Intuition

intuition is clear, quick, and full. Like a revelation it comes all at once, and fast. It is quite independent of time… Because intuitions are clear, quick, and full, and therefore so convincing, they can be wholly wrong

Hillman articulates intuition’s defining phenomenological character — its instantaneous totality and temporal independence — while insisting, with Jung, that this same convincingness renders it equally capable of catastrophic error without the corrective of the other functions.

Hillman, James, The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling, 1996thesis

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intuition tells us what it might become, its possibilities. I must confess I don’t know what more I could include. I could discover no other.

Jung defines intuition’s specific functional role within the four-function model as the prospective perception of hidden possibilities, distinguishing it categorically from sensation, thinking, and feeling.

Jung, C.G., Dream Analysis: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1928-1930, 1984thesis

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intuition is a characteristic of infantile and primitive psychology. It counterbalances the powerful sense impressions of the child and the primitive by mediating perceptions of mythological images, the precursors of ideas.

Jung establishes intuition’s archaic and compensatory relationship to sensation, grounding it developmentally as the matrix from which rational functions emerge and situating it as the psychic mediator of mythological image-perception.

Jung, Carl Gustav, Psychological Types, 1921thesis

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‘All great achievements of science must start from intuitive knowledge. I believe in intuition and inspiration’, wrote Einstein: At times I feel certain I am right while not knowing the reason.

McGilchrist uses Einstein’s testimony to argue that intuition — rooted in right-hemisphere processing — is the generative source of scientific discovery, operating prior to and independently of discursive justification.

McGilchrist, Iain, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, 2021thesis

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intuition’s power to produce insights that are very far from obvious functions too in our efforts to understand in the most fundamental way the cosmos in which we live.

McGilchrist argues that intuition’s epistemological reach extends beyond personal heuristics to the most fundamental comprehension of reality, situating it as irreplaceable in cosmological as well as personal understanding.

McGilchrist, Iain, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, 2021thesis

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That ability to get, and to a certain degree to trust, the hunch is what Jung meant by intuition… Jung held that feeling and thinking are rational functions, and that sensation and intuition are irrational functions.

Beebe clarifies Jung’s technical usage of intuition as the irrational perceiving function that delivers hunches, distinguishing it categorically from the rational functions and explaining why trusting it requires a particular psychological disposition.

Beebe, John, Energies and Patterns in Psychological Type: The Reservoir of Consciousness, 2017thesis

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intuition ‘is not concerned with the present but is rather a sixth sense for hidden possibilities.’ The imaginal approach… is attuned to those hidden and not readily present possibilities that linger and wait as the weight of history in the work.

Romanyshyn draws on Jung’s definition of intuition as a sixth sense for hidden possibilities to argue that it constitutes a legitimate and undervalued epistemological mode for depth-psychological research methodology.

Romanyshyn, Robert D., The Wounded Researcher: Research with Soul in Mind, 2007thesis

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Negative intuition sometimes does hit the target. It either hits the mark exactly, or it goes wildly astray… inferior intuition is primitive, and the sensation type either surprises you by hitting the bull’s eye

Von Franz describes the unreliable, all-or-nothing character of inferior intuition, demonstrating that without the counterbalance of a developed auxiliary function, intuitive perception oscillates between uncanny accuracy and complete distortion.

Marie-Louise von Franz, James Hillman, Lectures on Jung’s Typology, 2013thesis

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intuitions are very often of a sinister character, with dark premonitions… The fantasy material tends to be of a sinister character and if it is not worked upon, the prophetic contents which break through will be pessimistic and negative.

Von Franz documents the pathological coloring of inferior intuition in sensation types, whose unprocessed intuitive contents characteristically manifest as paranoid premonitions and sinister fantasy material.

von Franz, Marie-Louise, Psychotherapy, 1993supporting

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This inferior kind of intuition was very often right, but sometimes completely wrong! Sometimes he just had persecution ideas—dark suspicions without any foundation.

Von Franz illustrates through clinical observation how inferior intuition in the sensation type manifests as an undifferentiated mixture of genuine perception and persecution fantasy, demonstrating the function’s primitive and uncontrollable quality in an inferior position.

Marie-Louise von Franz, James Hillman, Lectures on Jung’s Typology, 2013supporting

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In the extraverted attitude, intuition as the function of unconscious perception is wholly directed to external objects. Because intuition is in the main an unconscious process, its nature is very difficult to grasp.

