Somatic theory

Somatic theory is a theory of human social behavior based loosely on the somatic marker hypothesis of António Damásio, which proposes a mechanism by which emotional processes can guide (or bias) behavior, particularly decision-making, as well as the attachment theory of John Bowlby and the self psychology of Heinz Kohut, especially as consolidated by Allan Schore.

It draws on various philosophical models from On the Genealogy of Morals of Friedrich Nietzsche through Martin Heidegger on das Man, Maurice Merleau-Ponty on the lived body, and Ludwig Wittgenstein on social practices to Michel Foucault on discipline, as well as theories of performativity emerging out of the speech act theory of J. L. Austin, especially as developed by Judith Butler and Shoshana Felman; some somatic theorists have also tied somaticity to performance in the schools of actor training developed by Konstantin Stanislavski and Bertolt Brecht.

Barbara Sellers-Young applies Damasio’s somatic-marker hypothesis to critical thinking as an embodied performance, and provides a review of the theoretical literature in performance studies that supports something like Damasio’s approach:

Edward Slingerland applies Damasio's somatic-marker hypothesis to the cognitive linguistics of Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner and George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, especially Fauconnier and Turner's theory of conceptual blending and Lakoff and Johnson's embodied mind theory of metaphor. His goal in importing somatic theory into cognitive linguistics is to show that

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