Feeling Function

What Is the Feeling Function?

Jung classified feeling as one of four functions of consciousness alongside thinking, sensation, and intuition. Crucially, he designated feeling a rational function — not because it involves logic, but because it evaluates experience according to a consistent scale of values. As Jung writes, “feeling is a kind of judgment, differing from intellectual judgment in that its aim is not to establish conceptual relations but to set up a subjective criterion of acceptance or rejection” (Jung, CW 6, para. 724). Where thinking asks what is this?, feeling asks what is this worth? The distinction matters clinically: feeling is not sentimentality, nor is it equivalent to emotion. Emotion erupts; feeling discerns. When the feeling function is differentiated, it provides the individual with a stable orientation toward value — an inner authority that registers what matters before the intellect can formulate reasons (Jung, CW 8, para. 334).

Why Is Feeling So Often Underdeveloped?

In Western intellectual culture, thinking dominates the hierarchy of psychic functions, and feeling is routinely confused with irrationality. Von Franz observed that for thinking types, feeling tends to operate as the inferior function — primitive, undifferentiated, and contaminated with unconscious contents (Von Franz, 1971). The result is not an absence of feeling but its distortion: moodiness, sentimentality, or rigid value judgments that masquerade as reasoned positions. Because the inferior function always carries the quality of the unconscious, its development requires sustained confrontation with the shadow and a willingness to tolerate ambiguity rather than default to intellectual certainty. Von Franz called the feeling function “the most reliable guide to the soul,” precisely because its cultivation demands what thinking alone cannot provide — a reckoning with what one actually values, not what one claims to value (Von Franz, 1971).

How Did Hillman Reimagine Feeling?

Hillman extended Jung’s typological framework into the territory of soul by redefining feeling as a poetic mode of knowing. In his essay “The Feeling Function,” Hillman argues that feeling is not merely a personal capacity for valuation but “the reason of the heart” — an aesthetic and imaginal intelligence rooted in depth rather than utility (Hillman, 1971). Feeling, in this reading, does not simply rank preferences; it perceives the soul in things. Hillman’s later work in Re-Visioning Psychology reinforced this move, insisting that the psyche’s primary activity is not conceptual but imaginal, and that feeling is the function most attuned to the images through which soul speaks (Hillman, 1975). The clinical implication is direct: a person disconnected from the feeling function is not merely confused about values but severed from the capacity to sense meaning in lived experience.

Sources Cited

1. Jung, C.G. (1921). Psychological Types (CW 6). Princeton University Press.
2. Jung, C.G. (1960). The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche (CW 8). Princeton University Press.
3. Von Franz, Marie-Louise (1971). Lectures on Jung’s Typology. Spring Publications.
4. Hillman, James (1971). The Feeling Function. In Lectures on Jung’s Typology. Spring Publications.
5. Hillman, James (1975). Re-Visioning Psychology. Harper & Row.