The Feeling Type, as treated across the depth-psychology corpus, is far more contested and nuanced a category than popular understanding allows. Jung's foundational taxonomy in Psychological Types establishes feeling as a rational function — a process of evaluative orientation that assigns value rather than merely registering emotion — and designates the feeling type as one whose dominant mode of adaptation proceeds through this evaluative faculty. Von Franz and Hillman, in their Lectures on Jung's Typology, substantially complicate this picture: they dismantle sentimental clichés about the type's presumed warmth and relational virtue, demonstrating that differentiated feeling can be manipulative, spiritually flattening, and resistant to intellectual development. Hillman's contribution in particular presses the distinction between the feeling function and eros, between human evaluative consciousness and archetypal compulsion, insisting that feeling is an instrument of awareness rather than a divine force. The corpus also attends with care to the introverted and extraverted variants, to the feeling type's characteristic inferior thinking, and to the developmental pathologies that attend undifferentiated feeling — including the doctrinaire rigidity, emotional inflation, and omnipotence fantasies that characterize the inferior pole. Beebe, Quenk, and Sharp each extend these concerns into typological dynamics and practical clinical observation. Taken together, these voices reveal a type defined not by sentiment but by the capacity — and its frequent failure — for differentiated valuation.
differentiated feeling of the feeling type can get away with anything and can be just the reverse of honesty and straightforwardness… feeling types do not necessarily lead anything out of others.
This passage directly challenges received idealizations of the feeling type, arguing that differentiated feeling may be neither honest nor genuinely relational, and may actively suppress emergent psychic contents.
, Lectures on Jung's Typology, 2013thesis
When the subject's attitude as a whole is oriented by the feeling function, we speak of a feeling type… The feeling function is that psychological process in us that evaluates.
This passage provides the canonical Jungian definition of the feeling type as one whose orientation is governed by the evaluative feeling function, grounded in a structured feeling memory and a set of internalized values.
, Lectures on Jung's Typology, 2013thesis
Feeling The Extraverted Feeling Type… Feeling The Introverted Feeling Type Summary of the Introverted Rational Types
Jung's Psychological Types establishes the formal taxonomic placement of both extraverted and introverted feeling types within the broader system of rational types, anchoring the term's structural significance.
, Psychological Types, 1921thesis
Feeling types tend to become fantastic and emotional in thought, but the thought itself, so overwhelmingly important, cannot be thought further, cannot be carefully worked out. It remains doctrinaire.
This passage characterizes the pathology of the feeling type's inferior thinking function, describing its tendency toward rigidity, archaic ideas, and the inability to develop or refine intellectual positions.
, Lectures on Jung's Typology, 2013thesis
The extroverted feeling type is characterized by the fact that his main adaptation is carried by an adequate evaluation of outer objects and an appropriate relation to them.
Von Franz characterizes the extraverted feeling type as a person whose social ease and relational fluency derive from a finely calibrated evaluative orientation toward external objects and persons.
, Lectures on Jung's Typology, 2013thesis
Her personality appears adjusted in relation to external conditions. Her feelings harmonize with objective situations and general values… the love feeling of this type of woman is in perfect accord with her choice. It is genuine and not just shrewd.
Jung describes the extraverted feeling type's love and relational choices as genuinely consonant with outer values, resisting both cynical and idealized readings of the type's characteristic adaptation.
, Psychological Types, 1921thesis
Inferior feeling, to sum it up, may be characterized by contamination with the repressed, which tends to manifest… in ira and cupiditas. Inferior feeling is loaded with anger and rage and ambition and aggression.
Hillman defines inferior feeling — the underside of the thinking type's psyche — as contaminated by repressed affect, manifesting as rage, greed, omnipotence fantasy, and a morbid turning of feeling upon itself.
, Lectures on Jung's Typology, 2013thesis
it is quite legitimate to speak of people with much eros and little feeling, or differentiated feeling and little eros… the charming 'feeler,' or the introverted 'deep feeler,' may be far from being moved by the archetypal.
This passage draws a critical distinction between the feeling function as a human, evaluative instrument of consciousness and eros as an impersonal archetypal force, insisting the two must not be conflated.
, Lectures on Jung's Typology, 2013supporting
By conceptually differentiating feeling and considering it a function of consciousness, Jung made a major contribution to the history of the concept of feeling… feeling be brought to bear upon it. We cannot read Jung by intellect alone.
Hillman argues that Jung's conceptual differentiation of feeling as a function of consciousness — rather than a secondary or emotional phenomenon — constitutes his most significant contribution to the history of psychological thought.
, Lectures on Jung's Typology, 2013supporting
There is a time sense connected with the feeling function… The sense of timing and tact is a function of feeling often incompatible with the reason of thinking.
This passage identifies a characteristic temporal dimension of the feeling function — an orientation to the qualitative feel of discrete moments — that distinguishes it from thinking's clock-bound rationality.
, Lectures on Jung's Typology, 2013supporting
the development of feeling means an evolution of the function away from its narrowly subjective base towards a freer adaptation. It is the oversubjectivity that leads to the intensity of feeling life and the inadequacy of expression.
Hillman frames the development of the feeling type as a movement away from oversubjectivity toward freer adaptation, identifying mishandled feeling — rather than negative feeling content — as the source of relational and evaluative failure.
