How Do You Feel?

Name: How Do You Feel?
Author: A.D. Craig

How Do You Feel? is a work by A.D. Craig (2015).

Core claims

Craig’s How Do You Feel? provides the neuroscientific substrate for what Jung intuited a century ago: that feeling is not a derivative of cognition but a primary mode of conscious representation rooted in the body’s homeostatic architecture, vindicating the Jungian insistence on feeling as a rational function equal to thinking.
The book’s identification of the anterior insular cortex as the neural seat of subjective feeling states reframes the entire debate between Hillman’s critique of “feeling as God” and von Franz’s call for a “therapy of feeling”—neither personal confession nor imaginal dissolution, but an embodied interoceptive awareness that is neither ego nor archetype but the material condition for both.
Craig’s homeostatic model of sentience inadvertently resolves a tension within depth psychology: the claim that feelings are “not ours” (Hillman, von Franz) finds anatomical grounding in the discovery that subjective feeling emerges from phylogenetically ancient sensory pathways shared across primates, making the collective and transpersonal dimension of feeling a neurobiological fact rather than a metaphysical assertion.

How does Craig’s model of the anterior insular cortex as the seat of subjective feeling challenge or support Hillman’s argument in Re-Visioning Psychology that emotions “reinforce ego psychology” and that feelings should be returned to their images rather than owned by the self?
In Lectures on Jung’s Typology, von Franz and Hillman describe feeling as “a buried continent in the collective psyche” and argue that feelings are transpersonal rather than personal possessions. How does Craig’s interoceptive neuroanatomy in How Do You Feel? provide an empirical basis for this depth-psychological claim?
Liz Greene’s Saturn explores how frustration and limitation in the feeling realm (Saturn in water signs) forces the individual toward inner wisdom. How might Craig’s account of alexithymia and disrupted interoception map onto Greene’s astrological phenomenology of blocked or undeveloped feeling?