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Mary Loomis is well known to Jungian analysts for her work (with June Singer) on the Singer-Loomis Inventory of Personality (Slip), the first paper-and-pencil inventory of psychological type to attempt to measure the eight basic Jungian functions independently. (Other tests, especially the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator and the Gray-Wheelwrights Test, have forced-choice items which assume from the start that a thinking choice excludes a feeling one, and an intuitive choice a sensation one.) In this small, well-written book, she expands her view of the eight functions as separate cognitive modes into an exploration of how they can, in many ways other than as rigidly opposed opposites, be combined in the course of an individual's development.
All of us have extraverted sensation, introverted sensation, extraverted feeling, introverted feeling, extraverted thinking, introverted thinking, extraverted intuition, and introverted intuition in different degrees of development, pressing at different times towards greater conscious differentiation. The author's intention is to teach an attitude of relating to the types that does not discourage people from trying to develop any of the functions that may be ‘up’ for them for further work and that does full justice to the creative possibilities of association between functions in the developing individual. Using a new intuitive image to reframe Jung's system of classification of the kinds of consciousness for us, she suggests we stop thinking of the types as four functions, arranged as a static cross of mutually exclusive options, and rather learn to imagine them as we actually experience them, as eight stations on a wheel that calls for personality movement. In this circular model, the eight functions all find their place within a cycle of personality development, which admits bridges between any of the functions as well as orderly progress along the curve, thus allowing for the zigs and zags that make up the spiral of individuatio