What is value?

Value, in Jung's psychology, is not a preference endorsed by the reflective mind, not a cultural convention, and not a philosophical abstraction. It is a psychic quantity — something that can be estimated, that exerts force, and that determines the intensity with which psychic energy moves through the soul. The question "what is value?" is therefore not primarily a moral question but an energic one.

Jung's clearest formulation appears in "On Psychic Energy":

Values are quantitative estimates of energy.

This is a deceptively compressed claim. What Jung means is that wherever psychic energy concentrates — wherever something matters to a soul — a value is present. The feeling-tone that surrounds a complex, the intensity of an affect, the pull of a symbol: all of these are value-phenomena, measurable not by a moral scale but by the degree to which they mobilize libido. As he writes in Aion, "the feeling-value is a very important criterion which psychology cannot do without, because it determines in large measure the role which the content will play in the psychic economy" (Jung, 1951). The shadow has a decidedly negative feeling-value; the anima and animus carry a more positive, numinous one. These are not judgments imposed from outside — they are the soul's own economy, its internal weighting of contents.

The instrument by which value is registered is the feeling function. Jung is careful to distinguish feeling from emotion and from mere preference. Feeling, classified alongside thinking as a rational function, is the capacity to impart a definite value — acceptance or rejection, like or dislike — to any given content of consciousness. In Psychological Types he writes:

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"). The process can also appear isolated, as it were, in the form of a "mood," regardless of the momentary contents of consciousness or momentary sensations.

This is why feeling is rational: it operates according to laws, just as thinking does, but it operates upon a different content — not concepts, but values. The feeling function does not merely react; it judges, and its judgments constitute the soul's living hierarchy of what matters. Beebe (2017) extends this by noting that all four functions involve valuation, but feeling is the one that places the highest premium on the act of assigning value as such — it is valuation made explicit, turned back on itself.

The energic account has a practical consequence that Jung draws out carefully. Psychic energy follows value: it flows toward what is valued and away from what is not. Stein (1998) renders this concretely — spending habits, the direction of attention, the choices made under pressure — all reveal where value actually lies in the psyche, as opposed to where the ego believes it lies. The gap between conscious and unconscious valuation is one of the central diagnostic facts of depth psychology. A person may consciously endorse one value while the unconscious organizes itself around another entirely, and the symptom — the compulsion, the dream, the inexplicable attraction — is the disclosure of the deeper weighting.

There is a further dimension that the energic account alone cannot capture. Jung distinguishes subjective feeling-values, which fluctuate with the individual's psychic state, from objective values — "moral, aesthetic, and religious values" — which are "founded on a consensus omnium" and carry their feeling-tone collectively rather than personally (Jung, 1951). These collective values are what Lévy-Bruhl called représentations collectives: they are not chosen but inherited, and they shape the individual's valuation before reflection begins. The archetypes themselves function as value-attractors in this sense: as Ulanov (1971) observes, drawing on Jung's CW 8, "psychic energy becomes connected with a value, that is, with something that attracts or repels our attention and activity." The archetype does not merely produce an image — it charges that image with a value-quantum that compels response.

What this means for depth work is that value is not something to be decided upon or cultivated through intention. It is something to be discovered — found already operating in the soul's economy, often in places the ego would prefer not to look. The question is never "what should I value?" but "what does the psyche already value, and what does that weighting disclose?" The feeling function is the instrument of that discovery; the complex is its evidence; and the symbol, when it forms, is the soul's attempt to transform the energy concentrated in a value into something that can move the psyche forward.

  • feeling function — Jung's rational valuing capacity, distinct from emotion and sensation
  • psychic energy — libido as Jung conceived it: a general, content-neutral force that flows according to value
  • complex — the feeling-toned constellation that carries value-intensity in the unconscious
  • James Hillman — his work on aisthesis and the thought of the heart extends Jung's value-theory into imaginal perception

Sources Cited

  • Jung, C.G., 1921, Psychological Types
  • Jung, C.G., 1951, Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self
  • Jung, C.G. and Pauli, Wolfgang, 1955, The Interpretation of Nature and the Psyche
  • Ulanov, Ann Belford, 1971, The Feminine in Jungian Psychology and in Christian Theology
  • Beebe, John, 2017, Energies and Patterns in Psychological Type
  • Stein, Murray, 1998, Jung's Map of the Soul