A READER'S JOURNAL, Volume 1
Psychological Types
by
Carl Gustav Jung
Revision by R. F. C. Hull of Translation by H. G. Baynes
Published by Bollingen Press in 1976
A Book Review by Bobby Matherne ©2002
I devoted the month of June to reading this book on psychological types by the master. Having read various second and third hand descriptions of Jung's types over the past ten years I decided it was time for me to get the full undiluted treatment. It was equivalent to "jogging in the swamp" — it's slow going, you get mud splashed all over you at times, you fall in over your head many times, and it just plainly wears you out. That's a sensate description of the book — my inferior function, so forgive my crude attempt to communicate intelligently with you primary sensates (who probably aren't reading this review anyway — except you occasional secondary thinking types).
To you feeling types: you might enjoy this account better if you have someone read it to you that feels like they understand it. Then you may find your inferior thinking function activated enough to want to read it on your own.
To you thinkers: there's a bright shiny goldmine of connections and interconnections. Carl goes back to the Gnostics, to Tertullian and Origen, to Schiller, to Goethe, to Epimedes, he covers Abelard, Aquinas and Nietzche, delving into Apollonian and Dionysian types, into Galen's humours, into Romantics and Classics, into William James' types — and that's only the first few chapters. The possibilities for exposition would tax Mr. Spock's ental capacity.
And now for you intuitives — what a treat is in store for you — as you've always suspected — Jung has fleshed your type out so that the rational types can think about you and feel for you and the irrational sensate type ( your alter ego type) can understand you as the source of their most curious unconscious behavior under stress. Lastly, you extroverts can use this to line your spouse's bird's cage.
For more information, read my review of Marie von Franz & James Hillman's Lectures in their book, Jung's Typology.
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