The Jung Schmid Letters
THE JUNG-SCHMID LETTERS
Between 1915 and 1916, Jung conducted an extensive theoretical discussion on the question of psychological types with his colleague, Swiss psychiatrist, Hans Schmid-Guisan (1881–1932).
Schmid first met Jung in 1911 and subsequently went to Zürich to study with Jung and became a member of the Zürich group of the International Psycho-Analytical Association. In 1913 he started a psychiatric practice in Basel, and was amongst those who sided with Jung when he broke with Freud. They maintained a close friendship up until Schmid’s early death in 1932.
The value of this correspondence is that it shows how Jung’s thinking about the type problem evolved from his original 1913 conception, rigidly linking extroversion to feeling and introversion to thinking, toward the flexible four-function two-attitude model we know today, which is the basis of the most widely used paper and pencil test of normal personality orientation in the world today, the Myers Briggs Type Indicator.
As increasing numbers of type practitioners begin to take the measure of Jung’s insights into how consciousness organizes itself through functions of thinking, feeling, sensation, and intuition, which it deploys, according to its preference, in either extroverted or introverted ways, it has become important to learn how Jung arrived at this understanding.
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Editors + Translators
John Beebe
Ernst Falzeder
Hans Schmid Correspondence – Quotations
Carl Jung and Hans Schmid – YouTube
Carl Jung/Hans Schmid Correspondence:
It is more likely that in the unconscious of the introvert there is a love for the object that compensates his fear of it, while in the unconscious of the extravert there is a fear that compensates his love for the object. ~Carl Jung, Jung-Schmid Correspondence, Page 55.
The introvert needs the object for his thinking, because it is precisely via the object that he adapts to outer reality. ~Carl Jung, Jung-Schmid Correspondence, Page 57
The attitude he [the introvert] assumes toward the object is a certain rejection, therefore, which can even develop into a kind of fear of the object. His primary reaction toward the object is actually not love but rather fear. The ancients knew these two original powers well, the eros and phobos. ~Carl Jung, Jung-Schmid Correspondence, Page 55.
While the introvert’s conscious attitude is an impersonal and just attitude of power, his unconscious attitude aims at inferior lust and pleasure; and while the extravert’s conscious attitude is a personal love for human beings, his unconscious attitude aims at unjust, tyrannical power. ~Carl Jung, Jung-Schmid Correspondence, Pages 55-62.
Introversion: I have to realize that my object, apart from its reality, is also a symbol of my pleasure, which I unconsciously try to gratify with its help. Extraversion: I have to realize that my object, apart from its reality, is also a symbol of my power, the approval of which I try to obtain from it. ~Carl Jung, Jung-Schm1d Correspondence, Pages 55-62.
I would say: the introvert also tries, through the hypothesis of abstraction, to reach the object, actually reality, which seems to him chaotic only because of the projection of his unused and therefore undeveloped feeling. He tries to conquer the object by thinking. But he wants to reach the object quite as much as the extravert. ~Carl Jung, Jung-Schm1d Correspondence, Pages 55-62.
What the extravert calls human is just “all too human” for the introvert. What the introvert calls human is airy and gaseous for the other.
