This paper compares the notion of ‘conflict as difference’ in Jung's typology and Kierkegaard's irony. The discussion rests on two key texts: Jung's Psychological Types (Jung 1990) and Kierkegaard's Concept of Irony (Kierkegaard 1992). Alluding to the archetypal and still unresolved splits in the history of psychoanalysis, the generation of conflict is specifically located in epistemic difference. Philosophy and psychoanalysis are deployed comparatively as methods that attempt to frame and resolve this specificity of conflict as it applies to the individual, societal organisation and the political State in their desire to annihilate the epistemically and culturally different other.
The central thesis examined here is that conflict is a psychological incapacity to tolerate difference, dependent on claims to knowledge or truth. Thus knowledge and truth claims different to our own become the site of conflict. In our unconsciously staged dramas, knowledge and truth can conflagrate difference into an inflamed mania that bursts out in the magnificent display of the death drive in action – the annihilation of others. Indeed, the brutality and violence of epistemic conflict is no stranger to the historical foundations of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy, which may be more concealed than historically or psychologically resolved.
Thus conflict depends on the element of difference in knowledge and truth claims to be fuelled and fed. This can break out as a consequence of our incessant activities in truth seeking or knowledge searching. In this epistemic location of conflict, Jung's typology is compared with irony in Kierkegaard as a recognition of the problem stated here.
Jung's Psychological Types, elaborating his typology schema in 1921, originated from profound conflicts that were professional, social and political. Typology repeated itself as a question before it became an answer to personal dilemmas he found in these fields. It is also clear that Jung did not fully understand the implications of his typology and was unable to use it when he needed to in Zurich or his relationship with
Freud. The reading of Jung's typology here drastically differs from the use made of personality classifications in the notorious Chapter 10 of Psychological Types which contains somewhat banal descriptions of type combinations. Against Jung's vehement protest, this chapter became exploited in isolation from the rest of the text, generating the rise of personality testing, personality profiling and personality inventories, the most popular of which is the Myers Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI). Instead, the reading of Jung's typology here situates it in the original conflicts from which it emerged.
Nearly all biographers promote Jung's narrative that the problem of typology arose solely in the conflictual differences between Freud and Adler, even though Jung was aware of conflictual differences between Freud and himself. This forms the professional setting or stage on which Jung's typology is presented in its official guise – a ‘spectacle of this dilemma’:
…a difference of temperament, a contrast between two types of human mentality, one of which finds the determining agency pre-eminently in the subject [introvert], the other in the object [extravert]…. The spectacle of this dilemma made me ponder the question: are there at least two different human types, one of them more interested in himself? And does that explain why the one sees only the one and the other only the other, and thus each arrives at totally different conclusions? (Jung 1999: 43)
What Jung queried was not the plurality of subjective truths that resides in all individuality as a generality, but the determined opposition of truth and knowledge claims that carry the need for supremacy in the rhetoric of ‘science’ or ‘objectivity’, and where difference is eliminated or rejected as ‘error’. Although Jung had prior theoretical interests in William James' distinction between the empirically ‘tough-minded’ (Freud as extravert) and the romantically ‘tender-minded’ (Adler as introvert) (Shamdasani 2003), it was this intimate, personal and professional setting that escalated the problem of conflicting knowledge
claims and the aggressive, annihilatory refusal to accommodate equally valid differences. Jung understood such belligerent epistemic superiority as a psychological construct and determination. Thus Jung's typology is strongly applicable to the professional guises of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy both historically and today. For Jung, whilst professional doctrines and ideologies rage on in conflicts, knowledge and truth claims feeding these conflicts constellate around the personality types of extravert and introvert. His typology adopts a radical position within epistemic conflicts in a bid to accept and bring professional differences together whilst diminishing aggression. If his typology failed in application to the professional competition between Freud, Adler and himself, it was because it had yet to be formulated robustly by the time of the 1914 secession of the Zurich Psychoanalytic Association from the International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA).
Indeed, Jung's typology was deeply impacted by the fall-out from the famous conflict and break with Freud and the IPA in what was to be called ‘the experiment’. That break created social pressures that went beyond the professional in what ensued, where typology again presented itself as a question of differences located in the search for knowledge.
