The Feeling of What Happens

The Feeling of What Happens is a work by Antonio Damasio (1999).

Core claims

• Damasio’s nested model of proto-self, core consciousness, and extended consciousness provides neuroscience with what Jung’s type theory attempted philosophically: a structural account of how the organism becomes a subject capable of knowing that it knows.
• The book’s central thesis—that emotion is not opposed to reason but constitutive of it—dismantles the Cartesian split not through phenomenological argument but through lesion studies and somatic marker evidence, grounding what Hillman called “feeling consciousness” in verifiable neural architecture.
• By locating the origins of selfhood in the body’s homeostatic regulation rather than in cortical narrative, Damasio inadvertently provides biological scaffolding for the depth psychological claim that the psyche is not “in” the head but distributed through the sensing, feeling organism—a vindication of embodied imagination as described by Bosnak and the anima mundi tradition Hillman championed.

Related questions

• How does Damasio’s distinction between emotion (public, bodily) and feeling (private, subjective) map onto von Franz and Hillman’s account of the feeling function in Lectures on Jung’s Typology, particularly their insistence that feeling is evaluative cognition rather than hedonic reaction?
• In what ways does Damasio’s proto-self—a pre-narrative, image-based somatic mapping—parallel or challenge Bosnak’s concept of embodied imagination in Embodiment, especially regarding the claim that “it takes a body to perceive imagination”?
• Tarnas in Cosmos and Psyche describes depth psychology as caught between subjective conviction and objective cosmological silence; does Damasio’s grounding of consciousness in biological homeostasis resolve or deepen this impasse?

See also

• Library page: /library/the-body/damasio-feeling-of-what-happens/

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