A Theory on Sam's Ability to Feel
In the SPN-verse, I believe souls are defined as the following: “A person's emotional or moral nature”. It is possible to live without a soul, but a soulless human is a machine - there is no empathy left, no fear, no love or care. It’s basically a vessel with the ability to breathe and think - it looks like a human but the part that makes it human is gone.
Sam however isn’t entirely a machine. He mostly doesn’t feel and hardly cares, but we have lots of evidence that not all of his emotional capacity is gone. I’ve been asking myself why he mutilated himself in order to safe Dean in 6x10, or why he decided to trust Dean in the first place. Why was Dean the first person he called when he was stuck with a baby? And why on earth was he so very scared and angry when faced with the prospect of getting back his (most likely damaged) soul?
A friend of mine suggested that he was probably faking it all along, she believes him to have an ulterior motive in working with Dean - and since he still has access to all his memories, he definitely knows how to get to Dean. While I agree that this might be a possibility, I still doesn't satisfy me.
Nothing made sense to me until I remembered something we discussed in our neuropsychology class. I realize that this might be a long shot, but it actually makes a lot of sense to me now - I’m curious to hear what you guys think about it.
I’m sure anyone who’s studied Psychology is familiar with the case of Henry Molaison, usually referred to as “Patient H.M.
Patient H.M suffered from a severe case of epilepsy, which is the reason parts of his hippocampus were removed. For those who haven’t heard of patient H.M.’s condition, here’s an excerpt from Wikipedia:
Scoville localized HM's epilepsy to his left and right medial temporal lobes (MTLs) and suggested surgical resection of the MTLs as a treatment. On September 1, 1953, Scoville removed parts of HM's MTL on both sides of his brain. HM lost approximately two-thirds of his hippocampus, parahippocampal gyrus, and amygdala.[…]
After the surgery-which was successful in its primary goal of controlling his epilepsy-he suffered from severe anterograde amnesia: although his working memory and procedural memory were intact, he could not commit new events to long-term memory. […]He also suffered moderate retrograde amnesia, and could not remember most events in the 1-2 year period before surgery, nor some events up to 11 years before, meaning that his amnesia was temporally graded. (source)
The important thing to know is that H.M. suffered from retrograde amnesia, which means that he wasn’t able to remember things from before the surgery. However, for some reason he could still very much remember his childhood and youth which led neuropsychologists to believe that older parts of our long-term memory (the “basic” memories) break away from where they’re usually located (in the medial temporal lobes).
Now, I’d like to think that we are dealing with the same concept when it comes to souls in the SPN-verse.
Soul and Body are not simply Soul and Body. They constantly rely and depend on each other. A human cannot be human with one of these entities not intact. At some point, the very basic parts of a soul break away and become an intrinsic part of ourselves. They are neither soul nor body, but rely on both parts equally. They are basically the foundation of an innate connection between soul and body.
Sam, as we know, was robbed of his soul but some of the very basic, raw emotions are still ingrained in his body. The connection to his soul is not intact anymore and that’s why Sam cannot grasp the complexity of an emotional situation, can’t link the memories he has to a construct of emotion and intuition. The only thing that is left is the foundation. We have to think of a man with the emotional structure of a newborn child while possessing the mind and memories of an experienced adult. In a very limited form, he still knows anger and fear and self-preservation. He shows hedonistic tendencies and selfish behavior. And most importantly, love must be around as well. He certainly isn’t able to understand/feel his relationship to Bobby or his father, not even the progression of his and Dean’s relationship as brothers, even though he obviously sees the memories. BUT the very basic concept of love is there and Dean is in fact the one person who was around when this stripped-down version of love was shaped and ingrained (namely, when Sam was a baby). I even think that this is the reason Ash referred to them as "soul-mates" in 5x16.
This is why Sam decides to trust Dean. Even if he can’t feel much, or can’t even name or grasp his emotions, he still experiences a small kind of affection for his brother.
The trust is only threatened when he listens to Castiel’s and Crowley’s concerns regarding the state of his soul. He rationally weighs his options and, sure enough, the decision is very simple: saving himself from pain and self devastation is way more important than trusting his brother (especially since he can still remember all the mistakes and misjudgments Dean has made before).
Dean, however, does not listen to him for obvious reasons and desperately tries to get Sam’s soul back. Sam gets angry and scared - both emotions, as we have already established, are limited and raw - without his soul, he can't control or adjust them - they basically "feed" his rational analysis. When combined and driven to a climax (Sam chained up and Death just about to reunite his body and soul), we see a very desperate version of soulless Sam.