, Lectures on Jung's Typology, 2013supporting
we have become feeling addicts… Communication has become centered upon the description of feelings, replacing the communication of ideas and insights.
Hillman critiques the cultural inflation of feeling in therapeutic culture as a collective form of type one-sidedness, in which the personal expression of feeling displaces intellectual and spiritual communication.
, Lectures on Jung's Typology, 2013supporting
The easy escape, which I have seen in several cases of extroverted feeling types, is that they get out of the difficulty by simply selling their souls to some already established system.
Von Franz describes a characteristic defensive maneuver of extraverted feeling types, who compensate for undifferentiated thinking by adopting ready-made intellectual systems — including Jungian psychology itself — in a mechanical and uncritical way.
, Lectures on Jung's Typology, 2013supporting
feeling does not depend upon the gods; it is not a force, but an awareness, not a redemption, but an instrument.
Hillman draws a sharp ontological boundary between feeling as a human instrument of consciousness and love or eros as archetypal forces, insisting that feeling cannot be replaced by emotional or religious experience.
, Lectures on Jung's Typology, 2013supporting
Feeling is primarily a process that takes place between the ego and a given content, a process, moreover, that imparts to the content a definite value in the sense of acceptance or rejection.
Jung's formal definition of feeling as a rational, evaluative process — assigning acceptance or rejection to contents — establishes the theoretical ground for all subsequent typological treatment of the feeling type.
, Psychological Types, 1921supporting
In Jung's model, the term feeling refers strictly to the way in which we subjectively evaluate what something, or someone, is worth to us… to the extent that it is not colored by emotion, feeling can be quite cold.
Sharp clarifies the technical Jungian meaning of feeling as subjective evaluation of worth, distinguishing it from emotion and emphasizing that the feeling function, when undisturbed by complex, can operate with considerable coolness.
, Personality Types: Jung's Model of Typology, 1987supporting
George, an ENFJ (dominant Extraverted Feeling), hired Ellen, an INFP (dominant Introverted Feeling)… His unbounded enthusiasm seemed to indicate to her a lack of discrimination.
Quenk uses a clinical vignette to illustrate the behavioral and relational differences between extraverted and introverted feeling types, particularly the introverted feeling type's distrust of demonstrative appreciation as a sign of poor evaluative discrimination.
, Was That Really Me? How Everyday Stress Brings Out Our Hidden Personality, 2002supporting
feeling is often confused with intuiting. Feeling certain, feeling right, feeling something is rotten or fishy are all expressions of intuition.
Hillman identifies three common confusions — of feeling with sensation, intuition, and emotion — that obscure the precise technical character of the feeling function and its typological significance.
, Lectures on Jung's Typology, 2013supporting
The hostess, appropriate to her role, embodies extraverted feeling… a quiet, extremely ladylike woman with mysterious eyes, the type in whom 'still waters run deep,' is with him. She exerts a strangely magnetic effect on the other guests with her introverted feeling.
Beebe presents a narrative illustration differentiating extraverted and introverted feeling across social roles, emphasizing the contrasting modes of expression and interpersonal influence characteristic of each variant.
, Energies and Patterns in Psychological Type: The Reservoir of Consciousness, 2017supporting
Feeling shapes time, breaking it up into various kinds of feeling tones… Feeling time is organized in clusters, more like an organic growth.
Hillman elaborates the feeling type's distinctive temporal consciousness, characterized not by sequential clock-time but by clusters of qualitatively differentiated moments organized around feeling tone.
, Lectures on Jung's Typology, 2013supporting
Friendship offers a feeling context in which the shameful awareness of inferior feeling can be bared… Even analysis does not offer pathology such a warm home as does friendship.
Hillman argues that friendship — rather than analysis — provides the most appropriate container for the development and expression of inferior feeling, locating the feeling function's natural habitat in sustained personal relationship.
, Lectures on Jung's Typology, 2013supporting
the introverted thinking type's feeling has very much the same characteristics as the inferior feeling of the extraverted thinking type, with very black and white judgments, either yes or no, love or hate.
Von Franz characterizes the inferior feeling of thinking types — regardless of introversion or extraversion — as undifferentiated, absolute in its judgments, and vulnerable to contamination by collective affect.
, Psychotherapy, 1993supporting
Since university professors will on the average have inferior feeling, they will fall for that at once. Hitler had the art of doing this.
Von Franz uses Hitler's rhetorical manipulation of inferior feeling to illustrate how the undifferentiated feeling function of predominantly thinking types renders intellectual populations especially susceptible to emotional propaganda.
, Lectures on Jung's Typology, 2013aside
the study of feeling leads outside psychology and into social history and biography, family life and friendship.
Hillman situates the academic study of feeling within a broader interdisciplinary context, noting that three major symposia on feelings and emotions across the twentieth century have yet to resolve the field's fundamental questions.
, Lectures on Jung's Typology, 2013aside
the feeling of the introverted thinking type flows towards definite objects… 'I love you and it will be your business; I'll make it your business!'
Von Franz contrasts the extraverted feeling of the introverted thinking type with that of the extraverted thinking type, noting that the former's inferior feeling is directed outward and expressed with directness rather than concealment.
, Lectures on Jung's Typology, 2013aside