Lectures on Jung's Typology by Hillman James & von Franz Marie-Louise

Author:Hillman, James & von Franz, Marie-Louise
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Spring Publications
Published: 2013-10-20T00:00:00+00:00

6

Jungian Descriptions and Distinctions

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I would claim for Jung that he did much for resurrecting feeling and separating it from the collective prejudices. Neither Bleuler nor Freud, the two psychological masters with whom Jung was most closely associated, clearly separated feeling from emotion, from passion, from affectivity. In psychiatric and psychoanalytic literature today the feeling function is still buried in the general category of affectivity, whereas Jung differentiated feeling as a function of consciousness equal to thinking, sensing and intuiting already in 1921 in his Psychological Types.

By conceptually differentiating feeling and considering it a function of consciousness, Jung made a major contribution to the history or the concept of feeling. In evaluations of Jung’s typological work this achievement is often overlooked, and thereby an essential aspect of Jungian psychology is often neglected, leading to many unnecessary arguments. It is crucial to the understanding of Jungian psychology that feeling be brought to bear upon it. We cannot read Jung by intellect alone. Conscious comprehension in Jungian psychology means as well feeling comprehension. All the principal conceptual symbols (e.g., introversion, shadow, archetype, self, synchronicity) are as well experiences of feeling.

The complex may be defined most simply as a group of feeling-toned ideas; the symbol is recognized by its effect on feeling as well as by its sensuous impression, its intuitional meanings and its ideational content. Even that general goal of a Jungian analysis—the cooperative relationship between ego consciousness and the unconscious dominants—is, as a relationship, largely a function of feeling. Jungian therapy is not, as it is sometimes mistaken to be, mainly a matter of self-knowledge. Self-realization is a process of feeling realization, realizing what we feel, feeling what we are; and this process begins with the first therapeutic session, to which the person comes often owing to his disturbed feelings and which opens often with that question “How do you feel?”

The assumption of feeling had its effect also on the later developments in Jung’s work, especially upon the anima concept and his explorations in many dimensions of the “feminine” pole of the psyche. The recognition of feeling can also be found in his rather free and open way of doing therapy unburdened by the rigidities of technique devised by intellect. His psychology therefore soon found ear among women and among artists, just as it soon met rejection—with notable exceptions—in those places where feeling is undervalued: contemporary scientific medicine and psychology and the academies of learning.

Jung came upon the role of feeling experimentally; his earliest descriptions of feeling stem from his association experiments; where he found pure affective reasons (“yes,” “bad” “like,” etc.) to stimulus words, rather than associations in the stricter sense. Already in this early work during the first decade of the century, we can trace two aspects of the concept of feeling: on the one hand, feeling as a function that “likes,” relates, makes judgments, connects, denies, evaluates; on the other hand, feelings as contents (hopes, longing, angers) that act in the association experiment as factors facilitating or disturbing associations.

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