Jung's Zurich approached learning differently to Freud's Vienna, just as Karl Abraham's Berlin was to differ in the pedagogic evolution of the IPA and psychoanalysis. In 1908, prior to the founding of the IPA in 1910, Jung and Bleuler were joint editors of the new journal initiative called the Yearbook for Psychoanalytic and Psychopathological Researches (commonly known as the Jahrbuch). In Zurich, psychoanalysis was structured around collegiate research, critical enquiry and the formation of the Zurich Psychoanalytic Association (ZPA). The term ‘association’ was a dominant signifier for Jung not just because of the association experiments conducted with his colleague Franz Riklin, but because it informed his view of what psychoanalysis could be as a mode of enquiry and as a profession. It is also a key word that Freud mentions in his conflict with Jung (Freud 1914) – yet another switch away from the term ‘libido’. Thus Zurich appeared to foster collaborative learning rather than the exactitude of doctrinaire formulation that preoccupied Vienna.
Knowledge and truth claims were understood to be diverse and different rather than monolithic.
To understand the rejection of leadership in Jung's typology regarding truth and knowledge, we need to note that it was not Jung but Alphonse Maeder who was the President of the ZPA which, located at the Burghölzli, was comprised of doctors not just locally but as far away as Hungary and Italy (for instance, Sandor Ferenczi and Roberto Assagioli, the latter being the founder of the transpersonal psychology known as Psychosynthesis). Such was the attraction of ‘association’ in the search for knowledge and learning processes at Zurich. Meanwhile, another group comprised mostly of analysands/clients had formed the first patient network by 1912 (Shamdasani 1998: 14). It was pioneered and headed by Riklin and called the ‘Society for Psychological Endeavours’. There is no evidence that Jung attended any of their meetings. Instead, Jung held talks or seminars at his house in Küsnacht for both doctors and analysands that came to be called the ‘Psychological Club’. Eventually, Jung and Riklin merged their groups into the one ‘Psychological Club’. After the break with Freud's IPA in 1914, the ZPA members left the Burghölzli, but over time also joined the Psychological Club. This was an extraordinary dismantling of hierarchies in the search for psychological knowledge or truth, where the concepts of association and personality type were brought under the informal examination of social or democratic enquiry. In two separate letters to Maeder, Jung wrote:
…we know nothing about the collective function of individuals and its conditions….I agreed with the idea of the Club, because it seemed to us to be of the greatest importance to experience how analysed people met without compulsion, and where the flaws in our analysis of the collective function lay…. The experiment must be made…..(Shamdasani 1998 :25)
The ‘experiment’ was not group or residential therapy. It was an active socialisation between analysts and their clients on an equal footing of human-to-human encounter. The aim of the experiment was to
explore the difference of psychological types at a social-collective level as associative knowledge gains rather than as conflicting or competing epistemologies.
Although Jung consciously rejected projections of leadership onto him, problems with hierarchy, dissension, splits and exiles continued in Zurich, just as they were to do at the IPA he had left. But the interest in democratizing psychoanalysis and dethroning the superiority of the analyst were a deliberate exhumation of different mentalities with their knowledge and truth claims working through the filters of psychological types. Analysts were to meet, think, speak and ‘be friends’ with their equal professional counterparts – their clients or analysands. In this setting, typology was to emerge as an informed response regarding knowledge and truth claims. It did not do so – but the experiment was made and its processes and outcomes comprise the 550 pages of Psychological Types. Thus Jung's typology cannot solely be used or exploited as a rigid taxonomic classification based on one chapter alone (Chapter 10). The whole text of Psychological Types is better read as a democratizing of truth and knowledge claims based on associative rather than conflictual responses to difference.
