feelings
Within the depth-psychology corpus, ‘feeling’ occupies a position of exceptional theoretical density, at once a discrete psychological function, an epistemological faculty, a somatic signal, and an archetypal force. Jung’s foundational intervention in Psychological Types establishes feeling as one of the four basic functions of consciousness — rational, evaluative, irreducible to sensation or thought — and subsequent Jungian commentators (von Franz, Hillman, Sharp, Beebe) spend considerable energy clarifying, critiquing, and extending this claim. Hillman in particular warns against conflating feeling with anima, with emotion, and with eros, insisting on the precision of the Jungian category. A parallel and partially convergent tradition, represented by Damasio, Craig, Barrett, and Levine, treats feeling as fundamentally somatic: an interoceptive monitoring of the organism’s homeostatic state, prior to cognition and constitutive of subjectivity itself. Gendlin’s ‘felt sense’ names a pre-verbal bodily knowledge zone between raw affect and named emotion. Key tensions structure the field: feeling as rational evaluation versus feeling as irrational surge; feeling as individual consciousness versus feeling as impersonal archetypal force; feeling as intrapsychic function versus feeling as relational and social phenomenon. The question of inferior feeling — feeling’s pathological, undeveloped, or shadow forms — receives sustained treatment in the Jungian lineage and remains one of the corpus’s most clinically consequential discussions.
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 (‘like’ or ‘dislike’).
Jung’s canonical definition establishes feeling as an autonomous, evaluative psychological function — rational in character, distinct from sensation, thinking, and intuition.
, Psychological Types, 1921thesis
By conceptually differentiating feeling and considering it a function of consciousness, Jung made a major contribution to the history of the concept of feeling. It is crucial to the understanding of Jungian psychology that feeling be brought to bear upon it.
Hillman argues that feeling is not merely a typological category but the indispensable medium through which all core Jungian concepts — complex, symbol, self — are experientially grasped.
, Lectures on Jung’s Typology, 2013thesis
The feeling function is that psychological process in us that evaluates. Through the feeling function we appreciate a situation, a person, an object, a moment in terms of value. A prerequisite for feeling is therefore a structure of feeling memory, a set of values.
Von Franz elaborates Jung’s definition by grounding the evaluative function in a structured ‘feeling memory’ built from accumulated experience, emphasizing its temporal and biographical dimension.
, Lectures on Jung’s Typology, 2013thesis
Feeling is an individual attribute of consciousness, limited by a spatial and temporal situation. Eros is, as the writings tell us, always universal and impersonal — even inhuman and demonic.
Hillman draws a sharp and clinically consequential distinction between feeling as a bounded, human, conscious function and eros as an impersonal archetypal force — a distinction routinely collapsed in popular usage.
, Lectures on Jung’s Typology, 2013thesis
There is no being, in the proper sense of the term, without a spontaneous mental experience of life, a feeling of existence. The ground zero of being corresponds to a deceptively continuous and endless feeling state.
Damasio advances a neuroscientific thesis that feeling is ontologically foundational to consciousness itself — the continuous substrate of subjectivity rather than a discrete affective episode.
, The strange order of things life, feeling, and the making, 2018thesis
It strives after inner intensity, for which the objects serve at most as a stimulus. The depth of this feeling can only be guessed — it can never be clearly grasped. It makes people silent and difficult of access.
Jung characterizes introverted feeling as an inwardly directed, largely invisible evaluative process that subordinates the object to an inner image, manifesting primarily as apparent emotional withdrawal or negative judgment.
, Psychological Types, 1921thesis
Love is archetypal, belonging to the gods and given by them as Eros. But feeling does not depend upon the gods; it is not a force, but an awareness, not a redemption, but an instrument.
Hillman asserts feeling’s essential humanity and instrumentality against the inflation that results from confusing it with transpersonal forces such as love, eros, or religious grace.
, Lectures on Jung’s Typology, 2013thesis
There is a time sense connected with the feeling function, which is not mentioned in the literature, yet which is part of the ratio of the feeling function. The sense of timing and tact is a function of feeling often incompatible with the reason of thinking.
Hillman extends the concept of feeling to encompass a qualitative sense of temporal rhythm and biographical continuity, distinguishing feeling-time from the quantitative time of thinking.
, Lectures on Jung’s Typology, 2013supporting
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. This is the sense in which it is rational; in fact, to the extent that it is not colored by emotion, feeling can be quite cold.
Sharp clarifies the technical Jungian sense of feeling as rational subjective evaluation, explicitly distinguishing it from emotion and from the loose colloquial uses that conflate it with sensation, intuition, or affect.
