The term ‘Somatic Feeling Function’ occupies a contested but increasingly central position across depth psychology, affective neuroscience, and somatic psychotherapy. At its broadest, the term designates the organism’s capacity to register, integrate, and communicate its own visceral and physiological states as meaningful signals—signals that inform cognition, regulate affect, and ground subjective experience in bodily reality. Antonio Damasio’s somatic marker hypothesis provides the most neurobiologically elaborated account: feeling is not epiphenomenal but constitutively linked to the brain’s continuous mapping of body states, such that its disruption (as in prefrontal lesion patients) produces marked impairment of decision-making and personal coherence. A. D. Bud Craig situates the somatic feeling function within interoceptive hierarchies running from lamina I neurons through the insular cortex, arguing that this system generates the ‘sentient’ substrate of self-awareness. Alan Fogel distinguishes embodied self-awareness—the direct, pre-conceptual registration of felt body states—from conceptual self-awareness, treating the former as foundational to psychological well-being. Somatic psychotherapists including Pat Ogden and Peter Levine operationalize the function clinically, emphasizing the therapeutic cultivation of somatic resources and mindful attention to sensation as pathways for trauma resolution. Jungian typology, through theorists such as John Beebe and Murray Stein, frames a related question: how ‘feeling’ as a psychological function relates to its somatic substrate and to instinctual, psychoid processes. Across these traditions, the somatic feeling function is understood as both phylogenetically primary and clinically indispensable.
When the bad outcome connected with a given response option comes into mind, however fleetingly, you experience an unpleasant gut feeling… the somatic marker… forces attention on the negative outcome
Damasio’s somatic marker hypothesis posits that felt bodily signals automatically flag negative outcomes during deliberation, making the somatic feeling function constitutive of rational decision-making.
, Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain, 1994thesis
I see feelings as having a truly privileged status. They are represented at many neural levels… because of their inextricable ties to the body, they come first in development and retain a primacy that subtly pervades our mental life.
Damasio argues that feelings, grounded in bodily representation, are developmentally and functionally primary among all mental processes, framing the somatic feeling function as the foundational organizer of cognition.
, Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain, 1994thesis
I conceptualize the essence of feelings as something you and I can see through a window that opens directly onto a continuously updated image of the structure and state of our body.
Damasio defines the somatic feeling function as the brain’s ongoing representational access to bodily structure and state, making interoceptive mapping the neural substrate of felt experience.
, Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain, 1994thesis
the subjective process of feeling emotions requires the participation of brain regions that are involved in the mapping and/or regulation of our continuously changing internal states — that is, in homeostasis.
Craig synthesizes Damasio’s somatic marker hypothesis within an interoceptive neuroscience framework, asserting that feeling requires active homeostatic mapping and that the somatic feeling function is grounded in evolutionary survival mechanisms.
, How Do You Feel? Interoception: The Sense of the Physiological Condition of the Body, 2002thesis
The inescapable and remarkable fact about these three phenomena—emotion, feeling, consciousness—is their body relatedness.
Damasio establishes body-relatedness as the inescapable condition of emotion, feeling, and consciousness alike, making the somatic feeling function inseparable from the emergence of self-awareness.
, The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness, 1999thesis
he himself was not disturbed… his flesh no longer responded to
Clinical evidence from frontal lobe patients demonstrates that when the somatic feeling function is disrupted, the organism loses affective resonance with emotionally significant stimuli despite intact cognitive recognition.
, Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain, 1994supporting
interoceptive signals and interoceptive awareness are… central tenet of so-called embodiment theories of emotion… our emotions guide our decisions and our behaviors
Craig positions interoceptive awareness—the neurological substrate of the somatic feeling function—as the empirical foundation for embodiment theories of emotion and behavioral guidance.
, How Do You Feel? An Interoceptive Moment with Your Neurobiological Self, 2014supporting
A feeling is any sensation that is experienced as coming from our own bodies… Emotion is the embodied evaluation of those feelings, reflecting how good or bad something feels to us.
Fogel distinguishes feeling as the raw somatic signal from emotion as its embodied evaluation, articulating a two-tier model in which the somatic feeling function provides the primary datum for affective life.
, Body Sense: The Science and Practice of Embodied Self-Awareness, 2009supporting
The essence of sadness or happiness is the combined perception of certain body states with whatever thoughts they are juxtaposed to, complemented by a modification in the style and efficiency of the thought process.
Damasio specifies that emotional quality arises from the conjunction of perceived body states and concurrent cognition, establishing the somatic feeling function as the necessary qualitative substrate of all emotional experience.
, Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain, 1994supporting
The somatic marker does not need to be a fully formed emotion, overtly experienced as a feeling… It can be a covert, emotion-related signal of which the subject is not aware, in which case we refer to it as a bias.
Damasio extends the somatic feeling function to include covert, sub-threshold somatic signals that bias cognition and behavior without rising to conscious feeling, broadening the concept beyond phenomenal experience.
, Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain, 2010supporting
An emotion, by definition, is at once somatic and psychic. The somatic aspect is made up of bodily innervations and expressive physical action. The psychic aspect is made up of images and ideas.
Within a Jungian framework, Tozzi articulates the dual structure of emotion as simultaneously somatic and psychic, locating the somatic feeling function at the bridge between bodily innervation and psychological image-formation.
, Active Imagination in Theory, Practice and Training, 2017supporting
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 operationalizes the somatic feeling function as ‘felt sense,’ arguing that therapeutic access to this somatic register is prerequisite for instinctual healing of traumatic injury.
, Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma—The Innate Capacity to Transform Overwhelming Experiences, 1997supporting
the first division—the one concerned with the organism’s interior—is permanently active, permanently signaling the state of the most internal aspects of the body proper to the brain.
Damasio identifies the interoceptive division of body-to-brain signaling as continuously active, establishing the somatic feeling function as a non-optional, ongoing process rather than an episodic one.
, The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness, 1999supporting
In somatic psychotherapy, in which clients are guided to a deeper awareness of their embodied experiences, attention to feeling states may eventually lead back to conceptual self-understanding.
Fogel traces the therapeutic arc from somatic feeling function to conceptual self-understanding, demonstrating how clinically cultivated interoceptive attention restructures self-knowledge from the body upward.
, Body Sense: The Science and Practice of Embodied Self-Awareness, 2009supporting
Psychoid processes lie between somatic life-energy and sheer bodily processes on the one hand and true psychic processes on the other.
Stein locates Jung’s psychoid concept at the interface of somatic and properly psychic processes, situating the somatic feeling function within a spectrum running from instinct through psychoid to differentiated consciousness.
, Jung’s Map of the Soul: An Introduction, 1998supporting
Jung found that ‘for all the types met with in practice, the rule holds good that besides the conscious, primary function there is a relatively unconscious, auxiliary function which is in every respect different from the nature of the primary function.’
Beebe’s account of function-attitude differentiation provides the typological context within which the somatic dimension of the feeling function must be understood as varying by individual typological constellation.
, Energies and Patterns in Psychological Type: The Reservoir of Consciousness, 2017supporting
even the conscious awareness of ordinary sensations can trigger traumatic activation… a heart rate raised in response to physical exercise can have the disconcerting effect of evoking helplessness or panic
Ogden demonstrates that traumatic disruption of the somatic feeling function produces pathological misreading of normal interoceptive signals, making therapeutic re-education of somatic awareness clinically necessary.
, Trauma and the Body: A Sensorimotor Approach to Psychotherapy, 2006supporting
during the experiment people sweat more, their body temperature rises, they have higher heart rates, and higher blood pressure… People also show impairment in their short-term memory
Fogel documents the physiological and cognitive costs of suppressing somatic feeling signals, showing that chronic suppression of the somatic feeling function impairs both autonomic regulation and cognitive performance.
, Body Sense: The Science and Practice of Embodied Self-Awareness, 2009supporting
Extraverted sensation, as a cognitive process, seeks ‘an accumulation of actual experiences of concrete objects’ and the function can become, in the moment, so riveted on the reality ‘out there’ that it cannot recognise that other things may also be happening at that same time
The Handbook’s account of extraverted sensation provides a typological contrast that helps delineate the somatic feeling function from sensation by emphasizing the inward, evaluative quality distinctive of feeling.
, The Handbook of Jungian Psychology: Theory, Practice and Applications, 2006aside
The threshold at which their emotions kick in, when they do, is so high that they appear unflappable, and are, from their self reports, unfeeling and uncaring.
The case of developmental sociopathy serves as a pathological boundary condition illustrating what the absence or severe attenuation of the somatic feeling function produces in terms of social behavior and moral affect.
, Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain, 1994aside
It engenders the fundamental image of the physical self as a feeling (sentient) entity.
Craig proposes that the interoceptive neural system — the anatomical correlate of the somatic feeling function — generates the foundational image of the organism as a sentient, self-aware entity.
, How Do You Feel? Interoception: The Sense of the Physiological Condition of the Body, 2002aside