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Feeling Versus Affect

Feeling Versus Affect

A persistent confusion in Jungian discourse identifies the feeling-function with affect or emotion. Jung distinguishes them quantitatively: “When the intensity of feeling increases, it turns into an affect, i.e., a feeling-state accompanied by marked physical innervations. Feeling is distinguished from affect by the fact that it produces no perceptible physical innervations” (Jung 1921, §725).

james-hillman judges this distinction insufficient and refines it qualitatively. Affect is “largely a physiological expression” — a partial, primordial release dynamism, “rather close to what animal behaviorists speak of with the term ‘inborn (instinctual) reactions,’ or psychiatrists with ‘primitive reactions.’” Emotion, by contrast, “is a total event of the personality, based perhaps in affect or having an affective component, and containing a feeling dimension. Many levels are activated, and consciousness becomes transformed through an emotion to a symbolic kind of consciousness” (Hillman, in von Franz and Hillman 2013).

The taxonomy that emerges:

  • Affect — physiological release, partial, often involuntary
  • Feeling — the conscious discriminating faculty; valuation
  • Emotion — the larger event embracing both affect and feeling

The clinical importance of the distinction is that affect lowers the mental level (in Janet’s sense), while feeling raises it through discrimination. The patient overwhelmed by affect is not exercising the feeling function; the patient speaking from the feeling function may appear, paradoxically, calm. This is why Hillman observes that “the person who seems to have so much feeling and be so full of feelings may not be a ‘feeling type’ at all, whereas a feeling type, because he disposes of feelings quite equanimously, may seem utterly devoid of feelings, distant and disinterested” (Hillman, in von Franz and Hillman 2013).

The discrimination matters because the feeling-toned-complex gathers around affect while feeling, properly exercised, is the faculty by which the complex is discerned and held.

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