, Personality Types: Jung’s Model of Typology, 1987supporting
The list of elementary contents of feelings is restricted, confined to only one class of object: the living organism of their owner. The contents of feelings that dominate our conscious mind correspond largely to the ongoing actions of viscera.
Damasio grounds the content of feelings exclusively in interoceptive signals from the body’s interior — particularly the viscera — situating feeling as the mind’s continuous report on organismic homeostasis.
, The strange order of things life, feeling, and the making, 2018supporting
Any feeling can become negative when it is mishandled. Even the most pleasant and approved ones of altruistic love and religious worship can be loaded with delusional intensity and oversubjectivity.
Hillman argues that the pathology of feeling lies not in particular feeling-contents but in the inferiority of the functioning itself, which distorts value-attribution regardless of the feeling’s apparent moral sign.
, Lectures on Jung’s Typology, 2013supporting
Inferior feeling puts the wrong values on things; its main disaster is in its introverted aspect when it gives the wrong feeling to oneself. Then one’s judgment about oneself is distorted and inadequate.
The inferior feeling function is identified as a primary source of distorted self-evaluation and false importance-attribution, with clinical consequences for both self-image and interpersonal judgment.
, Lectures on Jung’s Typology, 2013supporting
Feelings, as the consciousness of a bodily attitude, come in a virtually infinite range and blend. The Darwinian emotions correspond to distinct instincts, while feelings express a blending of sensate-based nuances and permutations.
Levine distinguishes feelings from discrete categorical emotions by characterizing feelings as the conscious registration of bodily attitudes — a continuous, blended spectrum rooted in somatic experience rather than fixed instinctual programs.
, In an Unspoken Voice: How the Body Releases Trauma and Restores Goodness, 2010supporting
Etymologically, the root of the word ‘feeling’ is fol (Teutonic), a cognate of fol-m (Anglo-Saxon), meaning palm of the hand. Clearly feeling once had a tactual connotation.
Hillman grounds the concept philologically and etymologically, tracing feeling’s semantic roots to tactile experience and illuminating the sources of its persistent confusion with sensation and intuition.
, Lectures on Jung’s Typology, 2013supporting
To be weak and helpless in one’s feelings, to stand loyal with one’s negative feelings, to be delivered over to one’s childishness — and this in front of another person — is indeed humiliating. There, perhaps, humility begins: in that inadequacy of inferior feeling.
Hillman reframes the painful exposure of inferior feeling not as a failure but as the phenomenological starting point of genuine humility — a transformative encounter with the limits of feeling consciousness.
, Lectures on Jung’s Typology, 2013supporting
‘Feelings’ as the word for emotions, sympathies and susceptibilities enters English in 1771. This was a time when feelings were of huge importance. New words were preempted by the feeling function.
Hillman situates the modern psychological concept of feeling historically, tracing its emergence as a reflexive category of inner experience to the late eighteenth century and linking it to the birth of psychology itself.
, Lectures on Jung’s Typology, 2013supporting
Feelings provide us with a moment-to-moment perspective on the state of our health. Degrees of well-being or malaise are sentinels.
Damasio assigns feelings a bio-regulatory function as real-time homeostatic monitors, positioning them as the organism’s primary instrument for assessing its own internal condition.
, The strange order of things life, feeling, and the making, 2018supporting
Between this wide-open aliveness and our more familiar feelings and emotions, lies a subtle zone of sensibility, which Gendlin calls the felt sense. In this prickly felt sense there is a lot more going on than just anger.
Welwood introduces Gendlin’s concept of the felt sense as an intermediate phenomenological register — more diffuse and informationally richer than named feelings or discrete emotions — located in bodily experience.
, Toward a Psychology of Awakening Buddhism, Psychotherapy,, 2000supporting
There is also a guilt — if not the very same one — to the complexes. Our responsibility is primarily to them. Because guilt makes everything so personal, we lose the sense of impersonal guilt I owe not only my personal feelings something.
Hillman argues for an impersonal dimension of feeling obligation — guilt owed to the complexes and to feeling values themselves — beyond the purely personal register in which it typically presents.
, Lectures on Jung’s Typology, 2013supporting
The pseudo-feeling of these doctrines can easily be detected because negative feelings have been suppressed. The honesty of his desire is replaced by the dishonesty of his philosophical justifications about it.
Hillman identifies ‘pseudo-feeling’ — feeling in service of the anima or ideological suppression of the shadow — as distinguishable from authentic feeling precisely by its elimination of negative affective contents.
, Lectures on Jung’s Typology, 2013supporting
The animus, especially in therapy where so much is made of feeling, can well manifest as a feeler, and again, like anima feeling, it will be just off. All the values and all the heart will be peculiarly half-values and half-hearted.
