Ambivalence

1. Etymology

Ambivalence names a state of mind where every attitude or anticipated course of action is counterbalanced by its opposite (Sharp)—Bleuler’s term, used by Jung in several senses. Related: conflict; opposites; undifferentiated functions; complex.

2. Plain summary

Ambivalence is not merely mixed feelings about a mixed object. In one Jungian use it fuses positive and negative feelings from the same root in the subject (bivalence)—as in infantile love/hate toward the mother arising in the child, not only from the mother’s traits. In another use it names plurality and fluidity—more than two contradictory currents. A third: every position entails its own negation.

Sharp ties ambivalence to unconscious complexes and to psychological functions not yet differentiated. It sits beside conflict and opposites without being identical to either.

Examples (exhaustive house list for this Index lemma — common ambivalence motifs named across Jung’s essays and standard Jungian lexica; not a claim that Jung’s CW contains only these):
attitude/course counterbalanced by opposite; Bleuler inheritance; bivalence of feeling from same root; infantile mother ambivalence; plurality beyond two; every position entails negation; complexes; undifferentiated functions; conflict/opposites neighborhood; adaptation strain when both poles pull; loving and terrible mother.

3. Academic elucidation

4. Lexicon

Sharp (1991)

Ambivalence. A state of mind where every attitude or anticipated course of action is counterbalanced by its opposite. (See also conflict and opposites.) Ambivalence is associated in general with the influence of unconscious complexes, and in particular with the psychological functions when they have not been differentiated.

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

ambivalence Jung used this term, which was introduced by Bleuler (see PSYCHOANALYSIS), in a number of ways… (1) … a fusing of positive and negative feelings about the same entity… from the same root… (2) Sometimes the number of contradictory feelings is permitted to exceed two… (3) … every position entails its own negation… (5) Ambivalence is a presence in the world…

(Samuels, Shorter, & Plaut, 1986, pp. 15–16)

5. CW concordance — sample, not exhaustive

Fusion of the psychological functions (v. Differentiation), of thinking with feeling, feeling with sensation, feeling with intuition, and so on, is archaic, as is also the fusion of part of a function with its counterpart, e.g., positive with negative feeling, or what Bleuler calls ambitendency and ambivalence, and such phenomena as colour hearing.
(Jung, 1921/1971, CW 6, p. 576, ¶684)

As a rule, the undifferentiated function is also characterized by ambivalence and ambitendency, i.e., every position entails its own negation, and this leads to characteristic inhibitions in the use of the undifferentiated function.
(Jung, 1921/1971, CW 6, p. 590, ¶705)

There I formulated the ambivalence of these attributes as “the loving and the terrible mother.”
(Jung, 1938/1968, CW 9i, p. 82, ¶158)

See also: conflict; opposites; complex; adaptation; attitude; feeling; mother.

References

Jung, C. G. (1968). Psychological aspects of the mother archetype. 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. 1, pp. 81–82, ¶158). Princeton University Press. (Original work published 1938)

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. 576, 590, ¶¶684, 705). 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.