Emotion

1. Etymology

Emotion names an involuntary reaction due to an active complex. Related: affect (often synonymous in house usage); feeling (commandable); alchemical fire.

2. Plain summary

Emotion happens to us. On one side it is the alchemical fire whose warmth brings things into existence and whose heat burns superfluities to ash. On the other it is steel on flint—the spark—because emotion is a chief source of consciousness. There is no change from darkness to light or from inertia to movement without it.

Samuels treats affect as synonymous with emotion of enough intensity to agitate: one commands feeling; affect intrudes against will. Emotions expose where adaptation is weakest and mark the locus of psychic value—including the wound’s measure when touched.

Examples (exhaustive house list for this Index lemma — common emotion motifs named across Jung’s essays and standard Jungian lexica; not a claim that Jung’s CW contains only these):
involuntary reaction; active complex; alchemical fire / burns superfluities; steel meets flint / spark; chief source of consciousness; no change without emotion; synonymy with affect; vs commandable feeling; exposes weak adaptation; value-locus / wound measure.

3. Academic elucidation

In analytical psychology emotion is complex-triggered involuntary fire—Mother Archetype essay territory in Sharp. Descent Press keeps Sharp in §4; Samuels via affect. §5 holds sample CW stamps at CW 9i ¶179.

4. Lexicon

Sharp (1991)

Emotion. An involuntary reaction due to an active complex. (See also affect.) On the one hand, emotion is the alchemical fire whose warmth brings everything into existence and whose heat burns all superfluities to ashes… But on the other hand, emotion is the moment when steel meets flint and a spark is struck forth, for emotion is the chief source of consciousness…

(Sharp, 1991) — cites CW 9i ¶179 in Sharp’s lemma.

Samuels, Shorter & Plaut (1986) — no dedicated emotion head; under affect p. 11

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… Our emotions happen to us; affect occurs at the point at which our ADAPTATION is weakest…

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

5. CW concordance — sample, not exhaustive

Conflict engenders fire, the fire of affects and emotions, and like every other fire it has two aspects, that of combustion and that of creating light. On the one hand, emotion is the alchemical fire whose warmth brings everything into existence and whose heat burns all superfluities to ashes… But on the other hand, emotion is the moment when steel meets flint and a spark is struck forth, for emotion is the chief source of consciousness. There is no change from darkness to light or from inertia to movement without emotion.
(Jung, 1938/1968, CW 9i, p. 95, ¶179)

See also: affect; complex; consciousness; feeling; adaptation; libido.

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.) (2nd ed., Vol. 9, Pt. 1, p. 95, ¶179). Princeton University Press. (Original work published 1938)

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.