THE ANCIENT GREEK GODS WERE KNOWN TO BE AUTONOMOUS POWERS who were able to overwhelm mortal humans at any moment. Modern depth psychology tells us that human emotions are also autonomous powers that, like the ancient gods, are able to overwhelm us — at any moment.
Does it seem a bit much to liken our emotions to gods? Well, try to remember the last time you felt angry. Did you choose to feel anger, or did your anger suddenly overtake you? If you’re being honest with yourself, I’m sure you’ll admit that the emotional state came over you suddenly and wrested control from your “rational” flow of thought. Now, think of the last time you felt overjoyed. Didn’t the feeling of joy well up and fill your being in much the same way as your anger? Falling in love happens the same way.
Each of these emotional states seems to have a life and will of its own. In other words, emotions are autonomous powers in our psyches. To the ancient mind, these autonomous powers seemed to come from outside oneself. They were projected into the heavenly world and personified as gods.
Eros was a great god, the god of love whose arrows caused all kinds of trouble in the well-ordered lives of mortals. Mars brought his warriors into the frenzy of war. Dionysus brought transforming ecstasy. Euphrosyne brought joy; Oizys, grief.
If you’re familiar with Jung’s theory of psychological types, you know emotion could be called a “compound” function. The four primary functions of consciousness, in this model, are sensation, thinking, “feeling,” and intuition. Thinking and “feeling” are rational functions of judgment. Sensation and intuition are non-rational functions of perception. According to Jung’s concise formulation, sensation tells you something is there; thinking tells you what it is; “feeling” tells you what value it has; and intuition tells you about the “hidden possibilities” something might have (see Collected Works, vol. 6, ¶ 983).
“Feeling” is an unfortunately imprecise term that in English can refer to a sensation (it feels cold), or to an intuition (I have a feeling that …), or to an emotion (I feel sad), but also to an evaluation (that feels right). As a typological term, feeling refers only to the latter, to the rational function that evaluates things.
Technically speaking, emotion is not feeling. Rather, emotion occurs when a feeling (an evaluation) and a sensation (an unusual “feeling” in one’s body) come together. It takes both primary functions, acting together, to produce an emotional state. That’s why I call emotion a compound function, and I think it’s one of three such functions. Sensation and thinking combine to give us apperception. Thinking and intuition produce inspiration. Intuition and feeling together give us revelation.
In keeping with the archetypal 3 +1 pattern of a psychological quaternity, apperception seems to be an ordinary experience, while the other three secondary functions typically lead to extraordinary experiences. In other words, these latter experiences have a numinous quality to them. They are both powerful and autonomous. They influence us profoundly, and are quite beyond our control. The ego is overmatched in its encounter with such non-ordinary states of consciousness, and emotional states are our most common experiences of such transpersonal numinosity.
The less well-developed consciousness of the ancients, overcome more completely by the advent of transpersonal powers, understood their emotions and their numinous experiences as encounters with gods. With the benefits of highly developed, rational thought systems, modern consciousness has the tools to withdraw earlier projections and see emotional experiences as inner realities. Psychological understanding allows us to maintain some perspective in our encounters with autonomous powers, and maybe even to stand our ground a bit.
When emotions were gods, mortals had virtually no chance. They could only be swept away by their emotions. Now that we are able to see that the gods always have been inner powers, not “heavenly” ones, we have the capacity to engage our emotional states, to allow a wave of emotion to wash over us and, more often than not, keep our feet under us in the shifting sand.
For an in-depth study of this topic from a Jungian perspective, read Emotion, by James Hillman.
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