Carl Jung on the Four Functions
Modern Psychology: C. G. Jung’s Lectures at the ETH Zürich, 1933-1941
Lecture V 18th May, 1934
It is fairly easy to imagine b eing able to think consciously, to have one’s thoughts under control, but when it comes to feeling it is much more difficult to do so, especially for a man.
To a feeling type however, feeling is really under control of the will to a very great extent.
As a matter of fact it is by no means everyone who can sit down and think out something voluntarily, and it is quite equally possible for someone to sit down and feel something out. It just depends which is your domesticated function.
It is usually women who can direct their feeling, and men who can control their thoughts.
Let us suppose that a feeling type has to go to a p arty, he [or more likely she) will groan over it in thought, or in speech, then when they arrive on the doorstep, they stop and think : “Why there is a nice feeling here after all, it will be all right”.
Then they go to the party and it goes beautifully, everyone says “What a nice evening” and the feeling type goes home and says “Yes, it was a nice evening, but I paid for it”.
This is quite true, it is wonderful what people with differentiated feeling can accomplish with it, especially when they want something!
Of all the functions intuition seems the most unpredictable and unmanageable, most people only know of intuition as the vaguest hunches coming from heaven knows where, but a great many people live by it entirely.
They draw the souls out of things and act according to what they discover by this process, just as if what they dis covered were ordinary every day facts.
All the functions can happen unconsciously just as well as consciously.
People think unconsciously, elaborate philosophical thoughts, you find them in dreams and in phantasies.
With feeling this happens still more.
You often first discover a feeling through an affect in a dream.
For instance you meet a man for the first time, you like him, it is a pleasant evening and you go home with the impression that everything was quite all right.
Then you have a very bad dream about him and discover he aroused a very bad feeling in you, there was something you did not like at all in him, you wanted to overlook it or it would have spoilt the pleasant evening, but it felt itself unconsciously and comes out
in the dream.
Unconscious feeling is often to be seen in facial expression, we repress it because it is unpleasant, but we always pay for this later.
Unconscious sensations are usually based on facts which one has seen and failed to register consciously.
A hunter, for instance, got benighted in the jungle and while it was still light he climbed up the only suitable tree in order to spend the night in it.
The ground would have been very dangerous because of the wild animals.
A wind got up and a wild panic seized him, he wanted to leap down from the tree but as it would have been foolish he controlled himself, and as the wind died down so did his fears .
But the next time a gust of wind rose, so did the fears .
At the third time he simply could not b ear it any longer and climbed down.
Immediately the tree crashed to the ground and he discovered the trunk was entirely eaten away by termites.
He thought it was God harning him, but he was a very experienced hunter and would well know the danger of such trees, he must have seen the holes as he climbed up , he did not see them consciously, his unconscious registered them and warned him of his danger by the panic.
Unconscious sensations, and still more intuitions, are in a curious borderland which defies exact definition.
Intuition is never quite conscious.
H.G. Wells in his book “The Time Machine” mirrors a curious machine which does not run in space but in time.
Three wheels can be seen, but the fourth is only faintly visible.
The idea is that we see three dimensions, but the fourth is invisible.
The same is true of the functions. Intuition is never tangible and we know as much of it as we do of the fourth dimension.
Sometimes intuitions and sensations are caused by such things as the holes made by the termites.
An intuitive type, for instance, was in analysis with me.
I received her in my garden room.
She said “You had a man here before”.
I was really amazed as there had been a luncheon interval and she could not have seen him.
She could only say she had a feeling it was so and I subsequently noticed many cigarette stumps on the table and concluded, as I do
not smoke cigarettes, that her unconscious had registered the fact and diagnosed a man.
It is a fact that coincidences can tend to heap up.
A professor once said to his students “This is a unique case, tomorrow we shall have another”.
During my own experience in the clinics I saw a very rare case for the first time, seven days after another, and then no more
for seven years .
This chain of chance events is in keeping with eastern philosophy and the primitive’s existence is based on such experiences.
Only the other day I took down “Ulysses” by James Joyce in order to quote it to an Englishman, a thing I had very rarely done
and certainly not for three or four years.
The Englishman had been in a bookshop the day before and, seeing “Ulysses” on a shelf, had thought “That is a book I should have”
though he had never heard of it before.
We think of this kind of thing as chance, but the east has discovered the laws of chance long ago.
Primitives firmly believe in lucky and unlucky days.
At the second unlucky accident they get into a panic and it is almost impossible to proceed that day.
This is considered superstitious, but it is not superstition but observation.
Magic is the science of the jungle.
It is a comforting fact in one way that these intuitions exist because through them some knowledge of the future is possible, but
they are dangerous, things never or very rarely happen as they are predicted.
They are not quite predictable, but are rather riddles which appear in order that you may l earn to guess them.
We can be certain that everything which we do not register consciously is registered unconsciously, but the unconscious does not work like
the conscious, it is archaic, primitive, and works rather in analogies.
A complete man would have all these functions in the light.
This diagram shows the functions as they are in the case of a thinking type, there is always at least one function which one observes
and adapts to reality by.
Take a man such as the diagram depicts, his thinking is excellent, he is most superior and deliberate in his judgments , intelligent and
satisfactory in every situation which calls for thought, but p u him in a situation which calls for feeling, in a love situation for instance, and
he simply collapses.
He is childish, ridiculous, breaking out into the wild affects that one might expect from a nigger, and, most deplorable of all, his
superior thinking is then taken prisoner by the wild affects and his thoughts themselves become worse than ridiculous.
A thinking type does not observe correctly, but he thinks over the situation and arrives at reality in that way.
Any of the four functions can, of course, be in the light and the two auxiliaries can be half in the light.
This can swing on its axis and you get two functions in the light and two in the darkness, but there is always at least one function down
in the primitive undifferentiated dark, the inferior function is never in the light, so every thinker is a feeler in the unconscious, but
an explosive one.
Thinking Feeling
Here we have a diagram in which an attempt is made to represent the functions by colours .
All sounds have colour, which we call colour illusions or coloured hearing.
Thinking is generally, almost always, represented by blue, it is connected with the air, with the spirit, primitives use birds or feathers
to represent thoughts.
Feeling is often represented by red, because of its connection with heart and blood.
Intuition is the beginning of the real uncertainty, it is sometimes represented by white or yellow, like the rays of the sun.
Sensation is often green as it is connected with the earth, and the earth’s surface is green.
The idea of the functions did not originate with me but was discovered by the Chinese centuries ago.
It is true, however, that I stumbled up on it without knowledge of the east and only afterwards found the parallels to my own discoveries.
There is a zone in between the functions in which the two neighbours mix.
In the place where thinking and intuition mix, for instance, you get speculative thinking and in different degrees.
Schopenhauer was primarily a thinker and secondarily an intuitive, whereas the quantities were reversed in Nietzsche.
He was primarily intuitive, and a thinker secondarily.
On the other side of intuition is intuitive feeling.
This sphere usually belongs to woman, who feels through the heart.
People in the zone of sensation-feeling always try to put their feeling through in the objective world and usually make nuisances and bores of themselves in the process.
Empirical, or sensation thinking, is the realm par excellence of the scientist. ~Carl Jung, Lecture IV, 18May1934, Pages 102-105.
