[24 June 1915]
Dear Friend,
As you have guessed, dealing further with the question of the psychological types has not given me any real headaches. I have never been fainthearted or desperate, but in finding similar opposites in the most varied fields I have tried to find the consolation that development is not possible at all without opposites. I have never viewed the problem of the types as the existence of two truths, however, but I have rather envisaged, from the genetic point of view, the existence of two poles between which psychic development occurs.
When I read Bergson’s “Évolution créatrice” [Creative Evolution] two years ago, I tried to draw parallels between the urge toward abstraction and the urge toward feeling-into, on the one hand, and Bergson’s pairs of opposites: plant and animal life on the one side, and intellect and instinct, on the other.61 If life is always built upon the interplay between complementary, yet also diverging, tendencies, why shouldn’t this also be the case in psychology? Like Bergson, I conceived the opposites as springing from a common primordial type that originally united both tendencies in itself.62 As development progresses, everybody is following only one tendency and lets the other atrophy. If opposites develop in this process, it is still their purpose to complement each other. Just as the cycle of the content of carbonic acid and oxygen63 in the atmosphere is maintained by the antagonism of plant and animal life, I envisage that psychic development is made possible only by an antagonism between feeling-into and abstraction. “L’évolution … ne s’accomplit jamais dans le sens d’une association, mais d’une dissociation, jamais vers la convergence, mais vers la divergence des efforts.”64 In doing this, I have always tried to keep clearly in mind that the tendencies, into which the primordial tendency split, must be of equal value, for Bergson also writes: “Il faut que les éléments, en lesquels une tendance se dissocie aient la même importance et surtout la même puissance d’évoluer.” However: “on est tenté d’y voir des activités dont la première serait supérieure à la seconde et s’y superposerait, alors qu’en réalité ce ne sont pas chose de même ordre ni qui se soient succédé l’une à l’autre, ni auxquelles on puisse assigner des rangs.”65 Thus I, too, have been tempted time and again to see your standpoint as irrational, and mine as the only rational one. And it has taken me some time to realize that I am mistaken in having believed that everybody else would have to go to heaven in my own way.
I had no fear that through the knowledge of diametrically opposed types “the harmony of the world mechanism would be disturbed.” I rather took the view that dissonance is a conditio sine qua non of all harmony. But neither do I believe that the two types can lead an undisturbed existence of their own. Harmony is possible only when different tones sound together. I envisage harmony as being the result of a gradual process in which we come to explain our differences as “deux solutions divergentes, également élégantes d’un seul et même problème,”66 as Bergson said about instinct and intellect. Perhaps we will generally find still one or the other important parallel in Bergson’s work; thus, I would like, before dealing with your letter in more detail, to apply an introductory statement of Bergson (p. 148) to our problem: we have to bring all distinctions that we make into a too trenchant (trop tranché) form,67 because we want to define only what is typical in thinking and feeling, whereas there is actually a thought hidden in every feeling, and feeling is permeating every thought. Or, as you once put it, feelings are pregnant with thoughts, and thoughts are pregnant with feelings. “Il sera toujours aisé de rendre ensuite les formes plus floues, de corriger ce que le dessin aurait de trop géométrique, enfin de substituer à la raideur d’un schéma la souplesse de la vie.”68
In reading your letter I became clearly aware of the fact that in my eyes your standpoint is irrational. I find it absolutely incomprehensible how anybody could adjust to the object by way of abstraction: abstraction puts a distance between me and the object, and that is precisely why it prevents me from adapting to it.
Just as you want to purge your thinking, I want to purge my feeling of all projection, of all cold, lifeless calculation, of all that is purely intellectual and kills the feeling, and to raise it to the height of the truly vital feeling, which springs from my innermost sources and rises above all thinking, raise it to the height at which the feeling is pure and also crystal clear, and has risen above the clouds—which is as far beyond anything that is merely thought as your universal idea is beyond anything merely felt. It is not from fantasized and infantile thoughts that I want to free my feeling, as you write, because often the most important and productive problems are enclosed within my fantasized and infantile thoughts. But I want to purge my feeling of all egocentric thoughts, of all thoughts that are directed only at self-development and self-love.
