The Feeling of What Happens

Antonio Damasio sets out a layered account of how the mind comes to know itself. He distinguishes a proto-self, the brain's continuous mapping of the body's internal state, from core consciousness, the fleeting sense of self that arises whenever an object alters that map, and from the autobiographical self that memory extends across a life. Emotion, in his account, is a bodily response; feeling is the mind registering that response; and the self is assembled moment by moment rather than given.

For a psychodynamic clinician, the book supplies a neurobiological grammar for affect that stays close to consulting-room experience: emotion precedes and organises thought, a sense of self is built and can therefore come apart, and bodily states carry meaning a patient may not yet have words for. Damasio draws throughout on neurological patients whose sense of self altered after brain injury, grounding the theory in observed cases rather than speculation.