Working with the Feeling Function

One of Carl Jung’s seminal contributions to psychoanalysis is his development of “typology,” i.e., his differentiation of four basic types of “psychic functioning,” and his creative use of these ideas in the service both of diagnosis and of healing analytic patients. However, though Jung’s contribution has been enormously influential in certain areas of psychology, especially through the famous Meyers-Briggs test, some of the deeper and more therapeutically relevant aspects of Jung’s theory have perhaps remained underdeveloped or ignored, even within the Jungian world. This situation is particularly troubling when we speak of the feeling function, because emotional disturbances – disturbances of the feeling function – are among the most important reasons our patients come to us.

In this course, we will discuss and clarify Jung’s notion of the feeling function, both spelling out its nature in detail and developing ways of working with it clinically. Our conception of the feeling function will be drawn not only from Jung’s and other Jungian writings but also from understanding something of the intellectual milieu in which Jung developed his ideas. Based on these reflections, we will articulate some technical principles for working clinically with the feeling function and discuss ways to help our patients differentiate and develop their feeling life on their own.

Seminar Objectives:

Describe the nature of psychic functions in contrast to other sorts of mental activity and differentiate the feeling function from other forms of psychic functioning.

Describe the nature of value, how values are experienced as the “objects” of feeling, and how an understanding of value can aid in the process of identifying and working clinically with feelings and affects.

Develop a clinically useful notion of love as well as recognizing one of love’s important and widespread opposites, ressentiment.

Course Outline:

WEEK ONE: What is a “psychic function”?

A general discussion of the nature of psychic functions, of Jung’s differentiation of four basic functions, and of his understanding of how the functions themselves – not just their content – can be unconscious.

WEEK TWO: The nature of the feeling function

A discussion of the nature and specific activities of the feeling function as well as some of the specific clinical challenges of working with it.

WEEK THREE: Value as the object of feeling (emotional) experiences

Jung describes value as the object of feeling experiences, a point that causes some confusion among English-language commentators. We clarify the meaning of “value” for Jung by setting his own statements in the intellectual milieu in which he was writing and also explore some issues of clinical technique when dealing with the feeling function.

WEEK FOUR: Love as a clinical phenomenon

Though arguably the most important of feeling experiences, few clinicians seem to work from a clinically differentiated notion of love. We develop both a clinically useful notion of love and discuss one of love’s opposites, what philosophers have termed “ressentiment,” as an example of a deformation of the feeling function.

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Working with the Feeling Function
For Mental Health Professionals

with Jungian Analyst JOHN R. WHITE, Ph.D.

Live-Video Jungian Psychology Seminar Series

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4-6 pm Pacific / 7-9 pm Eastern
Live Via Zoom
+ Video recording will be made available

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ALL WELCOME

Required Reading:

Jung, C. G. (1971). Psychological types (A revision). Princeton University Press. Paragraphs 556-671; 681; 723; 730; 731

White, J. “Ressentiment: Its Phenomenology and Clinical Significance,” in Roger Brooke, ed., Jungian Psychology and the Human Sciences, Routledge, 2024.
Will be provided by faculty as pdf.

JOHN R. WHITE, Ph.D.

John R. White, Ph.D., is a certified Jungian psychoanalyst in private practice. He received his doctorate in philosophy from the International Academy of Philosophy in the Principality of Liechtenstein. He received his M.A. In counselling from Franciscan University of Steubenville in 2011, and his diploma as a Jungian psychoanalyst from the Interregional Society of Jungian Analysts in 2017.

He is currently the Coordinator of the C. G. Jung Institute Analyst Training Program of Pittsburgh as well as the President-Elect of the Board of the Pittsburgh Psychoanalytic Center.

John has more than forty publications in philosophy, psychoanalysis, and organizational theory. He is the author of the book Adaptation and Psychotherapy. Langs and Analytical Psychology, (Rowman & Littlefield, 2023) and co-editor of Jungian Analysis in a World on Fire. At the Nexus of Individual and Collective Trauma (Routledge, 2024).