Hillman warns that animus-driven ‘pseudo-feeling’ infiltrates therapeutic encounters precisely where feeling is most valorized, producing half-hearted or performative emotional expression rather than genuine evaluation.
, Lectures on Jung’s Typology, 2013supporting
Where does a woman turn for a model for her feeling function? So, the mother passes on fear and uncertainties to her daughters, since the archetypal mother-daughter mystery and the right kind of awe and ambivalences have no appropriate place.
Von Franz connects the cultural impoverishment of the feeling function in women to the absence of the Demeter-Persephone archetypal matrix, arguing that without mythological grounding, feeling devolves into fear and negation.
, Lectures on Jung’s Typology, 2013supporting
It is principally among women that I have found the predominance of introverted feeling. Feeling is a specifically feminine virtue…. Now comes the first transformation: he discovers his countertype (‘feeling is all’) and at the same time realizes the projection of the anima.
Hillman surfaces the classical Jungian association of feeling with the feminine and with anima-projection, while simultaneously flagging the conceptual confusion this identification creates for typological analysis.
, Anima: An Anatomy of a Personified Notion, 1985supporting
Reading the lecture provokes a dissolving of fixed ideas about feeling and allows a different light on the subject to emerge. The lecture has set itself loose from the enlightened thinking language that psychology has devised to pretend that it knows enough about feeling, affect, eros, object relations, and emotion to distinguish cleanly among them.
Beebe affirms that the Jungian treatment of feeling resists the reductive conceptual tidiness of academic psychology, dissolving premature distinctions among feeling, affect, eros, and emotion rather than imposing false clarity.
, Energies and Patterns in Psychological Type: The Reservoir of Consciousness, 2017supporting
The danger for this type lies in being overwhelmed by the object — traditional and generally accepted standards — and so losing any semblance of subjective feeling, that is, what is going on in one’s own inner life.
Sharp identifies the characteristic pathology of extraverted feeling as the loss of subjective interiority through over-adaptation to collective standards and social expectation.
, Personality Types: Jung’s Model of Typology, 1987supporting
Extroverted feeling is primarily concerned with concord, consideration, compromise. External values are recognized and adjusted to. Adjustment implies such feeling values as joining in and taking part, sharing and helping.
Hillman characterizes extraverted feeling as oriented toward social harmony and the recognition of collective values, linking it to the archetypal domain of manners, hierarchy, and the numinosity of social forms.
, Lectures on Jung’s Typology, 2013supporting
Feeling shapes time, breaking it up into various kinds of feeling tones. These tones are not on the same band of continuity as seven o’clock follows six. Feeling time is organized in clusters, more like an organic growth.
Hillman elaborates feeling’s relationship to time as qualitative and organic rather than sequential, arguing that feeling-time clusters around significance rather than following the clock’s linear progression.
, Lectures on Jung’s Typology, 2013supporting
‘Feelings were once called spiritual senses.’ ‘Ego development conceived via heroic distance of feeling.’ ‘it’s not just getting your feeling right, it’s something deeper.’
Russell’s index entries document the range and biographical register of Hillman’s engagement with feeling across his career, from typological analysis to the psychology of masculine development and communal life.
, Life and Ideas of James Hillman, 2023aside
The study of feeling leads outside psychology and into social history and biography, family life and friendships.
Hillman situates the academic study of feeling within a broader interdisciplinary field encompassing social history and biography, resisting its reduction to a purely intrapsychic or clinical phenomenon.
, Lectures on Jung’s Typology, 2013aside
Let yourself feel that whole sense of specialness or loving. Notice how little of your love-feeling the words actually say. Yet the words are somehow right in relation to the felt sense.
Gendlin demonstrates the gap between named feelings and the pre-verbal felt sense through a practical exercise, showing that words gesture toward but cannot exhaust the somatic-affective whole.
, Focusing: How to Gain Direct Access to Your Body’s Knowledge, 2010aside
Each one of us has exclusive access to our own subjectively experienced feelings, yet we humans share a common understanding of feelings that is based on language, culture, and empathy.
Craig frames the epistemological paradox of feelings — private in their first-person phenomenology yet socially legible through language and embodied expression — as the central problem his neuroscientific account addresses.
, How Do You Feel? An Interoceptive Moment with Your Neurobiological Self, 2014aside
We must recognize that ‘being human’ is not only a matter of human feeling, but of human ideas and spirit. When feeling types are threatened by ideas, they act as antispirits, as Ungeist, and put down an essence of what is human in the name of feeling.
Hillman cautions against the idealization of feeling types, noting that an undifferentiated valorization of feeling can itself suppress spirit, ideas, and other essential dimensions of human existence.
, Lectures on Jung’s Typology, 2013aside