senses
The term ‘sense’ operates across multiple strata in the depth-psychology corpus, spanning ancient philosophy of perception, phenomenological accounts of embodied knowing, somatic-therapeutic frameworks, and linguistic theory. Aristotle anchors the classical pole, treating sense as the faculty by which form is received without matter, distinguishing special, common, and incidental sense-objects while insisting that perception in activity is always of particulars. Plotinus inherits and inverts this: for him the finest knowledge occurs precisely where sense falls silent and identification with the object replaces mediated sensation. In the modern somatic tradition, Gendlin’s concept of the ‘felt sense’ reanimates this debate by locating a pre-conceptual, bodily knowing that is neither raw sensation nor articulate emotion but a holistic, implicit grasp of a whole situation. Levine, Winhall, and Welwood extend Gendlin into trauma therapy, arguing that proprioception, kinesthesia, and visceral sensation constitute the most intimate register of self-knowledge and that trauma recovery depends on restoring access to these channels. Gallagher contributes phenomenological precision by distinguishing the sense of agency from the sense of ownership in voluntary movement, both grounded in body-schematic processes. McGilchrist situates ‘sense’—especially common sense—within hemispheric asymmetry, warning that the left hemisphere’s metric fixation strips elements from context and destroys their real meaning. Across these positions, the central tension is between sense as a passive, receptive channel and sense as an active, constitutive, meaning-laden orientation toward the world.
Pay attention there where you usually feel things, and in there you can get a sense of what all of the problem feels like. Let yourself feel the unclear sense of all of that.
Gendlin defines the felt sense as a holistic, pre-verbal bodily apprehension of a whole situation, distinct from discrete emotions or analytical categories.
, Focusing: How to Gain Direct Access to Your Body’s Knowledge, 2010thesis
The most intimate sense we have of ourselves is through proprioception, kinesthesia and visceral sensation… Without these internal senses… we simply are unable to know ourselves.
Levine argues that proprioception, kinesthesia, and visceral sensation constitute the irreducible foundation of self-knowledge, making somatic sense the ground of personal identity.
, In an Unspoken Voice: How the Body Releases Trauma and Restores Goodness, 2010thesis
I attach the word ‘gladness,’ feeling a calm, soft, pulsing flow into my arms and legs and I am glad (i. e., I have the felt sense of gladness).
Levine illustrates how the felt sense mediates between somatic sensation and emotional meaning, serving as the body’s primary language of experience.
, Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma - The Innate Capacity to Transform Overwhelming Experiences, 1997thesis
I attach the word ‘gladness,’ feeling a calm, soft, pulsing flow into my arms and legs and I am glad (i. e., I have the felt sense of gladness).
Levine illustrates how the felt sense mediates between somatic sensation and emotional meaning, serving as the body’s primary language of experience.
, Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma—The Innate Capacity to Transform Overwhelming Experiences, 1997thesis
To harness the instincts necessary to heal trauma, we must be able to identify and employ the indicators of trauma that are made available to us through the felt sense.
Levine establishes the felt sense as the therapeutic portal through which instinctual healing of trauma becomes possible.
, Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma - The Innate Capacity to Transform Overwhelming Experiences, 1997thesis
To harness the instincts necessary to heal trauma, we must be able to identify and employ the indicators of trauma that are made available to us through the felt sense.
Levine establishes the felt sense as the therapeutic portal through which instinctual healing of trauma becomes possible.
, Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma—The Innate Capacity to Transform Overwhelming Experiences, 1997thesis
Between this wide-open aliveness and our more familiar feelings and emotions, lies a subtle zone of sensibility, which Gendlin calls the felt sense… In this prickly felt sense there is a lot more going on than just anger.
Welwood maps the felt sense as an intermediate register of awareness between raw aliveness and identifiable emotion, richer and more inclusive than either pole.
, Toward a Psychology of Awakening Buddhism, Psychotherapy,, 2000thesis
In the third movement a word, phrase, or image—if it fits exactly—provides a ‘handle’ on the felt sense. One can then often feel the first shift, the first bit of internal movement… that says this is right.
Gendlin describes how verbal or imagistic handles allow conscious articulation of the felt sense, marked by a somatic signal of correctness.
, Focusing: How to Gain Direct Access to Your Body’s Knowledge, 2010thesis
In the normal phenomenology of voluntary or willed action, the sense of agency and the sense of ownership coincide and are indistinguishable.
Gallagher argues that under normal conditions the sense of agency (authorship) and the sense of ownership (mineness) are phenomenologically fused, making their distinction a product of pathological disruption.
, How the Body Shapes the Mind, 2005thesis
The forward comparator monitors the efference copy of the motor command… and it is likely responsible for generating a conscious sense of agency for action.
Gallagher traces the sense of agency to a pre-action forward comparator mechanism operating before sensory feedback, grounding phenomenological ownership in neurological process.
, How the Body Shapes the Mind, 2005supporting
The sense of agency with respect to my own thought comes not retrospectively… Rather, it is a sense that is built into thinking itself. It is part of the very structure of consciousness.
