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The authors of this book describe its purpose in the preface. It is first ‘to bring phenomenological approaches to personality into union with traditional empirical methods’, and secondly to re-examine the phenomenon of introversion in the light of the resulting methodology. Its depths and scope carry far beyond the areas of my own competence, and I shall not presume to assess its success or failure. Instead I shall simply summarize its contents and suggest what it might have to give to the general reader.
The underlying concern of the book is with the methodology of investigation and description. It is about ways of talking about experience which bring that experience near rather than push it farther away. It is thus concerned with the familiar problem of how we can be both scientific and human, empirical and personal, objective and subjective, reflective and experiencing. It carries the possibility of bridge building between positivistic psychology with its dependence on methods which tend invariably to reduce the living stuff of experience to something else—measures, analogies, abstractions, developmental processes—and analytical psychology with its concern for the subjective, irreducibly personal reality of human experience.
The authors begin with a detailed examination of the concept of introversion in Jung's writings. They discover two quite distinct models in his exposition in Psychological types, and while they criticize Jung for his failure to disentangle the concept of introversion from its interaction with culture, neuroticism and psychological function, as well as for his tendency to conceal the phenomenon behind theories and metaphors, they discover a rich, complex and subtle mine of thinking to form the basis for their further exploration. They have interesting explanations to offer to account for Jung's apparent loss of interest in the subject in later years. Altogether this section deserves to be studied by students of Jung for its own sake, quite apar