# Analytical Psychology, by Carl Jung: Cognitive Functions



## Abraxas (May 28, 2011)

The following is an excerpt of a lecture given by Carl Jung in 1935 on his analytical psychology (The Tavistock Lectures). I have selected a small part of this lecture that discusses the cognitive functions.



Lecture One, pages 35 to 39:

You can distinguish a number of functions in consciousness. They enable consciousness to become oriented in the field of ectopsychic facts and endopsychic facts. What I understand by the _ectopsyche_ is a system of relationship between the contents of consciousness and facts and data coming in from the environment. It is a system of orientation which concerns my dealing with the external facts given to me by the function of my senses. The _endopsyche,_ on the other hand, is a system of relationship between the contents of consciousness and postulated processes in the unconscious.

In the first place we will speak of the ectopsychic functions. First of all we have sensation, our sense function. By Sensation I understand what the French psychologists call 'la fonction du reel', which is the sum-total of my awareness of external facts given to me through the function of my senses. So I think that the French term 'la fonction du reel' explains it in the most comprehensive way. Sensation tells me that something is: it does not tell me _what_ it is and it does not tell me other things about that something; it only tells me that something is.

The next function that is distinguishable is thinking. Thinking, if you ask a philosopher, is something very difficult, so never ask a philosopher about it because he is the only man who does not know what thinking is. Everybody else knows what thinking is. When you say to a man, 'Now think properly', he knows exactly what you mean, but a philosopher never knows. Thinking in its simplest form tells you _what_ a thing is. It gives a name to the thing. It adds a concept because thinking is perception and judgement. (German psychology calls it apperception.)

The third function you can distinguish and for which ordinary language has a term is feeling. Here minds become very confused and people get angry when I speak about feeling, because according to their view I say something very dreadful about it. Feeling informs you through its feeling-tones of the values of things. Feeling tells you for instance whether a thing is acceptable or agreeable or not. It tells you what a thing is _worth_ to you. On account of that phenomenon, you cannot perceive and you cannot apperceive without having a certain feeling reaction. You always have a certain feeling-tone, which you can even demonstrate by experiment. We will talk of these things later on. Now the 'dreadful' thing about feeling is that it is, like thinking, a rational function. All men who think are absolutely convinced that feeling is never a rational function but, on the contrary, most irrational. Now I say: Just be patient for a while and realize that man cannot be perfect in every respect. If a man is perfect in his thinking he is surely never perfect in his feeling, because you cannot do the two things at the same time; they hinder each other. Therefore when you want to think in a dispassionate way, really scientifically or philosophically, you must get away from all feeling-values. You cannot be bothered with feeling-values at the same time, otherwise you begin to feel that it is far more important to think about the freedom of the will than, for instance, the classification of lice. And certainly if you approach from the point of view of feeling the two objects are not only different as to facts but also as to value. Values are no anchors for the intellect, but they exist and giving value is an important psychological function. If you want to have a complete picture of the world you must necessarily consider values. If you do not, you will get into trouble. To many people feeling appears to be most irrational, because you feel all sorts of things in foolish moods: therefore everybody is convinced, in this country particularly, that you should control your feelings. I quite admit that this is a good habit and wholly admire the English for that faculty; yet there are such things as feelings, and I have seen people who control their feelings marvelously well and yet are terribly bothered by them.

Now the fourth function. Sensation tells us that a thing _is._ Thinking tells us _what_ a thing is, feeling tells us what it is _worth_ to us. Now what else could there be? One would assume one has a complete picture of the world when one knows there is something, _what_ it is, and what it is _worth._ But there is another category, and that is time. Things have a past and they have a future. They come from somewhere, they go somewhere, and you cannot see where they came from and you cannot know where they go to, but you get what the Americans call a hunch. For instance, if you are a dealer in art or in old furniture you get a hunch that a certain object is by a very good master of 1720, you get a hunch that it is a good work. Or you do not know what shares will do after a while, but you still get the hunch that they will rise. That is what is called intuition, a sort of divination, a sort of miraculous faculty. For instance, you do not know that your patient has something on his mind of a very painful kind, but you 'get an idea', you 'have a certain feeling', as we say, because ordinary language is not yet developed enough for one to have suitably defined terms. But the word intuition becomes more and more a part of the English language, and you are very fortunate because in other languages that word does not exist. The Germans cannot even make a distinction between sensation and feeling. It is different in French; if you speak French you cannot possibly say that you have a certain 'sentiment dans l'estomac', you will say 'sensation'; in English you also have your distinctive words for sensation and feeling. But you can mix up feeling and intuition easily. Therefore it is an almost artificial distinction I make here, though for practical reasons it is most important that we make such a differentiation in scientific language. We must define what we mean when we use certain terms, otherwise we talk an unintelligible language, and in psychology this is always a misfortune. In ordinary conversation, when a man says feeling, he means possibly something entirely different from another fellow who also talks about feeling. There are any number of psychologists who use the word feeling, and they define it as a sort of crippled thought. 'Feeling is nothing but an unfinished thought' - that is the definition of a well-known psychologist. But feeling is something genuine, it is something real, it is a function, and therefore we have a word for it. The instinctive natural mind always finds the words that designate things which really have existence. Only psychologists invent words for things that do not exist.

The last-defined function, intuition, seems to be very mysterious, and you know I am 'very mystical' as people say. This then is one of my pieces of mysticism! Intuition is a function by which you see round corners, which you really cannot do; yet the fellow will do it for you and you trust him. It is a function which normally you do not use if you live a regular life within four walls and do regular routine work. But if you are on the Stock Exchange or in Central Africa, you will use your hunches like anything. You cannot, for instance, calculate whether when you turn round a corner in the bush you will meet a rhinoceros or a tiger - but you get a hunch, and it will perhaps save your life. So you see that people who live exposed to natural conditions use intuition a great deal, and people who risk something in an unknown field, who are pioneers of some sort, will use intuition. Inventors will use it and judges will use it. Whenever you have to deal with strange conditions where you have no established values or established concepts, you will depend upon that faculty of intuition.