Jung defines extraverted intuition as an essentially unconscious perceptual function oriented to external objects, and explains its theoretical elusiveness as a consequence of its fundamentally unconscious substrate.

Jung, Carl Gustav, Psychological Types, 1921supporting

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Extraverted Intuition has a lot in common with Extraverted Sensation. Both push us to adapt, to relate ourselves to sensory data in our immediate environment… Intuition draws our attention to context and we adapt to sensory events

Thomson distinguishes extraverted intuition from extraverted sensation by showing that where sensation attends to discrete objects, intuition attends to contextual relationships and situational possibility within the perceptual field.

Thomson, Lenore, Personality Type: An Owner’s Manual, 1998supporting

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The letters S and N stand for Sensation and iNtuition. These are the Perceiving functions, so called because we use them literally to perceive.

Thomson places intuition within the MBTI-Jungian framework as one of two perceiving functions, underscoring its role as a mode of encountering new information rather than a mode of judgment.

Thomson, Lenore, Personality Type: An Owner’s Manual, 1998supporting

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Maria Moltzer… proposed intuition as a third type of consciousness… Her suggestion… made him aware that beyond extraversion–introversion and thinking–feeling… there was another axis of orientation altogether… the ‘irrational’ axis of sensation–intuition.

Beebe reconstructs the historical emergence of intuition as a formal Jungian category, crediting Maria Moltzer’s proposal with prompting Jung to recognize the irrational sensation-intuition axis as a necessary complement to the rational thinking-feeling axis.

Beebe, John, Energies and Patterns in Psychological Type: The Reservoir of Consciousness, 2017supporting

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While I and nearly all psychotherapists rely somewhat on intuition, doing so exclusively is not advised when dealing with trauma… in dealing with clients with PTSD it can be hazardous.

Rothschild argues from a trauma-clinical perspective that exclusive reliance on intuition — understood as knowledge acquired without reason — is contraindicated in PTSD treatment, where objective observational precision is required.

Rothschild, Babette, The body remembers Volume 2, Revolutionizing trauma, 2024supporting

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Intuitions and Symbols. The new type of Astrology… is founded upon this positive conception of time. And it involves therefore the use of a faculty which had no place in minds weighed down by the negative concept of time

Rudhyar links intuition to a positive, holistic conception of time, arguing that it is the cognitive faculty proper to a cyclical understanding of existence and therefore central to his reformulated astrological epistemology.

Dane Rudhyar, The Astrology of Personality: A Re-formulation of Astrological Concepts and Ideals in Terms of Contemporary Psychology and Philosophy, 1936supporting

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The intuition, when it occurs or recurs, is unerring; the instinct is automatically correct as a rule, but can err, for it fails or blunders when the surface consciousness or an ill-developed intelligence interferes.

Aurobindo distinguishes intuition categorically from instinct, attributing to intuition an essential infallibility that instinct lacks, locating error not in intuition itself but in its interference by surface consciousness.

Aurobindo, Sri, The Life Divine, 1939supporting

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to intuit how to respond affectively and to act rightly, through our partaking in an intersubjective world: Without ever being ever able to formulate it, we know what we have to do

McGilchrist frames intuition as tacit intersubjective knowledge — an embodied capacity to respond rightly that precedes and exceeds any formulated rule, making it a foundation of ethical and relational competence.

McGilchrist, Iain, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, 2021supporting

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to intuit how to respond affectively and to act rightly, through our partaking in an intersubjective world: Without ever being ever able to formulate it, we know what we have to do

McGilchrist identifies intuition with the tacit, pre-reflective knowledge that enables ethical responsiveness within shared relational experience, arguing that attempts to replace it with explicit rules are both futile and psychopathological.

McGilchrist, Iain, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, 2021supporting

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Extraverted intuition… this is a function perfect for watching a basketball game, but it may not notice that someone is about to say or do something unexpected.

Papadopoulos illustrates the limitations of extraverted sensation in contrast to extraverted intuition, which attends to contextual possibility rather than surface reality, using practical examples to clarify functional distinctions.

Papadopoulos, Renos K., The Handbook of Jungian Psychology: Theory, Practice and Applications, 2006aside

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precisely this blinding of the usual intellectual mind and the blunting of its sharp edge permits us to say, with Wordsworth, ‘I saw them feel.’

Hillman, drawing on William James and Wordsworth, gestures toward a ‘mythic sensibility’ akin to intuition — a softened intellect that perceives invisible inwardness — as the cognitive mode appropriate to archetypal seeing.

Hillman, James, The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling, 1996aside

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