The Body-Seated Feeling Function

A cross-source pattern: the claim that feeling has always had an organ, that value-discernment is somatic before it is cognitive, and that the modern recovery of this fact (interoception, the feeling function, the imaginal body) is the return of an archaic European knowing.

Onians supplies the evidentiary floor. The lungs (phrenes) are the seat of thought; the liver, “the inmost spring of the deeper emotions, stirred only by powerful stimuli” (Onians 1951, p. 85); the heart (kradie, ker) houses affect as an internal organ, and Plato confirms it (p. 29); the knees and marrow hold generative life-substance; the head holds the breath-soul. Feeling is never, in archaic European thought, disembodied.

Hillman in Mythic Figures reads the same body as imaginal: the organs are not merely physiological but archetypal loci. “If we take our clues from Jung’s exploration of the theme in alchemy (‘The visions of Zosimos,’ CW 13), dismemberment refers to a psychological process that requires a body metaphor” (Hillman 2007). The body-metaphor of dismemberment, of the distributed pneuma, of the organs as sites of psychic activity, is not a Jungian invention; it is the philological substrate Onians documents in archaic Greece and Rome.

The thread holds together: thumos in Homer, the feeling function in Jung, interoception in Damasio and Craig, the body-as-soul in Hillman and Moore. It is one tradition’s continuous claim — that value is felt in the body before it is known in the mind — argued across three thousand years in successive vocabularies.

Sources

• richard-onians: the archaic Greek and Roman psyche is organ-seated; feeling lives in lungs, liver, heart, knees, head.
• james-hillman: the body is imaginal terrain; organs are archetypal loci; dismemberment is a body metaphor for psychic process.
• carl-jung: the feeling function is one of four psychological functions; complexes behave as autonomous sub-personalities with affective charge.