Case Response IV

In the following, I will supplement the given material by considering the feeling function in general. While I might seem to be avoiding the case's concrete dimensions by doing so, I will show why I think these considerations, combined with this material, suggest not only defensive manoeuvres around

definite feeling experiences, as the analyst has highlighted, but a generally underdeveloped (“inferior”) feeling function. I suggest it might behoove Bianca psychologically to intentionally cultivate her feeling function as a general goal of treatment.

While Jungians generally accept Jung's development of the basic psychic functions (Jung, 1971a, 1971b), not everyone in the early psychoanalytic movement felt similarly as, for example, Heinz Hartmann's quip that Jung's characterization of the psychic functions is a “crude” way of articulating the principle of adaptation (Hartmann, 1958). Though I consider Jung's articulation far from crude, Hartmann deserves credit for recognizing that Jung saw the psychological types as basic modes of adaptation and thus, like all forms of adaptation, they cannot be understood without reference to the environment to which the person is adapting. Adaptation and environment are correlating terms: all adaptation occurs with reference to an environment (White, 2023). Consequently, to consider, say, someone's thoughts or feelings purely intrapsychically, i.e., without reference to the specific environmental factors to which those thoughts and feelings refer, though legitimate psychologically, is not a consideration of thinking or feeling in terms of function. I might, for example, encourage a person unused to regarding the importance of their own feelings simply to allow the feelings to come and to try to verbalize them. If, however, I am treating feelings as functions, I would concern myself not only with the feeling but with the possible values to which the feelings refer. Functionally, we might describe th