Psyche

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Psychē is the Greek word usually translated “soul,” but the translation flattens a long history. The term begins close to the breath: the standard derivation links it to the verb psychein, which means “to blow, to breathe” — and also, in a second sense, “to cool, to make dry.” The soul, at root, is the breath, and the last breath is its departure. (Whether this verb itself reaches back to some deeper Indo-European root for “blowing” is unsettled; the link to breath is the recognized etymology, the prehistory behind it is not.) Across roughly a thousand years of Greek writing the word travels from naming what leaves the body at death to naming the immortal, rational core of the person. The single word carries that whole distance, which is why a Homeric psychē and a Platonic one are almost opposites wearing the same name — and the journey did not stop there, for the same letters would later name a mortal bride of the god of love and, later still, the entire interior of a human being.

In the Homeric poems psychē is barely a self at all. It is what departs at the last breath and goes down to Hades as a thin, witless shade — Achilles’ ghost in the Odyssey would trade its whole existence below for a day as a poor man’s hired hand. The living person’s thinking and feeling, in this early picture, belong elsewhere: to the thymos, the phrēn, organs of impulse seated in the breathing body. The psychē matters only at the edges of life, as the thing whose loss is death. Homer ascribes no activity to it while the body lives; it is the stake risked in battle and the residue that survives the corpse, nothing more.

The decisive widening happens in the sixth and fifth centuries BCE. Among the Pythagoreans and in Orphic circles the psychē becomes a fallen, transmigrating self, bound to a wheel of rebirths; Heraclitus speaks of a psychē whose limits cannot be found, so deep is its measure. The word stretches at both ends — it comes to carry the emotions, the moral qualities of courage and temperance and justice, and practical thought, while reaching outward to whatever is alive at all. Thales, by one report, granted a soul even to a magnet, on the grounds that it moves iron: psyche had passed from naming the human dead to naming the principle of animation itself. With Socrates and Plato the term takes its lasting philosophical shape. The psychē is now the true person, distinct from the body that houses it, the seat of reason and the bearer of moral worth — and, in the Phaedo, deathless: Plato has Socrates argue, on the last day of his life, that the soul existed before birth and survives the body’s end. In the Republic Plato also divided it, setting a rational part over a spirited and an appetitive one — a structure (it recurs in the Phaedrus as the charioteer and his two horses) that organized Greek thought about the self for centuries.

Aristotle pulled hard in the other direction. In his treatise On the Soul the psychē is the form of a living body — its organizing principle, the first actuality of an organism that has life in potentiality — not a separable passenger but what makes a given body the living thing it is. Soul stands to body as shape stands to bronze; it is not lodged in the body as a tenant but is the body’s being-alive. And it comes in a graded ladder of faculties, each presupposing the one beneath: the nutritive power that plants share, the sensory power of animals, the power of self-movement, and at the summit nous, the intellect proper to human beings — the one rung at which Aristotle leaves a door ajar toward something that might not need a bodily organ at all (a question that belongs to nous). The two readings, Plato’s separable soul and Aristotle’s embodied form, mark the poles the later tradition argued between. The Neoplatonists inherited both and built the Platonic line into a cosmos: for Plotinus, Soul is a level of reality itself, issuing from Intellect as Intellect issues from the One; the individual psychē is its descent into matter, and philosophy is the work of its return. Through the Latin anima this graded, immortal psychē passed into Christian and Islamic philosophy and the wider inheritance — a transmission the comparative study of the soul-concept across traditions carries in full (see soul).

The descent and return that the philosophers argued in doctrine, a contemporary of the late Neoplatonists told as a story. In the second century CE Apuleius set into his novel Metamorphoses, better known as The Golden Ass, the tale of Cupid and Psyche (books four through six), narrated by an old woman to a captive girl. Here Psyche is a mortal princess, the youngest and most beautiful of three, so admired that worshippers desert the temples of Venus. The slighted goddess sends her son Cupid to make the girl love something hideous, but he pricks himself on his own arrow and loves her instead. An oracle dooms Psyche to wed a monster feared even by Jupiter; left exposed on a crag, she is borne off by the West Wind to an enchanted palace, where an unseen husband visits only in darkness and forbids her to look on him. Persuaded by jealous sisters that he is the prophesied beast, she brings a lamp and a dagger, sees the sleeping god — and a drop of hot oil wakes him, and he flees. The penitent Psyche, fallen into Venus’s power, is set four seemingly impossible trials: to sort a vast heap of mixed grain (ants do it for her), to gather wool from murderous golden rams (a reed counsels patience), to draw water from the dragon-guarded Stygian spring (Jupiter’s eagle fetches it), and at last to descend to the underworld for a box of beauty from Proserpina. Her curiosity undoes her on the way back: she opens the box and sinks into a deathlike sleep, until the healed Cupid wakes her and pleads with Jupiter, who grants her ambrosia and immortality. The lovers are wed on Olympus as equals, and their daughter is named Voluptas, Joy. The allegory is transparent and old: Psyche is the Soul, Cupid is Love, and the Soul — exiled, tested through suffering, made to descend and to rise — is purified and at last united with Love and made divine. The story wears the same shape as the Platonic fall and return, and its trials and underworld box carry the resonance of mystery-cult initiation. Fittingly, the figure of Psyche was already drawn in Greek art as a maiden with butterfly wings, the butterfly being the emblem of the soul that quits the body — the chrysalis broken, the winged thing released.

The word’s last great expansion is modern, and it returns to the wide reach the Greeks had given it. From psychē the naming of disciplines was built: psychology, first attested in the 1650s as “the study of the soul” and settled into “the science of the mind” by the mid-eighteenth century; psychiatry, coined by the German physician Johann Christian Reil in 1808 as, literally, the medical treatment of the soul, joining psyche to the Greek verb “to heal”; and the broad family of psychic, psychedelic, and the combining form psycho-. In depth psychology the term recovered its ancient breadth. For C. G. Jung the psyche is “the totality of all psychic processes, conscious as well as unconscious” — deliberately wider than “mind,” which in ordinary speech means only what one is aware of. Jung’s psyche is a self-regulating system that seeks balance among its opposites and tends, over a life, toward wholeness; its inner structures — the ego, the layers of the unconscious, the archetypes of the collective inheritance — are the country mapped by the collective unconscious. What matters here is the word itself: “the psyche,” in everyday English since the early twentieth century, now names the whole interior of a person, conscious and unconscious together. The same five letters that named a witless Homeric shade have come to name the entire inner life — the longest arc a Greek word has traveled, and one its first speakers would not have recognized at either end.

→ In the library: Plato — Phaedo (Jowett, 1892) · Plotinus — The Enneads (MacKenna): On the Essence of the Soul

→ Related: Soul · Nous · Collective Unconscious · Gnosis