C. G. Jung’s Rehabilitation of the Feeling Function in Our Civilization

Abstract

This is the provocative, final lecture given in 1986 by Marie-Louise von Franz, a lifelong colleague of C. G. Jung and an accomplished scholar, teacher, analyst, and author. Her theme is Jung’s critique of twentieth century western culture for overvaluing the scientific method and rationalism at the expense of empathy and differentiated relatedness. She argues that the development of individual conscious relationships is the only thing that allows for the development of the human soul. Only this prevents cruelty, which, she notes, is often accompanied by sentimentality and emotionality as opposed to true empathy. She develops her theme by citing a student lecture by Jung, where he quotes Kant’s belief that an ethical stance requires a personal relationship to something beyond ordinary experience (god, the Self, the “spirit world”). In this wide-ranging lecture, von Franz expresses her own strong values through examples from contemporary and indigenous cultures and social movements, as well as the cultures of science and medicine. She is critical of experimental physiology (which inflicts pain upon animals) and quantitative psychology (with its objectification of human experience and abstraction through statistics). She also criticizes the objectification of analytic patients and the physician’s hiding behind persona in order to avoid a real human encounter. She ends with the suggestion that Jung may be remembered not only as a “leader of minds” but also as someone who resurrected the feminine principle of Eros, or relatedness.