[this commentary by Jean D. was delivered through the Animas Valley Commons].
Thank you James for this post. Your mapping of the four functions of consciousness to the four NVC components in this article opens up possibilities, and your overall approach is very interesting and resonates.
I'm by no means a Jungian scholar, and will only comment on something I've been digging into a bit, but is still puzzling to me.
Your mapping of the four functions of consciousness to the four NVC components in this article opens up possibilities, and your approach is very interesting to me (elsewhere, you've also mapped the NVC components to the four facets of the Self and the windows of knowing that they are most resonant with).
I'm by no means a Jungian scholar, and will only comment on something I've been digging into a bit, but is still puzzling to me.
His book "Animals of the Four Windows: Integrating Thinking, Feeling, Sensing and Imagery" is not a systematic work to allow for clear conclusions, but in my understanding, for Eligio Stephen Gallegos, there are four ways/windows of knowing, which incidentally are also four ways/windows of intuiting (but not the same thing).
Gallegos does not state it clearly in that manner, but I believe this can be surmised, as he repeats that intuition may occur through any the four windows (see below).
In other words, while he presents compelling arguments that Jung possibly mixed up intuition with imagination when describing the former (or its contents), he does not necessarily suggest that one equals the other. He differentiates between the two.
Let's see what Gallegos writes:
//The four modes of knowing are: thinking sensing feeling and imagery. Yes, I know. If you are a Jungian the fourth one will seem strange to you. Jung in speaking of the four functions of consciousness spoke of the fourth one as intuition. But there is good reason to rename it.
Jung was in a peculiar position in that he was highly intuitive and his imagery was very powerful. Furthermore, his intuition, i.e., knowing things beyond the present moment and circumstance and for which there is no immediate evidence, came to him through his imagery. So it is not surprising that he didn't differentiate the two. It is clear that his life's purpose was to help Western humankind return to the window of imagery as a valid mode of knowing.
But there are other people, also highly intuitive, for whom intuition arrives through one of the other windows.//
Notice that Gallegos above introduces his own definition of intuition here (which largely differs from Jung's): "knowing things beyond the present moment and circumstance and for which there is no immediate evidence", and submits that intuition may arrive through any of the four windows.
Further down, he writes:
//I was curious about his [Jung's] naming intuition whereas I was convinced that imagery was the fourth mode of knowing, so I promptly reread Jung's Psychological Types. I noted that when ever Jung spoke about the content of the intuitive function it was imagery. For example, he says, The primary function of intuition ... is simply to transmit images, or perceptions of relations between things, which could not be transmitted by the other functions or only in a very roundabout way.//
Interestingly, Jung also mentions imagination (when discussing fantasy) in Psychological Types:
//Imagination [imaginative activity] is the reproductive or creative activity of the mind in general. It is not a special faculty, since it can come into play in all the basic forms of psychic activity, whether thinking, feeling, sensation, or intuition.//
So what Jung says of imagination (that it happens through any function of consciousness), Gallegos says of intuition (that it may occur through any window)...
Regarding intuition, I wish to draw a link between the "experience of depth" Gallegos mentions in his vision analogy in the following footnote (which you've included in your article):
//Jung speaks of intuition as being the "function of unconscious perception". Intuition may, in fact, derive from the interrelated functioning of all modes of knowing, analogous to the experience of depth that results from using both eyes simultaneously rather than only one eye, or each eye alternately. Intuition would then essentially be a depth of knowing that emanates from the harmony of all four modes, and as such could appear in the guise of any of them, and to a greater or lesser extent depending upon the degree of alignment.//
and a later chapter called "Intuition as a Dimension in Itself", which starts thus:
//I mentioned in an earlier chapter that Jung called the imagery window the intuitive function because his own intuition occurred through the window of imagery, but that intuition could come through any window. This has been explored in group workshops on the animals of the four windows, by also inviting an animal of intuition to appear and asking it about its relationship to the other four.//
So in deep imagery, one may meet a separate, fifth animal, that of intuition, which "derive[s] from the interrelated functioning of all modes of knowing" and offers the depth of "knowing things beyond the present moment and circumstance and for which there is no immediate evidence".
I've been wondering what Gallegos arguments (which seem pretty convincing, although the matter calls for further study) would mean for Jung's psychological types theory. To me, this is not a matter of simply substituting one term for another (or combining them), but would have, if the thesis was accepted, larger consequences upstream...
As a bonus, I've found that Imagination and Intuition do figure as two separate functions in Assagioli's psychosynthesis approach (see Star Diagram: https://shorturl.at/htEVY ).