Below I share a short YouTube video—an interview with Marie-Louise von Franz—which is part of the film The Way of the Dream: Marie-Louise von Franz in Conversation with Fraser Boa. The person who extracted this segment titled it “Real Love Makes the Other Person Whole.”
The interview begins with Fraser Boa asking for a comment on the topic of liberating the heart and separating it from sexual desire. Marie-Louise laughs and says that feeling is her inferior function, which makes it somewhat difficult for her to speak about the subject. Yet the answer she gives is deeply touching, and I would like to explain why.
According to analytical psychology, it is precisely the inferior (the least differentiated) function that contains the treasure, because it is through this function that the connection with the unconscious is established. It is the Fool of the fairy tale—the one who finds the solution to the problem, the one who unites the opposites. The differentiation of the inferior function is the way it becomes integrated into the conscious personality. In this sense, it is through it that the path toward inner wholeness unfolds.
That is why, when Marie-Louise von Franz speaks, her words touch and move us so deeply: they come not only from her brilliant intellect, but also from her differentiated feeling function—from her treasure.
I strongly recommend watching the entire film with her (there is a link to a ten-hour video, Dr. von Franz on Dreams).
What follows is a transcript of this excerpt from the interview, with minor abridgements.
Marie-Louise von Franz
“The feeling function is completely neglected nowadays. Usually, we identify feeling with affect and emotion, but these are only inferior forms of feeling.
Differentiated feeling is the capacity to love this unique person because of their uniqueness, which presupposes that one is able to perceive the other’s uniqueness. It requires liberation from all schematic psychological evaluations…
The more a person becomes a unique individual, the more they individuate in the Jungian sense of the word. So the liberation of the heart would mean gradually becoming capable of sensing and feeling the uniqueness of the other person—and loving that uniqueness.”
(This does not mean loving everything or excusing everything…)
“It requires an enormous precision of feeling. I have noticed that people with differentiated feeling are already shocked if someone speaks to them without full sincerity, or if their gestures are not genuine. They sense uniqueness and want you to be yourself.
I think this is the most important thing for a psychologist: to love the genuine personality of the patient, and to be quite openly disapproving of everything in the patient that is not authentic.
In this way, one brings out of the other what he or she truly is—or what they were meant to be by nature. And that is real love: the kind of love that heals, or makes the other person whole. That makes the other person become themselves.
This has nothing to do with sentimentality, or with simply being sweet or nice. On the contrary. It is very exhausting to maintain a constantly sharp and precise sensitivity for what the other should or should not be…”
I fully agree with Marie-Louise von Franz’s words. The differentiation of the feeling function is of crucial importance. Thanks to it, we are able to form mature and meaningful relationships with other people. The irony is that, in order to achieve this, we need the active role of thinking—that is, the opposite function. Thinking and feeling are the rational functions which together form the capacity for reflection: that which distinguishes us from the animal kingdom and makes free will possible.
My psychological type differs from that of Marie-Louise von Franz, because my dominant function is the opposite of hers—feeling. Yet if I had not developed thinking, I would not have been able to express feeling in a constructive way. In this sense, my own treasure is the differentiated thinking function.
This is also where I see the value of the 29 Days Program, in which I share my experience of how one can build a mature and living relationship between mind and emotions.
I believe that if you feel called to work on the differentiation of the feeling function, such work can truly help you. The aim of the various self-observation and reflection tasks is to transform affects and emotions (inferior feeling) into fuel for the emergence of consciousness. Only when we bring awareness into the disturbing emotional factor within us does our life begin to change.
This Program always begins on a New Moon.
The next New Moon is on October 25th, in the sign of transformation—Scorpio.
Kameliya Hadzhiyska
