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This article delineates from a developmental perspective the import of feeling in the organization of mind. The argument is framed within a formulation of the concepts of agency and intentionality examined in their ongoing transformation from nonsymbolic to symbolic modes as these modes are defined. The author builds upon the neuroscientific work of Jaak Panksepp and the philosophical psychology of Susanne Langer and completes the developmental argument by making use of Marcia Cavell's book The Psychoanalytic Mind: From Freud to Philosophy. From the earliest days of infancy, the child's affective agency, operative from the deepest levels of nonconscious functioning, includes a rudimentary state of sentience. As argued here, this rudimentary state defines consciousness, a state of continuously shifting feeling arising out of nonconscious complexity. This fundamental sentience, this primary state of consciousness, is the child's capacity to feel. Growing up in a cultural environment built upon symbolic transformations of feeling, the child gradually acquires the capacity to become a symbol user herself and an agent whose intentions can be intersubjectively shared.