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THE PUBLICATION of Psychological types in the Collected works prompts some reflections on a theory that has stimulated longer if not more sustained interest than any other of Jung's formulations.
My first reflection is this: in his classical presentation there is, by intention, no single case study; Jung says (1921, p. xi): ‘It is not my intention to burden the reader with case material; my concern is rather to show how the ideas I have abstracted from my practical work can be linked up, both historically and terminologically with an existing body of knowledge. I have done this … from a desire to bring the experiences of the medical specialist out of their narrow professional setting into a more general context, a context that will enable the educated layman to derive some profit from them.’ (ibid., p. xiii): ‘Yet what I have to say in this book … has, sentence by sentence, been tested a hundredfold in the practical treatment of the sick and originated from them in the first place.’
It is commonly believed that Jung developed his theory during conflicts in the psychoanalytic movement; indeed in Memories, dreams, reflections he says, ‘This work sprang originally from my need to define the ways in which my outlook differed from Freud's and Adler's’ (p. 198). There is, however, reason to believe that though the introversion-extraversion contrast crystallized then, he had laid its foundation some time before especially in his experimental work. Besides individual differences in responses to stimulus words there were also types of reaction which transcended the individual. In ‘The associations of normal subjects’ (1904) he, with Riklin, classified responses into two main types: the objective and egocentric adjustment types of which Eder remarks, ‘There are certain obvious relationships