One of the more persistent myths we live with is the belief that our feelings, those sudden hunches and quiet gut instincts, reliably hold the key to truth. Some of us also may have an unwavering conviction that intuition is the voice of wisdom, although they may struggle to articulate what intuition consists of, and what separates it from instinctual imperatives. Intuition may indeed be a profound guide — but it is also frequently mistaken by most, can be riddled with biases, and prone to capture by our unconscious.
Instinct vs. Intuition
It can be helpful to distinguish between instinct and intuition. Instinct is deeply biological: it can be referred to as an innate programming that exists in different forms, ultimately for the goal of survival. Among the different ways it manifests could be from when we instinctively pull our hand away from a fire, to more controversially – when people travel to unknown places in search of different living spaces. In each of these examples, we are responding to pre-wired, evolutionary imperatives.
Intuition, by contrast, can be experienced to be more subtle. It is a psychological process involving a state of mind, rather than a ‘gut reaction’. Intuition operates through deeply felt convictions – may they be about people, situations, or decisions. It does not necessarily have to be related to some sort of mysticism – it may arise from experience, implicit learning, or unconscious pattern recognition.
While instinct belongs to the realm of survival, intuition belongs to the realm of meaning, insight, and subjective experience.
What Notable Psychotherapists Have Said About Intuition
Roberto Assagioli, the founder of psychosynthesis, placed significant emphasis on intuition as a gateway to deeper self-knowledge and transformation. As a psychospiritual psychology, psychosynthesis views intuition as a bridge between our rational mind and deeper, transpersonal self. For Assagioli, intuition was a faculty to be cultivated to gain "direct knowledge" unmediated by analytical thought.
Carl Jung, like Assagioli, regarded intuition as an essential part of psychological life. He identified intuition as one of the four fundamental functions of consciousness, alongside thinking, feeling, and sensing. For Jung, intuition was not irrational but rather pre-rational — an unconscious ability to perceive patterns and symbolic meanings before they became fully articulated. Jung also connected intuition with the collective unconscious – tapping in to implicit knowledge that did not involve ‘thinking too hard’.
Meanwhile, Sigmund Freud, was considerably more sceptical of intuition. He believed that what we call intuition is often the disguised voice of the unconscious, a repository not of timeless wisdom but of repressed desires, unresolved conflicts, and hidden fears. This fairly represents the problem, as Freud suggested, regarding the difficulty in correctly identifying it may be those impulses rather than an insightful truth.
More recently, cognitive-behavioural therapists have been wary of over-relying on intuition, given its susceptibility to distortion. Aaron Beck, the developer of cognitive therapy, focused on how automatic thoughts — sometimes mistaken for intuitions, are frequently shaped by cognitive biases, reinforcing patterns of depression and anxiety – a topic for our next blog post.
We need to know when to listen to instinct. When the time allows it, once deliberated carefully it can be recognised in its place of serving our drive for survival. Psychotherapy can play a part in helping those willing to explore their experience towards better understanding our own survival messages and insights to help us thrive.