Anamnēsis

The Platonic doctrine that learning is recollection: the soul, in its pre-incarnate state, beheld the forms-eidos directly, and earthly experience does not produce knowledge of them but awakens a latent memory of what was always already known. The doctrine is presented in the plato-meno through the slave-boy who, led by question alone, recovers geometric truths he has never been taught: “The souls of men returning to earth bring back a latent memory of ideas, which were known to them in a former state. The recollection is awakened into life and consciousness by the sight of the things which resemble them on earth. The soul evidently possesses such innate ideas before she has had time to acquire them” (Plato, Meno, summarized through the slave-boy demonstration).

The Phaedo extends anamnēsis into a full doctrine of the soul’s pre-existence and immortality. The plato-phaedrus gives it mythic form: the soul, winged in its pre-incarnate state, beheld the Forms in the supercelestial place; the sight of earthly beauty triggers the recollection, and the wings — shed in the descent — begin to grow back. What looks like erotic suffering is the soul’s metaphysical homesickness.

The Jungian inheritance is structural. The unconscious is not a tabula rasa accumulating personal experience but a stratum of inherited psychic forms — the archetypes — that experience activates rather than creates. The image triggers the archetype the way earthly beauty triggers the recollection of the Form. Anamnēsis is the Platonic name for what Jung calls the activation of an archetypal image, and what james-hillman calls the soul’s recognition of itself in the image.

Relationships

• forms-eidos
• archetype
• divine-madness
• active-imagination

Primary sources

• plato-meno (Plato, c. 385 BCE)
• plato-phaedrus (Plato, c. 370 BCE)