Intuition is more than a hunch

“In so far as intuition is a “hunch” it is not a product of a voluntary act; it is rather an involuntary event, which depends on different external and internal circumstances instead of an act of judgment.  Intuition is more like sense perception…” Carl Jung, Symbols and the Interpretation of Dreams, par. 502

Intuition is a slippery sort of business, especially for those whose psychological type is not orientated in that direction.  One might regularly claim “I need to buy a lottery ticket tonight, I have a hunch my numbers are gonna come up,” only to be disappointed yet again that whatever that passing thought was that prompted the purchase of the lottery ticket, it was not accurate.

So yes, intuition is a hunch, but it is also more than that.  I’d like to share an instance of intuition operating in my life yesterday and today to demonstrate.

Yesterday while fiddling with the back end of this blog, I posted how the that activity reminded me of watching my father repair cars in our driveway when I was growing up.   It was an analogy that seemed to fit.  The image of my dad working over the car engine activated a flood of memories that I had not visited in awhile, priming the pump so to speak for the challenges that where about to unfold.

Unexpectedly last night, the hood on our Ford would no longer latch.  The safety mechanism prevented it from flying open while driving, but it clearly was no longer closing as it should.  Now normally I would have driven the car to the service station and handed them the keys asking only “how long will it take?”  But the image of my father fresh in my mind from yesterday’s reflection prompted a different course of action.  I found the can of wd-40 in the barn and gathered some misplaced tools.  Step by step I disassembled the latch, discovered the part that was bound up with rust, squirted the be-jeezus out of it with wd-40 and presto.  A repair job gets notched into the belt.

So the hunch was seeded with a distinct image, as if it were a dream image that carried possible solution that would go against the conscious tendency.  Where it gets interesting though is not so much in the repaired hood latch, but in the assessment of what it might all be saying on a different level.

“Breurer and Freud recognized more than half a century ago that neurotic symptoms are meaningful and make sense in as much as they express a certain thought.   In other words, they function in the same manner as dreams: they symbolize.  A patient, for instance, confronted with an intolerable situation, develops a spasm whenever he tries to swallow: “He can’t swallow it.”  Under similar conditions another patient develops asthma: “He can’t breath the atmosphere of the home.”  A third suffers from a peculiar paralysis of the legs: “He can’t go on any more.” A forth vomits everything he eats: “He can’t stomach it.” And so on.  They could all just as well have had dreams of a similar kind. ” Carl Jung, Symbols and the Interpretation of Dreams, par. 421

So yesterday through analogy, an unexpected image gets activated in consciousness.   Like all intuitions, it is bi-polar in the sense that it points both to where it came from and where it is going.  Like a dream that is given due attention, the contents that get lifted into consciousness expand or widen the possibilities one has at their disposal for facing life’s challenges.  But beyond the given circumstances, the image symbolizes.  So what is this image pointing at?

Briefly: getting under the hood is in a manner of speaking digging into the psyche itself.  The specific dilemma, needing to fix the latching mechanism, points to an idea that appropriate seal needed to contain the unconscious materials is not functioning.   But the image and the resultant exercise with the car point out that the solution is within my capability, not requiring the intervention of an expert.

So for what it’s worth, and example of living what Jung called the symbolic life.