My recent meditations re: Jung's four functions and the four potentialities I deduced from them lead to another revision-- hopefully, the last, in which I attempt to define just what narrative quanta are evoked whenever an author employs one of the four potentialities. I wouldn't tread this ground again except I think it's necessary for a more extensive formulation.
The last major attempt to form terminology for the four quanta-types appeared in 2017's GOOD WILL QUANTUMS PT. 2:
The KINETIC is a potentiality that describes the relationships of strength-quanta.
The DRAMATIC is a potentiality that describes the relationships of affect-quanta.
The DIDACTIC (formerly "thematic") is a potentiality that describes the relationships of idea-quanta.
The MYTHOPOEIC is a potentiality that describes the relationships of symbol-quanta.
Since then, however, I decided that in place of "ideas" and "symbols" I would use "cogitations" and "correlations" in this 2022 essay, and thus far I'm sticking with that revision. In another essay I experimented with substituting "potency" for "strength" under the kinetic umbrella. However, I've used both "power" and "potency" in an earlier terminological opposition. So, since the context of using "strength" was that of discrete forces impinging upon the various human senses, I'm going to substitute the new term "excitations," because I'm concerned with the excitation of neural perceptions by those forces. Whatever emotional context human beings then place upon their neural sensations then line up as "emotion-quanta," which takes the place of the vaguer "affect-quanta." So now my schema comes down to:
The KINETIC is a potentiality that describes the relationships of excitation-quanta.
The DRAMATIC is a potentiality that describes the relationships of emotion-quanta.
The DIDACTIC (formerly "thematic") is a potentiality that describes the relationships of correlation-quanta.
The MYTHOPOEIC is a potentiality that describes the relationships of cogitation-quanta.
The new terminology of course essentially coheres with Jung's general formulation that the potentialities rooted in the sensation and intuition functions are what Jung called "perceiving functions," while those rooted in the feeling and thinking functions are what Jung called "judging functions." That said, I do have some departures from Jung's system on which I'll expound in a future essay, in line with remarks already made in PARALLEL PATHS: ARTHUR, CARL, AND ALBERT.
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