To purify the feeling, I need the object, and herein lies perhaps one of the main differences between our types: the object is an obstacle only to purifying the thinking, whereas it is absolutely essential and necessary for purifying the feeling. I maintain that every development of the feeling is possible only via and with an object, because feelings that are not directed at the object are probably only what you call a “physiological sensation.” It was a struggle for me to finally realize that I cannot develop without the object. Thus I had to sacrifice an ideal of freedom, for I have to remain in a certain dependency on the object.
If I conceive those people with whom I have a closer relationship only as imagoes, as symbolic values of tendencies within myself, precisely that effect to which I owe the development and purification of the feelings will get lost: in doing so I cut them off from myself. Viewing things on the subjective plane, therefore, was no relief for me. It did do me the great service, however, of enabling me to see the imago in my feelings for other people, and insofar as another person represented a complex for me, it became possible for me to unlearn complex-related reactions. But if I carry my view of the other as no more than an imago too far, I will no longer be able to respond spontaneously and emotionally to him, and in my view it is in my feeling reactions that my greatest asset lies. In other words, I am depriving myself of the possibility of feeling me into the other when I view things on the subjective plane. I have to accept your explanation of my reactions on the subjective plane—to Herr Müller, for example—to the extent that he is an imago for me, or that my reaction is complex related. But even if I realize that what I do not like in Herr Müller corresponds to something I do not like in my own character, Herr Müller will still not have vanished from the earth for me. I am indeed married to him, because I need the object.
At a time when I still identified with you, I tried for several weeks to completely embrace your ideal: all my hatred and my love were nothing but reactions to imagoes, to tendencies within my own personality. I even accepted the phrase in your “Transformations and symbols of the libido”: “Beauty does not reside in the things themselves, but in the feeling we attach to them,”69 as a truth that was valid also for me. I thus succeeded in finding an attitude toward reality that was satisfying for the moment, but very soon I had to realize that by this one-sided attitude I deprived myself of any possibility of further development. I could no longer react spontaneously, my desire to feel myself into the other withered, I became lifeless, and I had the feeling I was violating myself.
So the reason why I find your standpoint irrational is that, when I assume it, I live irrationally myself. After I had realized this, there were moments when I discarded your standpoint as irrational even for you, and it seemed to me that from your standpoint it was no longer possible to love and to hate. But for me love means life. Goethe, who was more of a feeling person, wrote to Jakobi (10 May 1812), the purely intellectual one, when the latter sent him his book, Von den göttlichen Dingen und ihrer Offenbarung [Of Divine Things and Their Revelation],70 that if he, Goethe, had published a similar work, there would have had to be an inscription on the back of the title page: “We get to know nothing but what we love, and the deeper and the fuller our knowledge is supposed to be, the more forceful, stronger, and livelier must be our love, even our passion.”71 I have to confess that I, too, firmly believe that even knowledge is predicated on love. Although I realize today that it is a one-sided standpoint if you can know only what you love. For the feeling person, however, love for the object does play this great role. I know that this standpoint is diametrically opposed to yours, and I can understand today that you find it as irrational as I find yours. Perhaps we could also explain the urge toward abstraction and toward feeling-into like this: the urge represents a need to be relieved and liberated. The thinking person tries, through abstraction, to liberate himself from the object, from reality, which represents chaos to him; the feeling person tries, by feeling himself into the object, to liberate himself from himself, and from his chaotic feelings. The tendency toward liberation in the thinking person leads away from the object, that of the feeling person leads toward the object.
