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Affect

Affect — Descent Press Index (entry forthcoming).

Jae Botávn

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Affect
A face carrying visible strain - Photo: Max Bvp / Unsplash

## 1. Etymology

**Affect** names **emotional reactions marked by physical symptoms and disturbances in thinking**—emotion strong enough to agitate the nervous system. Distinct from [feeling](/index/feeling/) as a psychological function; related: [complex](/index/complex/); invasion of the [ego](/index/ego/).

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## 2. Plain summary

**Affect** happens *to* us. Feeling, in Jung’s typology, is a judging function one can command; affect intrudes against the will and is hard to repress. An explosion of affect temporarily takes over the ego. It usually appears where adaptation is weakest, and it exposes that weakness—often a lower level of personality with little moral judgment in the moment.

A key to discovering a [complex](/index/complex/) is an affect-laden response (as in the word [association](/index/association/) experiment). Affect reveals the locus and force of psychological values; the measure of a psychic wound is the affect aroused when it is touched.

**Examples (exhaustive house list for this Index lemma — common affect motifs named across Jung’s essays and standard Jungian lexica; not a claim that Jung’s CW contains only these):**

emotion with physical symptoms; thinking disturbed; complex activated; adaptation weakest; lower level of personality; invasion / temporary ego takeover; vs [feeling](/index/feeling/) as function; word-[association](/index/association/) indicators; psychic wound gauge; [shadow](/index/shadow/) / inferiority kinship; [compensation](/index/compensation/) when one-sided; [inflation](/index/inflation/) / possession edges.

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## 3. Academic elucidation

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## 4. Lexicon

**Sharp (1991)**

> Affect. Emotional reactions marked by physical symptoms and disturbances in thinking. (See also complex and feeling.) Affect is invariably a sign that a complex has been activated. Affects occur usually where adaptation is weakest, and at the same time they reveal the reason for its weakness, namely a certain degree of inferiority and the existence of a lower level of personality.

(Sharp, 1991, p. [provisional — unverified])

> affect Synonymous with emotion; feeling of sufficient intensity to cause nervous agitation or other obvious psychomotor disturbances. One has command over feeling, whereas affect intrudes against one’s WILL and can only be repressed with difficulty. An explosion of affect is an invasion of the individual and a temporary takeover of the EGO. … A key to the discovery of a COMPLEX is an affect-laden response.

(Samuels, Shorter, & Plaut, 1986, p. **11**)

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## 5. CW concordance — sample, not exhaustive

> By the term affect I mean a state of feeling characterized by marked physical innervation on the one hand and a peculiar disturbance of the ideational process on the other.

(Jung, 1921/1971, CW 6, p. 573, ¶681)

> … feeling can be a voluntarily disposable function, whereas affect is usually not. Similarly, affect is clearly distinguished from feeling by quite perceptible physical innervations …

(Jung, 1921/1971, CW 6, p. 574, ¶681)

> Affects occur usually where adaptation is weakest, and at the same time they reveal the reason for its weakness, namely a certain degree of inferiority and the existence of a lower level of personality.

(Jung, 1951/1959, CW 9ii, p. 9, ¶15)

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**See also:** [feeling](/index/feeling/); [complex](/index/complex/); [association](/index/association/); [ego](/index/ego/); [shadow](/index/shadow/); [attitude](/index/attitude/); [compensation](/index/compensation/).

## References

Jung, C. G. (1959). The shadow. In H. Read, M. Fordham, G. Adler, & W. McGuire (Eds.), *The collected works of C. G. Jung* (R. F. C. Hull, Trans.) (Vol. 9, Pt. 2, p. 9, ¶15). Princeton University Press. (Original work published 1951)

Jung, C. G. (1971). Psychological types [Definitions]. In H. Read, M. Fordham, G. Adler, & W. McGuire (Eds.), *The collected works of C. G. Jung* (R. F. C. Hull, Trans.) (Vol. 6, pp. 573–574, ¶681). Princeton University Press. (Original work published 1921)

Samuels, A., Shorter, B., & Plaut, F. (1986). *A critical dictionary of Jungian analysis*. Routledge.

Sharp, D. (1991). *Jung lexicon: A primer of terms & concepts*. Inner City Books.

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