Published in 1921, Jung's Psychological Types was also a response to the mass slaughtering that took place during World War 1 which ended in 1918. Jung's typology had not just a professional and social but also a political dimension that it aimed to address. What interested Jung here was the idea of ‘barbarity’ or ‘barbarian’ - a word that is repeated in Psychological Types. It sits as an analysis of a sickness at the heart of white European civilisation in which other cultures and their knowledge forms are annihilated and destroyed as inferior. Jung wanted to explore that need for an annihilation of other cultures with an assumed supremacy or superiority of the European white man. Barbarity as a terror or phobia of other cultures and a compulsion to destroy them was contrasted with the primitive and the savage who, harmless as they were relative to the killing technologies of white Europeans, showed up the specific shadow and residing ‘evil’ of the ‘white man’. Here, he brings the polarity of the rational-irrational to view as it operates in the collective psyche and the
profound sickness or lunacy at the centre of rationality in white European civilisation:
Thus the rational attitude of culture necessarily runs into its opposite, namely, the irrational devastation of culture. (Jung 1999: 72)
It is important to note that Jung's uses of colonial language regarding ‘barbarians’, ‘primitives’, ‘savages’ and ‘Negroes’ is not in any way an endorsement of white supremacist politics. Instead, he deliberately and provocatively uses these terms from the Europe of his day to claim that negative and pejorative meanings in such language actually belong to the profound psychological inferiority and kleptomaniac poverty of white European civilisation projected onto other races and their cultures. This is demonstrated, for instance, by Jung's visit to African Americans to analyse the dreams of ‘Negroes’ held in asylums, during his visits to America in the early 1900s. He made extended visits to Algeria in 1921 and tropical Africa in 1926, as well as Mexico, India and Italy (Jung 1995). He had no doubt that so-called ‘primitives’ and ‘savages’ had a far superior relation to nature and communal life than the industrialised and technology driven white European. Numerous examples are given in Chapter 9 of his biography where Jung the white European is deeply identified with other ethnic cultures as an unconscious connection of his humanity and psyche with theirs:
In travelling to Africa to find a psychic observation post outside the sphere of the European, I unconsciously wanted to find that part of my personality which had become invisible under the influence and the pressure of being European. This part stands in unconscious opposition to myself, and indeed I attempt to suppress it…there was the danger that my European consciousness would be overwhelmed by an unexpectedly violent assault of the [collective] unconscious psyche…I was not prepared for the existence of unconscious forces within myself which would take
Page 57the part of these strangers with such intensity, so that a violent conflict ensued. (Jung 1995:273)
This needs to be borne in mind in Jung's allegation of ‘barbarian’ at what he terms white ‘Europa’. Jung's engagement with the political as an expression of psychological forms and forces in which the supremacist cultural and institutional truth or knowledge claims of white ‘Europa’ do not accommodate difference, experiencing that instead as threat and annihilatory conflict, gives us the clues to the ground of his typology that played out extensively in the text of Psychological Types. Jung's typology originated in a dynamic ground that drove typologies and types into the political. In his typology, the politics of governmental and institutional white ‘Europa’ was a place where the rational was driven by the irrational, with compulsive needs to annihilate difference in the other.
A final point about the conditions from which Jung's typology emerged was the battle for the authority of the ‘science’ label for his work in analytical psychology. Much of this conflict is detailed in Shamdasani (2003). We merely need to note in passing that typology was uniquely redefined as a scientific and psychological frame by Jung in contrast to the direction of taxonomic classifications derived from the experimental laboratory work of Wilhelm Wundt and Emil Kraepelin.
Having explored some of the background to Jung's typology in the personal-professional, social and political, we can minimally sketch its outlines as put forward in Psychological Types.
Having announced the field of typology in his 1913 paper at the 4th IPA conference in Munich, Jung went on to explore this difference of types in a short correspondence with his close friend and fellow analyst, Hans Schmid-Guisan (Jung 2013). Positioning Schmid-Guisan as an extravert and himself as an introvert, Jung pushed the connection between personality type and truth claims even further. In the opening letter, Jung writes:
…the problem is…the acceptance of a viewpoint that is
Page 58diametrically opposed to our own, and which essentially forces the problem of the existence of two kinds of truth upon us. Thus we arrived at a critical point of the greatest order, because we had to ask ourselves, in all seriousness, whether the existence of two kinds of truth is conceivable at all. (Jung 2013:39-40)
