Glossary: Affect

A strong emotional reaction caused by a complex being touched. They usually flare up where adaptation is weakest; a particular sore spot for people is in their inferior function. Affects are different from feeling - i.e. the feeling function – in that the former causes disturbances in thinking and in the body, while use of the feeling function does not.

On the one hand, emotion is the alchemical fire whose warmth brings everything into existence and whose heat burns all superfluities to ashes (omnes superfluitates comburit). 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, "Psychological Aspects of the Mother Archetype," CW 9i, par. 179