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As John Beebe states in his foreword, the central task of this substantial volume is to update ‘Jung's project for a contemporary audience’. For Giannini, this involves demonstrating the archetypal value of Jungian typology individually, professionally, and more generally in society. He aims to move typology out of the shadows and into depth psychology.
Giannini begins at the finishing point of Psychological Types , in which Jung described the two attitudes of Introversion and Extraversion and the four functions of Thinking (T), Feeling (F), Intuition (N) and Sensation (S). Although the notion of type as archetype was implicit, Jung never systematically explored the connection. Giannini attributes this omission to Jung's personal typology: as an ‘NT Ethereal’ he was too unsystematic to follow through his understanding of typology as archetypal pattern. Giannini plumbs the depths of typology, endeavouring to substantiate an archetypal substratum that justifies the description of typology as the ‘Compass of the Soul’. ‘When we hear a description of our typology, we feel in a deep way that something substantial in our Soul has been touched’, a feeling described by Jung as ‘numinal accent’.
The author offers a thorough and detailed history of typology including the development of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, comparing this with other statistical measurements of type. He is particularly appreciative of Isabel Myers for placing at centre stage the type couplings of dominant and auxiliary functions by identifying them as universal patterns of human differences. Giannini arranges these function couplings similarly to Jung's individual functions, with a dominant, auxiliary, second auxiliary and inferior coupling. His theory is supported by clinical examples of couplings and illustrated throughout by circular type diagrams, which Mary McCaulley, who contributes to the preface, calls ‘circumplexes’. These diagrams become three dimensional and more or less complex as type and