Across the depth-psychology corpus, ‘value system’ occupies a contested and generative position, naming at once a neurobiological inheritance, a phenomenological structure, a cultural formation, and a therapeutic target. Damasio grounds the concept in what he calls the brain’s ‘biological value system,’ arguing that somatic appraisal marks every image with valence prior to conscious deliberation, rendering value-laden processing fundamental rather than derivative. Siegel extends this into developmental neuroscience, distinguishing inborn motivational structures from those assembled through relational experience. Yalom, working in the existential register, treats the value system as the practical correlate of meaning: once meaning is felt, values crystallize into a code regulating action. Von Franz, reading Jung, locates the value system in the feeling function’s ‘structure of feeling memory,’ shaped by childhood and the accumulated past. ACT theorists such as Harris position values as freely chosen, present-tense orientations rather than inherited codes. McGilchrist situates value hierarchies within hemispheric asymmetry, attributing higher values to right-hemisphere affective engagement and warning against their reduction to use-value. Woodman employs the term mythologically, charting the collision between patriarchal and feminine value systems through the Demeter–Persephone complex. Simondon offers the most abstract formulation, defining value as the normativity of a system of norms—what persists across systemic transformation. The term thus serves as a crossroads where brain science, existential philosophy, clinical practice, and cultural critique meet.
any image being processed by the brain is automatically appraised and marked with a value in a process based on the brain’s original dispositions (its biological value system), as well as on the dispositions acquired over lifelong learning.
Damasio argues that a biological value system stamps every consciously processed image with valence, integrating innate dispositions and learned experience into the fabric of memory itself.
, Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain, 2010thesis
Some aspects of a value system are inborn, and some are acquired through experience. The notion of innate versus constructed neural processes is part of an active discussion in the field of affective neuroscience.
Siegel holds that the value system is a hybrid neural construction—partly constitutional, comprising motivational drives such as attachment, and partly sculpted by relational experience.
, The Developing Mind: How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are, 2020thesis
values constitute a code according to which a system of action may be formulated. Values allow us to place possible ways of behaving into some approval-disapproval hierarchy.
Yalom defines the value system as the action-regulating code that emerges synergistically from meaning, enabling individuals to rank modes of behavior on an approval–disapproval axis.
, Existential Psychotherapy, 1980thesis
A prerequisite for feeling is therefore a structure of feeling memory, a set of values, to which the event can be related.
Von Franz identifies the value system with the Jungian feeling function’s accumulated memory-structure, arguing that evaluative judgment is only possible against this internalized archive of past experience.
, Lectures on Jung’s Typology, 2013thesis
the old value system (Demeter) grieves, while the new value system (Persephone) is ravished by the otherness that penetrates her and brings new life; then old and new are reunited in a new way.
Woodman reads cultural and psychological transformation through the Eleusinian myth, interpreting the collision of value systems as a necessary grieving and ravishment that permits feminine renewal.
, Addiction to Perfection: The Still Unravished Bride: A Psychological Study, 1982thesis
value is the relativity of the system of norms and is known and defined within the system of norms itself.
Simondon proposes that value is not a fixed content but the self-aware relativity of any norm-system—the capacity of a system to recognize and survive its own possible transformation.
, Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information, 2020thesis
All such values belong to the higher levels of Scheler’s hierarchy. The values of the useful and pleasurable, those of the lowest rank, are the only ones to which left-hemisphere modes of operation are applicable.
McGilchrist draws on Scheler’s value hierarchy to argue that the left hemisphere can only process lower-order use-values, while higher values require the affective and relational engagement characteristic of the right hemisphere.
, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, 2009thesis
within this crucible of convergence value is forged. Job’s suffering generated a new reality—one that Yahweh could not grasp. Incarnation was necessary for Yahweh because value is forged only under convergence.
Peterson argues that value is not transmitted as knowledge but forged as psychic substance through the convergent constraints of mortality, making incarnate suffering the necessary condition for genuine value-creation.
, The Iron Thūmos and the Empty Vessel: The Homeric Response to ‘Answer to Job’, 2025thesis
Values are our heart’s deepest desires for how we want to behave; how we want to treat ourselves, other people, and the world around us. They describe what we want to stand for in life.
Harris presents the ACT formulation in which a value system functions as an inner compass of ongoing behavioral orientation rather than a set of goals or fixed moral rules.
, ACT Made Simple: An Easy-To-Read Primer on Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, 2009supporting
people who lead a very goal-focused life often find that it leads to a sense of chronic lack or frustration … In the values-focused life, we still have goals, but the emphasis is on living by our values in each moment.
Harris distinguishes a value system from goal-orientation, arguing that values are always available in the present whereas goals perpetually defer satisfaction.
, ACT Made Simple: An Easy-To-Read Primer on Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, 2009supporting
what differentiates individuals and groups from each other most sharply are their patterns or configurations of valued objects.
Pargament frames the value system as an organization of significant objects whose configuration, rather than any single object, constitutes the distinctive signature of an individual’s or group’s coping orientation.
, The psychology of religion and coping theory, research,, 2001supporting
No longer the site where value is forged through relational engagement, the thūmos is reduced to the enforcement arm of a logic it did not generate.
Peterson argues that Plato’s tripartite soul mislocates value-formation by demoting the thūmos, severing the organ through which relational encounter generates authentic values from the rationalizing faculty that merely enforces them.
, The Abolished Middle: Retrieving the Thumotic Soul from the Unconscious, 2026supporting
The most essential possession of any living being, at any time, is the balanced range of body chemistries compatible with healthy life … The notion of biological value is ubiquitous in modern thinking about brain and mind.
Damasio grounds all value in biological homeostasis, arguing that biological value—the organismic drive to preserve viable chemistry—is the evolutionary precursor to all higher value systems.
, Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain, 2010supporting
This is part of our overvaluing of the rhetoric of power, which often seems to be the only value that gets discussed, whether it be in relation to political values, societal discourse or even the critique of works of art.
McGilchrist diagnoses contemporary culture as having collapsed its value system to a single axis of power, marginalizing the softer values of sorrow, tenderness, and vulnerability that depend on right-hemisphere functioning.
, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, 2021supporting
These cards each contain words describing values that are important to some people. Sort them into these five different piles depending on how important each one is to you.
Miller describes the clinical use of card-sorting to externalize and rank a client’s implicit value system, making tacit priorities explicit and thereby available for therapeutic exploration.
, Motivational Interviewing: Helping People Change, Third Edition, 2013supporting
Guilt is tied to appraisals that the individual is responsible for a transgression of an important moral value.
Pargament notes, within his appraisal theory of coping, that specific emotions such as guilt are generated by the perceived violation of moral values embedded in the individual’s significance system.
, The psychology of religion and coping theory, research,, 2001aside
SCHELER: THE IMPORTANCE OF VALUE IN CONSTITUTING REALITY … what is everywhere apparently now demanded is tough, instant and, where necessary, violent action.
McGilchrist introduces Scheler’s phenomenological value-theory as a counter-tradition to Western materialism, situating the importance of value in the constitution of reality rather than its mere evaluation.
, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, 2009aside