The Discovery of Depth

Depth as a category of the soul is not Homeric. Bathys, “deep,” in Homer remains a word for waters, ditches, and the sea; “Homeric speech does not yet know this aspect of the word ‘deep’” applied to thought or feeling (Snell 1953, p. 18). The depth of the soul is, for bruno-snell, the historical achievement of the early Greek lyric.

“About six hundred years before Virgil, the early Greek lyrists had awoken to the fact that man has a soul” (Snell 1953, p. 301). They were the first to find that feelings are personal, that they originate “from no other source but his own person,” that they may be shared across persons, and — most consequentially — that “a feeling may be divided against itself, distraught with an internal tension; and this led to the notion that the soul has intensity, and a dimension of its own, viz. depth” (Snell 1953, p. 301).

When Archilochus apostrophises his own thymos — “endure, my heart; you once bore an even baser thing” (Snell 1953, p. 59) — the lyric “I” has stepped back from its own affective organ to address it. The space between speaker and thymos is the space depth psychology will later occupy. The whole tradition that runs from Heraclitus’ soul whose limits cannot be found, through the Christian inner life, into Jung’s depth psychology, is the elaboration of what the lyric first discovered. Depth is not a metaphor borrowed by psychology; it is a category that psychology inherits from the Greeks who made it.

Relationships

• lyric-i
• homeric-plural-self
• soul
• heraclitus
• interiority

Primary sources

• snell-discovery-of-the-mind (Snell 1953)