The concept of the wounded feeling function is something that is spoken about in the writing of various Jungian analysts but in particular those of Robert Johnson. I was drawn towards his work in the early years of my sobriety after deciding to put down drugs and booze and embark on a process of becoming more in touch with myself, my denied feelings and my inner world. Luckily in 1995 I was lent some wonderful taped talks by Robert Johnson in which he used various myths and stories to explain what can happen to our psyches when we loose touch with feeling. According to Johnson in modern times most of us, following on from the age of the rational enlightenment suffer in this way. I listened to a programme the other day in which the story was being told of how the philosopher Descartes who coined the phrase “I think therefore I am” that was the basis of the dominant philosophical thinking and preoccupation of that time actually performed live vivesection on animals. Despite the fact those animals were writing about in pain Descartes believed they could feel nothing as they did not have souls. What a powerful metaphor for how wrong he got things and how we treat the suffering animal body in each of us.
According to Johnson
the wounded feeling function (is) probably the most common painful wound which occurs in our Western world. It is very dangerous when a wound is so common in a culture that hardly anyone knows that there is a problem. There is general discontent with our way of life but almost no one knows specifically where to look for its origin.
Thinking is that cool faculty which brings clarity and objectivity – but provides no valuing; sensation describes the physical world – but provides no valuing; intuition suggests a wide range of possiblitieis – but provides no valuing. Only feeling brings a sense of value and worth; indeed, this is its chief function. Without feeling there is no value judgement. To lose one’s feeling function is thus to lose one of the most precious human faculites, perahps the one that make us most human. We can understand the term feeling more accurately if we define it as the capacity to value or to give worth to something. People who have finely differentiated feeling function bring grace and good feeling with them; one feels valuable in their presence.
It is interesting to me reading this quote back what a huge slice of the modern imagination is captured by the images or archetypes of zombies and robots. In an increasingly technological age its almost as if we are able to by pass feeling entirely not seeing how demonic this actually makes us as a culture. Anyone who has had to undergo a technological physical procedure for a disease such as cancer will testify, if they are not totally feeling wounded or undifferentiated as to how dehumanising this can often be. To have one’s body treated almost as an object rather than a living vibrant being composed of cells that are alive and vibrating feels almost as if one is taking part in a horror movie. Of course if we tried to express this insight to the wrong people we would probably be diagnosed as schizoid or psychotic in some way. I was described as emotionally labile after I broke down in tears during my pre radiology interview for breast cancer back in 2016.
On this subject of wounded, denied and deeply buried feeling I was also very interested to read recently the chapter The Grief Exception in Johann Hari’s book Lost Connections : Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression and the Unexpected Solutions. In it he explains how so many people diagnosed with depression had actually in previous years undergone some kind of loss or grief in their lives. He sites one case of a woman called Joanne Cacciatore who appeared at her doctor’s office manifesting painful body contractions that had been ongoing for three weeks, that felt abnormal to her. Joanne was pregnant at the time. She was told her contractions were normal but weeks later she lost her baby during childbirth. Joanne was naturally forced into deep depression and grief, and during this time she encountered profound and complex feelings of guilt and self blame.
Joanne’s experience of loss eventually led to her becoming a clinical psychologist, specialising in traumatic bereavement. She was through this avenue seeking to make sense of feelings she could not quite understand and of course what she discovered was that very soon after people she treated had gone through some kind of traumatic bereavement they were being diagnosed with clinical depression and being given very powerful psychiatric drugs. The trauma was converted to a problem with brain chemisty that then needed to be ‘fixed’. Further more if one of these patients told the doctor they were hearing the voice of their dead child or loved one talking to them, often they were diagnosed as psychotic and were being put on anti-psychotic drugs.
Joanne noticed that when her patients were given these diagnoses, they would ‘start questiong their own feelings, and doubting themselves – and that causes them to hide more.”
Undertaking more research Joanne eventually found that almost everyone who is grieving matches the clinical criteria for depression. If you simply use the checklist (provided in the psychiatric ‘bible’ the DSM), virtually anyone who has lost someone should be diagnosed as having a clear mental illness.
This made many doctors and psychiatrists feel uncomforable, So the authors of the DSM invented a loophole, which became known as “the grief exception.”
They said you were allowed to show symptoms of depression and not be considered mentally ill in one circumstance and one circumstance only – if you have recently suffered the loss of somebody close to you……you can show these symptoms for a year before you are classed as mentally ill….. (further more and most alarmingly).. as the years passed and different versions of the DSM were published, the time limit changed; its was slashed to three months, one month, and eventually just two weeks.
Is anyone else out there feeling horrified and murderously angry reading this? What of those whose recent loss may just be the tip of a far deeper iceberg, being just the latest in a long line of other losses that may not just concern loss of loved ones, but loss of a self or lack of essential support for and of a growing self full of feelings from earliest baby and childhood?
Grief is not an irrational response and neither is it a sign of mental illness. It is necessary part of losing and living and being human. Furthermore as Joanne’s own loss and losses of countless others show, pain over the loss of a loved one may never go away, when grief is a measure of the depth of love that was there for the person lost : a feeling value that can only be rationalised away with thinking for so long or by those who dont understand the value and are themselves cut off from feeling how much more is our depression and protracted grief compounded?
In the final three pages of this chapter Hari makes the point that loss of a loved on through death is of course only one case in which depression or grief is an understandable reaction. We all encounter many losses and different kinds of suffering in our lives which affect us on a feeling level : loss of a marriage through divorce or separation, loss of our failure to achieve a meaningful career, being trapped in an abusive or soul deadening job, relationship or circumstance. Furthermore when people present for treatment with feelings of depression (or substantial lack of or deadened feeling), according to Joanne Cacciatore, so often the context is not considered and very little is asked of their personal history.
Johann Hari himself presented with depression to various health care professionals and in over thirteen years “no doctor ever asked me if there was any reason why I might be feeling so distressed…. The message my doctors gave me – that our pain is simply a result of a malfunctioning brain – makes us…..disconnected from ourselves, which lead to disconnection from others.’
I would also add that such treatment in giving us the message that deeper and natural feelings should lay unmentioned and unaddressed is enough to contribute even more feelings of depression, meaninglessness and lack of value on top of the avoidance and discounting of a vital part of our human nature. I fully agree with Joanne when she says in Hari’s book “we’re such an utterly disconnected cutlure, we just don’t get human suffering.” But also what we so often dont seem to get is human feeling and how important and valuable it is to understand. I am also with Hari when he writes
What if depression is, in fact, a form of grief – for our own lives not being as they should? What if it is a form of grief for the connections that we have lost, yet still need.
But I would also add what if it is also about a grief for the loss and wounding of our own shared feeling fuction that is dogging us globally and collectively and through our suffering and pain asking us to wake up to new ways of connecting to and valuing our feelings as well as our deeper connection to nature. Surely it is only a deeper connection to feelings and nature which in its vital essence can provide for us in those most desolate times a sense of connection or way back to the natural soul in us that feels and suffers when we found our connections severed from what has true value for us as souls?
These are just some questions I will leave you with as this post is rather long now. There is so much more to write on this subject. But for now to those out there for whom this resonates, dont let your feelings be devalued, don’t let that wounding persist, for it is when our deepest feelings are negated or run roughshot over by a technologically deadening culture that we suffer so accutely, with such suffering and feeling buried, covered over, hidden or unrecongnised until we meet another soul awake to its power and influence.
Emerging From The Dark Night 