Towards a Dynamic Concept of Feeling

Mrs. Peacock Arrives at every lecture in a series twenty minutes late, upsetting many of the audience as she works her way towards a distant seat. Having read Jung's Psychological types (JUNG 12), she explains her lateness by saying that she is intuitive and hence has poor sensation and a weak sense of time. But acquaintances think that she comes late to demonstrate her superiority to the rest of the audience and her indifference to the speakers, towards whom she is indeed not indifferent but hostile. Her explanation and theirs do not exclude one another, but theirs provides a better account of what motivates her in this specific behaviour, and it is in better accord with the fact that other members of the audience who are as intuitive as she come on time. She has not understood that Jung's types ‘are not static positions, but a dynamic interaction of polaristic patterns of behaviour and adjustment’ (ADLER 1, p. 341).

Unfortunately, Mrs. Peacock is not alone in applying Jung's typology statically, to obscure psychological motives that it can and should help to clarify. And although Jung did not himself apply it in this way, he presented it largely in isolation from some essential concerns of analytical psychology. Thus Meier reminds us that the full title of Baynes’ translation of the book was Psychological types, or the psychology of individuation, but observes that it does not actually treat the bearing of typology on individuation at all (MEIER 20, p. 279). Nor does it treat the bearing of typology on developmental psychology or on the analytic process. Jung may simply have paid the unavoidable price of neglecting some things in order to concentrate on others, but there are moments when one does well to be aware that he has paid it.

Jung shows, for example, that the functions of thinking, feeling, sensation and intuition all supply the subject with material necessary for adaptation And since each is necessary, and since the material supplied by each is incomplete,