectual abilities prefers to adjust to the object by way of feeling himself into it. This results in the rational quality of thinking in the former and the rational quality of feeling in the latter. Owing to the preference of thinking, feeling- into will remain in a relatively undeveloped state and will thus function in an irregular, unpredictable, and uncontrollable way—in one word, irrationally. Naturally man, ever mindful of his role as Homo sapiens, tries to control the irrational with the rational, so that the thinking person wants to force his feeling to serve his thinking, and the feeling person his thinking to serve his feeling.

The stronger my ideal is, and the more I cherish it, the more I actually have to condemn the other, because he²⁷² acts contrary to my ideal—which I naturally consider to be the ideal. After all, I want to purge my thinking of all that is erratic and unaccountable, of all pleasure and unpleasure of personal

²⁷² In Iselin: es=it. Very probably either a writing error of Jung’s, or an error in the transcription, for er=he (see the almost identical passage in 1 J).

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