The equal validity of opposing truth and knowledge claims are addressed at a stroke and cover all the fields mentioned above as driving pressures to produce a psychology of types or mentalities that was not mere classification. Logical error was now psychological fact requiring an explanation as to how and why it appeared into existence. There was no need for Jung to either negate or annihilate opposing claims of truth or knowledge with polemic or violence. All truth and knowledge claims have an equal psychological validity and legitimacy to exist. Jung admits at an early point in Psychological Types that it is tempting 'to deny the existence of types altogether and to believe only in individual differences. (Jung 1990:3). Instead, Jung makes the next definitive step in his type modelling. He provides a descriptor of two opposing attitudes or trajectories of energy adopted by consciousness:
…the introverted standpoint….gives the subject a higher value than the object …. the object represents no more than an outward token of a subjective content, the embodiment of an idea, the idea being the essential thing…. The extraverted standpoint… subordinates the subject to the object, so that the object has the higher value. In this case the subject is of secondary importance, the subjective process appearing at times as no more than a disturbing or superfluous appendage of objective events.’ (Jung 1990:5)
Put simply, the introvert attitude (Adler) is drawn inwards towards the internal world of ‘the idea’ and will annihilate any objects that may refute the direction of its ideational energy. The extravert attitude (Freud) is drawn outwards (biologically) towards the behaviour of the external object and will annihilate any ideas that may query or refute observations
or interpretations of the object's behaviour. Thus knowledge and truth claims originate in the dynamic orientation of consciousness as either introvert or extravert attitudes, which become fatal when locked into onesided claims. But Jung distinguishes ‘the conscious’ (what we are aware of in daily clock time) and consciousness because he posits a non-egoic Self. What this means is that consciousness is not part of our everyday awareness – it is not ‘the conscious’ or ‘what we can be conscious of’. It is a deeper, subliminal energy of the mind that streams through the personal unconscious and the collective unconscious, bringing both to our daily clock time ‘conscious’ or cognitively aware state. For Jung, consciousness is based on the Heraclitean principle for which he coined the term enantiodromia – where every accumulation of excess energy turns into its opposite. Thus rational becomes irrational, the civilised white European becomes barbaric, the primitive savage becomes an enlightened connection in mythical codes that honour our ecosystem and interdependence with Nature and each other.
The bifurcation of this Heraclitean consciousness into introvert as a psyche occupied with internal ideas and extrovert as a psyche occupied with external object behaviours was, for Jung, a ‘hypothesis’ of ‘such a superficial and general nature that it permits no more than this very general distinction (Jung 1990:6). To this, he further added four dominant mental functions: thinking, feeling, intuition and sensation. Combining attitudes of consciousness with mental functions produced the start of mistaken personality profiling – extravert thinking, extravert feeling, extravert intuition, extravert sensation, and their enantiodromic opposites for the introvert. The mistake that took place in Psychological Types was that these were not so much character or personality classifications as they were studies of the flow of consciousness founded on an enantiodromic, Heraclitean ground. This flow of consciousness through attitude-functions determined the conflicts of truth and knowledge claims.
Jung's typology delivers a frame in which we can re-calibrate and diminish any one-sided over accumulation of consciousness as an energy form locked in our attitude-function. If unattended, one-sided attitude-function produces cruelty, violence and death in relation to the different
other, whilst claiming truth and knowledge in doing so. When recognised, it creates the possibility of contact, connection and communication with the epistemologies of different attitude-functions, making conflict and annihilatory aggression redundant. In his typology, differences increase in proportion to decreasing conflict. The proliferation of difference and the diminishing of conflict form the basis of Jung's typology.
Having briefly discussed Jung's typology, we can now turn to Kierkegaard's irony. Even when omitting any background to Kierkegaard's The Concept of Irony, written in 1841, 80 years before Jung's Psychological Types, we can immediately locate similarities and differences to Jung's typological schema in the appearance of truth and knowledge claims as they relate to conflict. The focus will be on Part I of The Concept of Irony, which provides an analysis of Socratic irony. It compares different knowledge and truth claims about irony in Socrates as presented by Xenophon (the historian), Plato (the idealist) and Aristophanes (the comic satirist). This results in an aesthetic account of knowledge claims about Socrates which Kierkegaard wrote in a style described by his contemporary, Poul Møller, as ‘…so thoroughly polemical that it is quite appalling’ (Kierkegaard 1992:viii).
