20/03/2026
James Hillman met personally with Jung at his house in Kusnacht to discuss Hillman’s doctoral thesis, on emotion and its differentiation from the feeling function. Hillman presented his own belief that the feeling function was somehow mystically linked with time, but Jung told Hillman the feeling function also had very important spatial considerations. Hillman later wrote an essay in response to his discussion with Jung on the feeling function and emotion, which was included along with Marie Louise Van Franz’s essay on the Inferior function, called “Lectures on Jung’s Typology”.
From Hillman’s essay :
“Tact, or the sense of timing, is perhaps the crown of appropriate feeling… Perhaps feeling is merely tactfulness, a matter of timing. Humor depends wholly on it, and music is the art of time. The feeling function perceives time: as, for instance, when visiting a person in the hospital, staying not too short or too long, feeling the time to get up and go. The quality of time, rather than the amount one gives another, carries the feeling… Time has a quality – or is a quality. It is not but an accumulation of endlessly clicking identical minutes into eternity. The development of the time Sense means the development of feeling awareness of the moment and of biography different from the moment constructed by the thinking clock.. Moments have sizes: there are long moments, big moments, and moments so crowded that nothing finds place. Feeling shapes time, breaking it up into various kinds of feeling tones… Feeling time is organized in clusters, more like an organic growth, so that today has its roots perhaps in a day last summer (and not yesterday which belonged to a wholly different branch). Thus we do pick up old relationships again where we left off. And thus is continuity so essential for feeling development. The elapse of time may or may not alter the feeling function… How long to hold and when to let go are again matters of timing; one has no better guide than the “inner voices” of the feeling function and has to trust the guide… Feeling may be in essence only a matter of giving time to things; and patience, or the art of slowness, may be, as mysticism says, the final flower of human feeling… And when we inquire to what a person gives his time, or to whom, we discover a great deal about his feeling. The time one spends may express the feeling itself being given.”
