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The 100th anniversary of the publication of Psychological Types is remembered in this issue as the occasion for analytical psychology that it was - the introduction of a founding document in the understanding of the self-experience we call consciousness. This consciousness, which psychoanalysis had initially imagined that encounters with the unconscious would enlarge, had already been demonstrated by both Freud and Jung to be restricted by the very complexes that emerge when the unconscious is explored. What had not been demonstrated was the way the complexes, when listened to, could also become lenses through which the unconscious could be seen as being ‘onto’ something. Naming the functions and attitudes of such awareness was, for Jung, the way to realize the consciousness that hides in complexes. Unfortunately, his notion of complexes as keys to the psyche's self-regulation has not been explored as systematically as he had hoped.
The quality of the consciousnesses carried by the complexes became Jung's way of determining whether the spirit of a possessing complex was ‘of God’ (1939/1966, para. 72), but it could have been demonstrated just as well that the complexes expressed shadowy forms of consciousness. Both kinds of consciousness speak on behalf of a personal self. They are, in the mouth of that self, its rows of teeth, with which to bite into experience en route to its digestion. It has taken Jungian analysts a long time to see that patients cling to their complexes, not to prevent consciousness, but because the complexes are necessary to chewing what is on people's plates.
The papers and reviews in this centennial issue draw upon Jung's understanding of the eight function complexes that he identified as the toolkit of consciousness. They are arrived at in each of us by deploying the four functions of consciousness (sensation, thinking, feeling and intuition) in their extraverted and introverted attitudes within the different archetypal roles our lives require