If we, you and I, could lead a separate existence side by side, undisturbed by each other, we would now be in agreement, in that each of us tries to accept the viewpoint of the other, even if considering it irrational. The past months seem to confirm, in my view, that our mutual relationship is not realized if each of us leads his separate existence. By the fact that we enter into a relationship with each other, one of us becomes an object for the other. My natural way leads me (if I may express myself one-sidedly on purpose) to feel myself into the object, whereas yours leads you away from the object. When I imagine that I represent mostly an imago for you, an imago, that is, which for you has the symbolic value of the irrational, it seems to me that you will not be capable of responding spontaneously to me. Also, when I think that I am mostly an imago for you, I feel I am being devalued, which in turn makes it nearly impossible for me to respond spontaneously toward you. I know that in making this statement I am exaggerating in a schematic way, but I find this necessary. I can imagine that a purely intellectual person would find it quite pleasant to be viewed by others as nothing but an imago; he would thus be protected against their spontaneous feeling reactions. But for the feeling person it is impossible to feel himself into another individual for whom he represents more or less exclusively an imago, because he feels that all reactions of the other are directed not to him or to his personality but only to an imago within the other.
In my view, this seems to be one of the difficulties with which we are confronted. For my part, I see a solution in my reaching the insight that what is irrational to me may be rational to me at the same time, because I must not accept only one truth, the truth that follows from the objective plane. I must learn to see that “all that is changeable is also but reflected.”72 But I must not view each object that presents itself to me primarily as only a symbol. Perhaps the same is true for you; primarily, the object can be only an imago for you, secondarily, however, a certain feeling into the object will be necessary for you, too.73
Perhaps the antagonistic, yet complementary relation between the two types, as assumed above, consists in the fact that they force each other to place more emphasis on the person’s own standpoint, but then also to exchange it for the other one. I’ll write more about how I see this later.
With best regards,
your Hans Schmid
61 Bergson explores these branchings of life energy throughout chapter 2 of his book, concluding that “consciousness, after having been obliged, in order to set itself free, to divide organization into two complementary parts, vegetables on one hand and animals on the other, has sought an issue in the double direction of instinct and of intelligence” (Bergson, 1907, p. 185).
62 Bergson speaks of “the dissociation of the primordial tendency into such and such complementary tendencies which create divergent lines of evolution” (ibid., p. 255).
63 Corrected from Kohlenstoff (carbon) and Wasserstoff (hydrogen). What Schmid had in mind is obviously carbon dioxide, not carbon or carbonic acid.
64 “[E]volution … is never achieved by means of association, but by dissociation; it never tends toward convergence, but toward divergence of efforts” (Bergson, 1907, p. 117).
65 “[T]he elements into which a tendency splits up are far from possessing the same importance, or, above all, the same power to evolve” (ibid., p. 118). “[W]e are generally led to regard them as activities of which one is superior to the other and based upon it, whereas in reality they are not things of the same order: they have not succeeded one another, nor can we assign to them different grades” (ibid., p. 135).
66 “ … two divergent solutions, equally fitting, of one and the same problem” (ibid., p. 143).
67 “Let us say at the outset that the distinctions we are going to make will be too sharply drawn” (ibid., p. 136).
68 “It will always be easy afterwards to soften the outlines and to correct what is too geometrical in the drawing—in short, to replace the rigidity of a diagram by the suppleness of life” (ibid., p. 137).
69 “Die Schönheit liegt ja nicht in den Dingen, sondern im Gefühl, das wir den Dingen geben” (Jung, 1911/12, reprint 1991, p. 176). This sentence was deleted in the revised edition (1952) and so does not occur in Symbols of Transformation and in the CW.
70 Jacobi, 1811. Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi (1743–1819), German polemicist, socialite, and literary figure.
71 In M. Jacobi, 1846, p. 254.
72 An allusion to Goethe’s Faust (part II): “All that is changeable is but reflected / The unattainable here is effected / Human discernment here is passed by / The Eternal-Feminine draws us on high.”
73 Crossed out: I would be interested in hearing your views on this.