The feeling function has its roots with the archetypal mother. My actual mother had limited tolerance for negative emotions from me. Her outbursts frightened me, and my own feelings terrified me even more. Hillman wrote that the mother-complex, “is the permanent trap of one’s reactions and values from earliest infancy, the box and walls in every situation whichever way one turns.”
Issues
For intuitives, change can be a thrilling undertaking. A preference for sensing, by contrast, tends to be associated with a step-by-step process to change that is anchored in what is known, as well as what is necessary and practical. If acculturation is viewed as a process of change, intuitive individuals possess a greater propensity for reconciling different cultural identities.
The black swan represents those aspects of the inferior function that evoke surprise, spontaneity, and freedom from control and rigidity. It is here where the interpretation of the black swan requires an open mind, not to play the role merely, but to embody what seems foreign and necessary to us from a more authentic and personal place.
Giannini’s model differs importantly from Myers’ in that it does not restrict us to just one predominant function pair associated with one’s preferred perceiving and judging processes. His model provides a greater degree of flexibility in the developmental expression of type-related behaviors as well as enhanced adaptive power for engaging and responding to our various environments.
Like the water that surrounds their country, the Greeks are very fluid and go with the flow. They are passionate and capable. However, their heroic use of extraverted sensing has contributed to the current economic crisis. The Greek hero must ease his extraverted sensing grip and use puer extraverted thinking energy to build analytical and efficient systems.
With his unique thundering velvet hand approach, a Texan rarely says, “Shut up!” or “Don’t do that!” Instead, we hear, “Hush,” or “That would be ill-advised,” with a long drawl and a grin. The result is effective and charming, binding the man to his community. He easily compensates in robust, creative, and powerful ways to ensure full balance in his personality expression.
Individuation is attractive as a therapeutic goal, but adaptation, even to a self that analytic work has brought into focus, can continue to be a challenge. I have come to feel that one of my jobs as a therapist is to help the person working with me develop an attitude that can negotiate culture comfortably— one adequate to bridge the gulf between irreducibly individual self and continuously demanding world.
“Once upon a time, there was a quiet little village in the French countryside whose people believed in tranquillité.” This opening indicates that the psychological orientation of the village is one of peace and calmness, agreeability and order, suggesting that the village has certain values through which it judges situations—in other words a feeling function is at work.
My Feeling is definitely not a matter of determining whether simply I like or dislike something, as Hillman suggested an undifferentiated Feeling function might do. For example, I feel a hundred different aspects of a rose—smell, vibration, gentleness, tone, harmony, et cetera, and all of these come into play when I evaluate its suitability for a certain spot in the garden.
What is evil? We know it when we see it. Evil is subjective; it often depends on our point of view. For example, when the two women asked if they could tell me what I did wrong, I had a choice; I could either see their offer as helpful or “evil” in the sense that they were out to destroy my work. Can we utilize the power of psychological type to better understand what evil is?