ABSTRACT
When Jung began to work on the psychological problem that he was attempting to solve with his theory of types, he had an international reputation as an investigator of the unconscious. Early on, he had allied himself with the burgeoning psychoanalytic movement, which had made the idea of the unconscious, already topical by the end of the nineteenth century, a world preoccupation. So in 1921, when his book Psychological Types appeared with its description of various attitudes of consciousness, it looked to some as if Jung had turned away from the concerns he had embraced so boldly in the first part of his career. He seemed a bit like that other prewar trailblazer, Picasso, who elected in the 1920s to abandon his cubist explorations of painterly depth for a conservative, neoclassical style that emphasized contour drawing in a conventional rendering of the human figure. Freud, who had long accused Jung of being in flight from the real unconscious because he could not accept the sexual theory, was able to crow to Ernest Jones:
A new production by Jung of enormous size, seven hundred pages thick, inscribed “Psychological Types,” the work of a snob and a mystic, no new idea in it. He clings to that escape he detected in 1913, denying objective truths in psychology on account of personal differences in the observer’s constitution. No great harm to be expected from this quarter (Paskauskas 1993:424).1