I have tried to describe that function as well as I can, but perhaps it is not very good. I say that intuition is a sort of perception which does not go exactly by the senses, but it goes via the unconscious, and at that I leave it and say 'I don't know how it works'. I do not know what is happening when a man knows something he definitely should not know. I do not know how he has come by it, but he has it all right and he can act on it. For instance, anticipatory dreams, telepathic phenomena, and all that kind of thing are intuitions. I have seen plenty of them, and I am convinced that they do exist. You can see these things also with primitives. You can see them everywhere if you pay attention to these perceptions that somehow work through the subliminal data, such as sense-perceptions so feeble that our consciousness simply cannot take them in. Sometimes, for instance, in cryptomnesia, something creeps up into consciousness; you catch a word which gives you a suggestion, but it is always something that is unconscious until the moment it appears, and so presents itself as if it had fallen from heaven. The Germans call this an Einfall, which means a thing which falls into your head from nowhere. Sometimes it is like a revelation. Actually, intuition is a very natural function, a perfectly normal thing, and it is necessary, too, because it makes up for what you cannot perceive or think or feel because it lacks reality. You see, the past is not real any more and the future is not as real as we think. Therefore we must be very grateful to heaven that we have such a function which gives us a certain light on those things which are round the corners. Doctors, of course, being often presented with the most unheard-of situations, need intuition a great deal. Many a good diagnosis comes from this 'very mysterious' function.


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## PaladinX (Feb 20, 2013)

What publication contains this lecture? Thanks!

Is it one of these? Or maybe they're all the same? Or none of the below?

Analytical Psychology: Its Theory & Practice (The Tavistock Lectures): C. G. Jung, E. A. Bennet: 9780394708621: Amazon.com: Books

http://www.amazon.ca/Analytical-Psy...7938008&sr=8-3&keywords=analytical+psychology

Analytical Psychology: C. G. Jung, William McGuire: 9780691019185: Amazon.com: Books


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## Abraxas (May 28, 2011)

PaladinX said:


> What publication contains this lecture? Thanks!


On the iBooks store, there's a book called Analytical Psychology, by Carl Jung.

I think this might be the same book, but I'm not sure.

I'm pretty sure though. It's the Tavistock Lectures.

http://www.amazon.com/Analytical-Psychology-Practice-Tavistock-Lectures/dp/0394708628/ref=pd_sim_sbs_b_1?ie=UTF8&refRID=092PWQEQWTEAMJM0KFTB


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## reckful (Jun 19, 2012)

@PaladinX — Here's a link where you can read that entire first Tavistock Lecture (in Vol. 18 of the _Collected Works_).

@Abraxas —

Thanks for posting that excerpt!

The mystical flavor of many N (and especially Ni) descriptions certainly goes all the way back to Jung, who mostly considered the abstract/concrete component of N/S a component of I/E instead, and — as shown by the stuff in your OP (which is essentially consistent with Jung's descriptions in Psychological Types) — conceptualized intuition primarily in terms of a special ability to perceive the contents of the unconscious and to envision, as Jung put it, "possibilities as to whence [something] came and whither it is going." Jung's Ni-dom portrait has a pretty strong _mystical visionary_ aspect that I don't think a typical INTJ is very likely to identify with.

Myers largely shifted abstract/concrete from I/E to N/S — and downplayed the unconscious stuff — with the result that the N/S items on the official MBTI are pretty much free of the mystical taint. But both Myers and Berens/Nardi talk about _both_ (1) the aspect of Ni that can potentially have visions of "what will be" (or at least could be) _in the future_, and (2) the aspect of Ni that uses the essential pattern-spotting nature of N to simply come to _present understandings_ (whether of the "aha!" variety or otherwise) of _the way things are_, or _the way things work_, or _what something means_, etc. And it's not uncommon for MBTI tests — both dichotomy tests and functions tests — to include one or more N questions (or Ni or Ne questions) that I suspect an NF or NP is more likely to choose the N response to than an NTJ. I'd say NTJs are the most _grounded_ of the N's in a number of ways, with the result that the N responses are sometimes too mystical/flaky/whatever to appeal to an NTJ. As one example, the original version of Keirsey's test asked if you find "visionaries" fascinating or annoying. Because (I assume) too many NTs (like me) were choosing the "annoying" response — because we associate the word "visionary" more with evidence-free New Agey mystical folks — Keirsey adjusted the wording, and the revised version asks if you find "visionaries _and theorists_" fascinating or annoying.

I'm an INTJ with what I consider strong T and J preferences, and these items from Nardi's cognitive functions test — 


Experience a premonition or foresee the distant future.

Gain a profound realization from a mystical state or sudden release of emotions.

Feel attracted to the symbolic, archetypal, or mysterious.
— have too much of a flaky flavor for me to relate to them very strongly. To identify with that kind of stuff, I think it helps to be an NF or NP (or both), and it probably also helps to be at least somewhat prone to believe in ESP and/or other supernatural stuff — as Jung was. Jung most often gets typed as an INTJ, INTP or INFJ, and the people who consider him an INFJ sometimes point to his mystical bent as one of the reasons they think he was an NF rather than an NT.


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## Abraxas (May 28, 2011)

@_PaladinX_,

I got the ISBN numbers.

ISBN: 978-0-415-73869-9 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-77220-2 (ebk)


This is the exact book.

http://www.bookwire.com/book/Analytical-Psychology-9780415738699-Carl-G-Jung-45501756


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