extroversion

Note: Both Extraversion and its counterpart Introversion were introduced into psychology by Carl jung, apparently in the second decade of the twentieth century. The words occur in the text of a presentation given by Jung at a meeting of the International Psychoanalytical Congress in Munich (September 7-8, 1913), published in French in the same year ("Contribution à l'étude des types psychologiques," Archives de psychologie, tome 13 [1913], p. 290.) Introversion and the adjective introvertiert "introverted" appear earlier, in a somewhat different sense, in Jung's Über Konflikte der kindischen Seele (Leipzig/Vienna, 1910, pp. 6, 10). The above etymology assumes that Jung had in mind an already existing word, but he could have equally well formed Extraversion by substituting the prefix extra- for other prefixes joined to -version, taken as an independent formative. The choice of extra-, which ordinarily means "beyond," seems peculiar, and has led to re-formations of the word in English as extroversion, with extro- taken to mean "outward." On the other hand, extro- is a neologism made up as a correspondent to intro-, with no correspondent in classical Latin; perhaps this is why Jung avoided it.