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Embodied Feeling

Embodied Feeling

The feeling function is, beneath its definition as a function of consciousness, a somatic faculty. The English word feeling preserves this. james-hillman traces the etymology: “The root of the word ‘feeling’ is fol (Teutonic), a cognate of fol-m (Anglo-Saxon), meaning palm of the hand. The same root is in the Icelandic fal-ma = to grope. Walter William Skeat’s Etymological Dictionary of the English Language, in fact, defines ‘feel’ simply as ‘to perceive by touch.’” The Greek orexis — appetite, desire, longing — likewise “means also to reach for or stretch out for, as one does with the hand” (Hillman, in von Franz and Hillman 2013). “Clearly feeling once had a tactual connotation.”

The function is the residue of an organ. The Homeric inheritance is unambiguous on this: feeling has a seat, and the seat is in the chest. Bruno Snell documents the network of kradiē, etor, ker, phrenes, and thumos as the somatic locations of psychic activity in early Greek epic (Snell 1953). Sullivan, treating thumos in detail, observes that it “functions principally as a psychic entity within the person… a vibrant source of activity” — the seat of joy, pain, anger, desire, fear, courage, love, and hope (Sullivan 1995).

marion-woodman returns this to clinical experience. Her concept of “embodied consciousness” — “the wisdom in the body; the light in the cells; the subtle body” (Woodman 1993) — names the modern recovery of the same somatic substrate the Greeks called thumos. Her path through anorexia is a case-study in the disembodiment of feeling and the necessity of its return: “To me the feminine side of God is consciousness in matter.” The clinical work of restoring the feeling function is, for Woodman, indistinguishable from the work of restoring consciousness to the body.

The function is rational because it is somatic. The body weighs.

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