Two people stand at the rim of the Grand Canyon. One is overcome with awe at nature’s grandeur, while the other sees an enormous rift in the landscape. What accounts for the difference? This week, Jungian analyst and scholar JOHN R. WHITE joins Lisa Marchiano and Deborah Stewart to explore Jung’s feeling function, our capacity to discern what matters.

One of Jung’s best-known legacies is his categorization of ego functions: typology. Whether we are extraverted or introverted (terms Jung introduced), our four basic ego functions sort themselves into intuition, sensation, thinking, and feeling. We have all four functions but prefer some over others. Jung’s system led directly to the creation of the widely used Myers-Briggs Personality Type Indicator.

The feeling and thinking functions are both ways of making judgments, but the feeling function is based on personal values: if you were a military commander, would you be like Napoleon, directing his troops from the hilltop -- or like Braveheart, leading his men on the field? When the feeling function is cultivated and differentiated, it illuminates much of how and why we do what we do. Do we tend to prefer a subjective stance based on personal values, or a more objective and strategic stance?

Developing our feeling function may be challenging in the context of a culture that prioritizes thinking and sensate functions over feeling and intuition. It is a task worth taking on, however. Evaluating our experiences up close as well as from the greater distance the thinking function affords can be a profound step toward growth and individuation. Discerning whether the basis of a decision should be subjective or objective builds consciousness and expands choice. Since subjectivity is closely aligned with feelings, we can reflect on what a bruising encounter has made us feel—and choose our response rather than reacting.

We discuss some of the strategies you might use to differentiate your feeling function, including embarking on analysis, writing in your journal, and Eugene Gendlin’s focusing technique, which asks us to tune into the body and carefully name what is felt.

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This Halloween week, when the veil between worlds grows thin, Jungian analyst ROBERT SHEAVLY joins us to discuss ways in which we experience the dead communicating with the living.

In times of grief, it is common to be briefly reunited with the person we have lost in the form of deeply comforting dreams, visions or visitations. Jung himself was visited in such a dream by his deceased wife, Emma. He dreamed that Emma was in the south of France, continuing her research on the Holy Grail, and he felt comforted.

People have also sought seances and mediums to contact the dead, and Jung had a lifelong interest in these phenomena. Family members, including a teenage cousin, were deeply involved in this work. Jung was fascinated by his cousin’s ability to transform into another personality with knowledge a young woman could not have acquired. These experiences were Jung’s first encounter with what we now call the paranormal. This remained a lifelong interest and would later give rise to his theory of the collective unconscious, the deep wellspring of psychic experience shared by all humankind.

For Jungians, the appearance of the deceased loved one is not only a psychological metaphor; the possibility that such contact may be more than a reassuring fantasy is admitted into consideration. Jung’s work offers us ways to relate to mysterious phenomena that neither ask us to abandon critical thinking nor limit our understanding to rationality alone.

In this wide-ranging conversation, we also discuss Jung’s Seven Sermons of the Dead, quantum physics, dreams that predict death, and the visitations from the dead that many people experience at the end of life. We consider, too, AI’s promise of technologically reuniting us with lost loved ones.

Visit our website to read today’s dream and follow up on the resources we mention.

Connect With This Jungian Life

Join Lisa at the Kosmos Colloquium this Dec. 17-21. Podcast listeners can claim a 15% discount - details here.

Take a look at This Jungian Life Dream School, our online course in Jungian dream analysis.

Send a dream for us to analyze on the show

Watch bonus mini-episodes on our Patreon channel

Follow This Jungian Life on Instagram

Our guest this week is GARY LACHMAN, a founding member of the rock group Blondie, and the author of more than twenty books, including a biography of C.G. Jung, and a new memoir, Touched by the Presence: From Blondie's Bowery and Rock and Roll to Magic and the Occult.

We explore Gary’s wide-ranging interests, from the nature of consciousness and the history of the occult to the lives and ideas of Rudolf Steiner, Aleister Crowley, and Colin Wilson.

Our current era of cultural dissolution and environmental destruction can feel towering and fearsome. Yet might this moment also represent the state of dire necessity required for a change in consciousness? It is important to realize that we are always part of the great mythic cycle of life, death, and rebirth, so during times of disintegration cultivating our capacity for awe, attending to synchronicities, and listening to the wisdom of dreams can help us find a path forward. Jung’s search for meaning and a relationship to the infinite offers a way to approach this question.

There are still spaces available to join Lisa Marchiano and Gary Lachman in Switzerland for the Kosmos Institute’s First Annual Colloquium this December 17-21. This Jungian Life podcast listeners can claim a 15% discount - details here.

Visit our website to read today’s dream and find a detailed list of the resources we mention.

Follow Up the Episode

Check out This Jungian Life Dream School, our 12-month online course in Jungian dream analysis.

Send a dream for us to analyze on the show.

Watch bonus mini-episodes on our Patreon channel.