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Feeling Function

Feeling Function

The feeling function is, in C.G. Jung’s strict definition, one of the four basic functions of consciousness — the rational faculty by which the psyche imparts value to a content, in the sense of acceptance or rejection, like or dislike. Jung classes it with thinking as one of the two rational functions, distinct from sensation and intuition, which he classes as irrational; the four together constitute a quaternity by which consciousness orients itself in the world (Jung 1921).

Jung is exact about this: “Feeling, like thinking, is a rational function, since values in general are assigned according to the laws of reason, just as concepts in general are formed according to these laws” (Jung 1921, §727). Feeling is not affect; affect is feeling intensified to the point of physical innervation. Feeling is not mood; mood is the diffused background of the function. Feeling is not emotion; emotion, in the post-Jungian refinement of james-hillman, is the larger event in which feeling participates (Hillman, in von Franz and Hillman 2013).

Structurally, the feeling function is paired in opposition with thinking: where thinking is differentiated, feeling is correspondingly underdeveloped, and vice versa. “The one-sided emphasis on thinking is always accompanied by an inferiority of feeling” (Jung 1921, §955). This is the inferior function problem, and it is why a thinking-type’s feeling tends to appear as crude, archaic, contaminated with sensation or intuition, and often projected onto figures of the anima or animus.

The classical root of the function is thumos — the Homeric organ of affective and evaluative life. The function-theory of 1921 is the modern stratum of an inheritance whose deepest stratum is the somatic interiority of the Homeric hero, the chamber in which value is weighed (Peterson 2025).

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