To begin with, Kierkegaard shares the inner-outer bifurcation of consciousness in terms that match Jung's introvert and extravert. Kierkegaard describes the entire basis of Socratic dialogue as requiring an introversion of ‘the I and its relation to the world.’ (Kierkegaard 1992:124). He then offers a strikingly similar description to Jung's introvert – but note the relation to conflict and polemic as he states the conditions of introvert dialogue:
…in the one case it is the I that continually devours the world…. the I is continually talking itself out of the world…a questioning that consumes the answer… (Kierkegaard 1992:124)
Kierkegaard sets this world of internal reflection and thought against an opposing extravert consciousness of:
…the I that wants to take up the world….is continually talking itself into the world….a questioning that develops the answer. (Kierkegaard 1992:124)
However, Kierkegaard does not allow for any transformation of these two positions of consciousness, as there is no connection between them. He needs irony as a device that holds the oppositions of consciousness in place. Though irony's gaze may oscillate from one to the other, the positions themselves can never change. In place of Jung's Heraclitean consciousness where energy transforms itself into its opposite and always carries its opposite in the hidden recesses of ‘the shadow’, Kierkegaard posits irony as an aesthetic mode of perception to hold the conflict of difference in view. To do this, irony stands outside all oppositions and opposing claims of knowledge and truth, but then has to set them in conflict with each other's differences because there is no connecting principle. For Kierkegaard, Socratic irony as a point of view presents difference as conflicted opposition that replaces the self-transforming flux of enantiodromia in Jung's Heraclitean-grounded consciousness. Thus Kierkegaard remarks: ‘…. the position of irony is negative, whereas that of reasoning is positive…’ (Kierkegaard 1992:123). And, elsewhere: ‘Irony oscillates between the ideal and the empirical.’ (Kierkegaard 1992: 128) Here we can equate the ‘ideal’ with Jung's introvert and the ‘empirical’ wit Jung's extravert.
This difference remains as a separation and is consequently held in polemical opposition or conflict. In Part I of The Concept of Irony, irony is defined as ‘an angle of refraction’ that sees one thing always in the light of its separate opposite. Irony rejects the useful, the practical, the empirical as the finality found in Xenophon's Socrates. Irony rejects the idea, the abstract, the poetic in Plato's Socrates because this remains speculative and unattainable. Irony does not identify with the dialectical (as scientific logic – logic without content) or the mythical (as poetic idea – the idea in a state of alienation). Truth and knowledge claims are reduced to the stasis of irreconcilable and competing opposites that make the other's different position nonsensical, illogical, irrational or mere
illusions of a blind folly. Sanity and logic lie in irony's aesthetic ‘angle of refraction’ that sees opposite positions but refuses to fully identify with them.
The next set of oppositions that Kierkegaard draws regarding knowledge claims of Socrates is between Plato as tragic thinker and Aristophanes as the satirical comic who portrays Socrates suspended in a basket between heaven and earth, stuck in the irony of never reaching any conclusions with his questioning. For Kierkegaard, Aristophanes the comic holds Socrates ‘infinitely in suspension’ (Kierkegaard 1992:129 ff.), where comic irony ensures Socrates' wisdom is a mere seductive folly that is socially worthless, abusive (it tears sons away from fathers and breaks down the family system) and powerless to bring about meaningful actions in individuals. Plato becomes laughable just as Aristophanes becomes vulgar under the gaze of irony. Neither gives us any true knowledge about Socrates.
History as the merely useful and practical in Xenophon, Ideality as a life-enhancing but tragic speculation in Plato, Comedy as the infinite suspension of useless and dangerous knowledge in Aristophanes make for three filters of competing knowledge and truth claims about Socrates, which Kierkegaard's irony, looking at all three, reduces to a nothing. We may be forced to adopt a position proclaiming either historic, or tragic or comic claims to knowledge with their linked discourses and modalities of alleging ‘truth’. But Kierkegaard's irony ensures that none of these can reach the status of a ‘truth’ or any definitive knowledge. Instead, the individual is left in a state of negation towards the different modes to which they do not belong. Differences between the pragmatically historical, tragic idealism and comic materialism of satire remain hostile, polemical and negatively critical of each other. Each perceptual orientation rests in an eternal isolation from the other. These mutually negating separations are how irony holds and maintains difference without reducing or eliminating conflict. By bringing conflict into view, irony reduces conflict to the less dangerous alternative of polemic for Kierkegaard. Irony requires polemic to reduce any conflagration of conflict because of the absurdity revealed in its comparisons.
Concluding Part I, Kierkegaard examines how Socratic irony positioned itself negatively in relation to the State of Athens regarding the two counts made against Socrates for which he was sentenced to death: rejecting the gods of the State and corrupting the youth of Athens. What is fascinating here is the relation of individuality to personality as a politics of irony. In Kierkegaard's reading of Socrates, irony emancipates the individual from the personality in order to oppositionally challenge the State with epochal significance.