Gallagher extends the sense of agency from motor action to cognition, arguing it is intrinsic to the temporal structure of consciousness rather than a retrospective inference.
, How the Body Shapes the Mind, 2005supporting
Absent any pre-action preparatory processes at the neurological level, however, the body-schematic system will fail to register a sense of agency, a sense that it is the subject himself who is the willful generator of the movement.
Gallagher shows that the sense of agency depends on intact pre-action neurological preparation, its absence producing the alienated experience of passivity or external control.
, How the Body Shapes the Mind, 2005supporting
The senses perceive each other’s special objects incidentally; not because the percipient sense is this or that special sense, but because all form a unity.
Aristotle establishes that the unity of sensory experience requires a general sensibility beyond any single special sense, anticipating later integrative accounts of perception.
, On the Soul (De Anima), -350supporting
We thus have special sense-objects… that are the object of one sense only but are the direct object of that sense, common sense-objects… that are equally available to several sense-organs.
Aristotle’s taxonomy of special, common, and incidental sense-objects provides the foundational ontology of perceptual qualities that structures subsequent discussion of sense in the corpus.
, De Anima (On the Soul), -350supporting
Actually perceiving is spoken of in the same way as contemplation. Yet there is a difference between them in that those things that are productive of actual perception are external.
Aristotle distinguishes perception from contemplation by the necessity of an external object for sensing, locating sense firmly in the particular and the worldly as opposed to the universal and the internal.
, De Anima (On the Soul), -350supporting
The unbelieving element is sense; it… we are most completely aware of ourselves when we are most completely identified with the object of our knowledge.
Plotinus positions sense as the faculty that doubts and limits self-knowledge, contrasting it with intellective identification as the mode of highest self-awareness.
, The Six Enneads, 270supporting
Man, therefore, lives in part under sensation, for he has the organs of sensation… but neither does the better rule unfailingly; the lower element also has a footing.
Plotinus maps the human person as a contested hierarchy in which the sensory principle perpetually competes with higher soul, making sense both constitutive and limiting for embodied life.
, The Six Enneads, 270supporting
The left hemisphere understands quantity better than quality. Its vision is comparatively simple. It strips elements away from context and history and is ignorant of their real meaning.
McGilchrist argues that the left hemisphere’s reductive mode destroys the contextual richness that constitutes genuine sense or meaning, replacing it with a simulacrum of measurement.
, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, 2021supporting
The left hemisphere understands quantity better than quality. Its vision is comparatively simple. It strips elements away from context and history and is ignorant of their real meaning.
McGilchrist argues that the left hemisphere’s reductive mode destroys the contextual richness that constitutes genuine sense or meaning, replacing it with a simulacrum of measurement.
, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, 2021supporting
The very ‘sponginess’ of the concept, rather, is connected with its richness and vitality… It withdraws from our efforts to conceptualise it unambiguously as an object.
McGilchrist, citing Blankenburg, defends common sense’s conceptual indeterminacy as a positive feature reflecting its mode of Being rather than a failure of definition.
, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, 2009supporting
This state of merely filled time is called sensation. Man in this state is nothing but a unit of magnitude, a filled moment of time… his personality is extinguished so long as sensation rules him.
Jung, via Schiller, defines sensation as the instinct that anchors consciousness in time and matter, temporarily dissolving personality in pure sensory immersion.
, Psychological Types, 1921supporting
Anesthesia suspends the processes of sensing and responding. I believe that in complex creatures such as humans anesthesia suspends feelings and consciousness because feelings and consciousness depend on the general machinery of sensing and responding.
Damasio grounds feeling and consciousness in the biological infrastructure of sensing and responding, making sense the necessary condition for all higher affective and conscious life.
, The strange order of things life, feeling, and the making, 2018supporting
After directly experiencing this relief as a sensation in her body… Sharon regained a sense of aliveness and the felt reality that she had, indeed, survived and that her life had a future.
Levine demonstrates clinically that the recovery of bodily sensation restores a sense of aliveness and temporal openness, reversing trauma’s freezing of embodied self-presence.
, In an Unspoken Voice: How the Body Releases Trauma and Restores Goodness, 2010supporting
The Felt Sense Polyvagal Model (FSPM)
Winhall’s title signals a clinical synthesis of Gendlin’s felt sense with Porges’s polyvagal theory, situating sense-based knowing at the centre of a trauma and addiction treatment framework.
, Treating Trauma and Addiction with the Felt Sense Polyvagal Modelaside
Neither light nor darkness nor sound nor smell has any effect on bodies but rather that in which they are… But then what is smelling beyond being affected in a certain way? Or is it that smelling is also perceiving.
Aristotle probes the boundary between physical affection and genuine perception, questioning whether sensing is reducible to being physically altered or constitutes a sui generis cognitive act.
, De Anima (On the Soul), -350aside
The symbol is recognized by its effect on feeling as well as by its sensuous impression, its intuitional meanings and its ideational content.
Von Franz situates sensuous impression alongside feeling, intuition, and ideation as one of four channels through which symbolic recognition operates in Jungian psychology.
, Lectures on Jung’s Typology, 2013aside