Phenomenological Correlates of Jung's Typology

Jung's type theory (1921) is accorded great pragmatic value by latter-day analytic psychologists. Brawer and Spiegelman (1964) maintain, in fact, that Jung's typology represents his second most important contribution to personality theory; these authors give first rank to his discovery of the archetypes. However, apart from the two attitude types (extravert and introvert), the function types (sensation/intuition and thinking/feeling) appear to have been largely overlooked in empirical personality research since Jung (1921) first set them forth.

In a not entirely unsympathetic critique of the Jungian system of psychology, two Freudian writers, Friedman and Goldstein (1964), acknowledge the considerable influence that Jung's concept of extraversion/introversion has had on contemporary psychology and psychiatry. The function types are, however, dismissed by them in a footnote:

… his [Jung's] classification of psychological types into the four subclasses (thinking, feeling, sensation, intuition) which cut across the two major categories of introvert and extravert. This fourfold classification obviously is an arbitrary one. It has raised much less interest than Jung's main distinction between introversion and extraversion (Friedman and Goldstein, 1964, pp. 213-14).

Possibly the difficulty in operationalizing the function type constructs may have contributed to their neglect as variables in empirical research. Jung is said to have remarked ‘… half-jokingly, that one would have to wait thirty years after a person's death in order to say with certainty to which type he belonged’ (Brawer and Spiegelman, 1964, p. 137). A number of instruments have attempted to measure these concepts; in addition to the rather numerous instruments which provide valid indices of extraversion/ introversion (e.g. the Guilford-Zimmerman Temperament Survey, ). The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (Myers, 1962) is one device, among