Citing Hegel, Kierkegaard claims that Socratic irony does not represent ‘subjective freedom’ because Socrates relied on his daemon as the voice that warned him not to concede to the demands of the Athenian State. This daemon is not the State approved Delphic oracle but a personal voice that incites opposition and a negating irony towards Athens. It also corrupts the youth of Athens by encouraging them to think for themselves rather than obey their parents, eroding family structures that support Athenian State ideology.
For Kierkegaard, this means that Socrates was presented with an idea that did not allow him to sink into pure subjectivity, nor claim objective truth or knowledge to overthrow the State. In a devastatingly polemic journal entry attacking Hegel, Kierkegaard claims the State can never represent any moral good or virtue (Kierkegaard 1992:453-455). It is ‘evil’ and ‘a calculus of egotisms’ that correct each other but can never find a position outside their egotism. It practises injustice on a vast scale and calls it justice. It replaces ideas and concepts with numbers and quantification that have no relation to the moral or the ethical. In response to this, Socrates' claim to ignorance, a full and complete abdication of all truth and knowledge through his oppositional insistence on aporia, made him repeat the negation of irony with everyone he met – including the State of Athens. Kierkegaard concludes:
…that which makes him into a personality is precisely irony…. with the enormous elasticity of a world-historical viewpoint, he tipped one individual after the other out of the substantial actuality of the state.’ (Kierkegaard 1992:453-455)
Socrates' ironic negation emptied out the significance of institutional law and family authorities and hierarchies, without destroying them completely. They were kept within the realms of polemic conflict, within the view of difference as opposition to Socrates. The political result of Socratic irony was to create space to rethink the State by negating its claims to truth and knowledge in the forms of cultural compliance, power and force, legality and morality, and family structure.
Kierkegaard stresses that Socratic irony negates but does not annihilate. Whether this angle of refraction is applied to the historical, tragic, comic, dialectic or mythical claims of truth and knowledge, irony holds them in oppositional view without annihilating that opposition. Difference here can be nothing more than perpetual states of conflict in the realms of knowledge and truth. Meanwhile, the initial role of consciousness as introvert and extravert is entirely missed in its application to difference as conflict, since both forms of consciousness become subject to irony.
Both authors foreground the problematic nature of knowledge and truth as sites of conflict that undermine and destroy the very quest for the goal. Typology and irony are attempts to frame the destruction that we feel so compelled to re-enact not only in our social and political worlds, but also symbolically manifest in our profession by the first splits with Freud, Jung and Adler. Owning to the psychological incapacity of our psychotherapeutic profession to tolerate different knowledge forms is indeed ironic, but an irony that could bring some new attempts at collaborative dialogue and learning into view.
Kierkegaard offers irony as a perceptual modality for minimizing the grandiosity or omniscience/omnipotence of truth and knowledge claims. The aesthetic of irony expands the range of different epistemic angles into view. However, polemic in irony is necessary to reduce the grandiosities inherent in unreflective and dogmatic conflict.
Jung puts forward his typology frame that he repeatedly stated was not the only way to look at either human personality or conflicts. For Jung, different forms of knowledge can be enabled to flourish if
conflict and annihilatory aggression are diminished. To achieve this, the demarcation of his typology as two attitudes combining with four functions was supposed to be an attempt to increase our capacity for dialogue and shared or collaborative knowledge and truth claims. His typology aimed to recognise how each individual became stuck in a onesided fixation with an attitude and a function that excluded or annihilated any opposing views. In Jung's typology, such one-sidedness requires self-calibration or correction if humanity is to progress and evolve out of its barbaric propensities.
Both Kierkegaard and Jung refuse any sinking into pure subjectivity, trying instead to hold subjectivity in some relation to its oppositional other(s). Both connect the individual with the social and political Other – the one through ironic negation for new possibilities, the other searching for transformational upheavals of consciousness flows in human history. Whilst Kierkegaard sees knowledge shared through maintaining conflicting oppositions in view, Jung seeks to transform them into a balanced centre through contact and communication to proliferate difference and expand personality.
Both authors foreground the problematic nature of knowledge and truth as sites of conflict that undermine and destroy the very quest for the goal. Irony and typology are attempts to frame the destruction that we feel so compelled to re-enact not only in our social and political worlds, but also symbolised in our profession by the first splits with Freud, Jung and Adler. Owning the psychological incapacity of our profession to tolerate different knowledge forms is indeed ironic, but an irony that may bring some new attempts at collaborative dialogue and learning into view.