One is struck by the enormous diversity of human individuals
Carl Jung Depth Psychology Facebook Group
I have given a detailed description of a purely psychological typology in my book Psychological Types.
My investigation was based on twenty years of work as a doctor, which brought me into contact with people of all classes from all the great nations.
When one begins as a young doctor, one’s head is still full of clinical pictures and diagnoses.
In the course of the years, impressions of quite another kind accumulate.
One is struck by the enormous diversity of human individuals, by the chaotic profusion of individual cases, the special circumstances of whose lives and whose special characters produce clinical pictures that, even supposing one still felt any desire to do so, can be squeezed into the straitjacket of a diagnosis only by force.
The fact that the disturbance can be given such and such a name appears completely irrelevant eside the overwhelming impression one has that all clinical pictures are so many mimetic or histrionic demonstrations of certain definite character traits.
The pathological problem upon which everything turns has virtually nothing to do with the clinical picture, but is essentially an expression of character. ~Carl Jung, CW 6, Para 970
A type is a specimen or example which reproduces in a characteristic way the character of a species or class.
In the narrower sense used in this particular work, a type is a characteristic specimen of a general attitude occurring in many individual forms.
From a great number of existing or possible attitudes I have singled out four; those, namely, that are primarily oriented by the four
basic psychological functions: thinking, feeling, sensation, intuition.
When any of these attitudes is habitual, thus setting a definite stamp on the character of an individual, I speak of a psychological type.
These function-types, which one can call the thinking, feeling, sensation, and intuitive types, may be divided into two classes according to the quality of the basic function, i.e., into the rational and the irrational.
The thinking and feeling types belong to the former class, the sensation and intuitive types to the latter.
A further division into two classes is permitted by the predominant trend of the movement of libido, namely introversion and extraversion.
All the basic types can belong equally well to one or the other of these classes, according to the predominance of the introverted or extraverted attitude. ~Carl Jung, CW 6, Para 835
The role played by the collective in the human culture is decisive.
The individual fate of the hero-and the creative Great Individual is indeed a hero-may be the exception, but he is also the exemplar of a process which subsequently affects all individuals in varying degree.
The average ego, the average individual, remains fixed in the group, although in the course of development he is compelled to give up the original security of the unconscious, to evolve a conscious system, and to take upon himself all the complications and sufferings which such development entails.
For the primary security of the unconscious he exchanges the secondary security of the group.
He becomes a group member, and the average man spends at least half his life-the essential part of his development- adapting to the group and allowing himself to be molded by collective trends.
The role played by the collective in the human culture is decisive.
Society, with its conscious postulates, sets up an authority, a spiritual tradition which, spoken or unspoken, forms the background of education,
The individual is molded by the collective through its ethos, its customs, laws, morality, its ritual and religion, its institutions and collective undertakings.
When one considers the original submergence of the individual in the collective, one sees why all collective orientations are so binding and are accepted without question. ― Erich Neumann, The Origins and History of Consciousness, Page 426-427
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