Psychē sui generis (Claus)

David Claus‘s central philological thesis is that psychē does not develop by analogy to the other Homeric life-words. Its pattern of usage in and immediately after Homer “is too idiosyncratic and restricted to be the product of analogy to any one word” (Claus 1981). The later psychological uses of psychē in lyric poetry and tragedy are best explained as continuations of “a pattern struck sui generis” in Homer itself — not as post-Homeric invention, not as imported new-afterlife-belief, not as analogical drift from thumos or menos or aion.

The consequence is load-bearing for the Lineage. If psychē is sui generis from Homer forward, then the term carries a continuous identity across the Homeric-lyric-tragic-Platonic transition. “The importance of ψυχή in popular usage after Homer is, therefore, not that it reflects the spread of new ideas about the nature of the psychological self but that on the whole it preserves for Greek speech, particularly poetry, the archaic pattern of expression that attributes each human life to the activity of a powerful ‘life-force’ whose manifestations are both physical and psychological” (Claus 1981).

This is why the Jungian tradition’s claim that psychē names one real thing — not a variable cultural category — has philological warrant. The concept is continuous, not constructed.

Relationships

• david-b-claus — the scholar.
• claus-toward-soul-inquiry — the work.
• psyche — the concept this thesis secures.
• psyche-breath-soul — the Homeric sense Claus extends philologically.
• homer — the ground.
• bruno-snell, shirley-sullivan — parallel philological programs.

Primary sources

• claus-toward-soul-inquiry (Claus 1981, ch. on ψυχή and its evolution in popular usage)