Lectures on Jung's Typology

Jung’s Psychological Types is one of his most systematic works and, paradoxically, one of his most misunderstood. The popular reduction of typology to personality classification (the MBTI industry, the online quizzes, the four-letter codes) strips away everything that made Jung’s original framework psychologically interesting. This small book by von Franz and Hillman restores what the popularizers removed: the recognition that typology is not about cataloguing strengths but about confronting the places where consciousness fails.

The Inferior Function

Von Franz’s essay, “The Inferior Function,” is the heart of the volume. Her argument is precise: every conscious attitude has a shadow side, and that shadow is carried by the function that remains least developed, least differentiated, least available to the ego’s control. The inferior function is not simply weak. It is archaic, contaminated by the unconscious, prone to eruptions that embarrass the conscious personality precisely because they bypass its usual competence. The thinking type whose inferior feeling produces sentimental outbursts, the sensation type whose inferior intuition generates paranoid fantasies — these are not failures of character. They are the psyche’s way of compensating for one-sidedness.

What makes von Franz’s treatment indispensable is her insistence that the inferior function is also the gateway. It is through this awkward, undeveloped capacity that the unconscious makes its most direct claims on conscious life. The inferior function carries numinosity precisely because it has not been domesticated by the ego. To develop it is not to master it but to learn to be in relationship with something that will always remain partially autonomous.

The Feeling Function

Hillman’s companion essay addresses a specific and persistent confusion: the collapse of feeling into emotion. In Jung’s typology, feeling is a rational function, a mode of evaluation that assigns value and makes judgments about worth. It is not sentimentality, not affect, not mood. Hillman traces how the cultural devaluation of feeling has produced a psychological landscape in which this function is chronically misidentified, reduced to something irrational and feminine and therefore clinically negligible. The restoration of feeling as a genuine mode of knowing is one of Hillman’s most consequential contributions to depth psychology.

Why This Book Matters

Together, these two essays accomplish something rare: they make Jung’s typology clinically alive again. Anyone who works with personality structure, whether in therapy or in self-understanding, will find here a framework that goes far deeper than trait measurement. The inferior function is where the real psychological work begins, because it is where the ego’s fantasy of competence meets the soul’s insistence on wholeness.