Historical Psychology

Psychologie historique is Vernant’s methodological name for the claim that the faculties of the mind — memory, will, imagination, the category of the person, the sense of time and space — are historically constituted rather than given. Inherited from Ignace Meyerson and elaborated across Myth and Thought Among the Greeks (1965) and the collaborative work with marcel-detienne and Pierre Vidal-Naquet, the method treats ancient texts as documents not only of what the Greeks thought but of how their thinking was structured.

Vernant states the thesis directly: “these transformations affect the entire framework of thought and the whole gamut of psychological functions: modes of symbolic expression and the manipulation of signs, ideas of time and space, causality, memory, imagination, the organization of acts, will, and personality — all these categories of the mind undergo a fundamental change in terms of both their internal structure and their interrelationships” (Vernant 1983). The archaic Greek who inhabits the Iliad is not a classical Greek with archaic beliefs; he is a differently organized subject, whose psyche is a breath-soul, whose thumos is a faculty of the chest, and whose moral agency is distributed across the body and the gods.

For the Lineage, historical psychology is the scaffolding beneath the Jungian reading of Greek myth. The claim that Homer’s faculties are not ours is what makes the recovery of those faculties — by bruno-snell, caroline-caswell, richard-onians, ruth-padel — a meaningful psychological project rather than a philological curiosity.

Relationships

Primary sources

vernant-myth-and-thought (Vernant 1983)