The Seba library treats Dielexato in 7 passages, across 3 authors (including Bernard Williams, Peterson, Cody, Jung, Carl Gustav).
A curious formula is used more than once to express this: a character “addresses his own thumos” and in the course of the following speech says, “Yet still, why does the heart within me debate on these things?”
Williams identifies the Homeric formula of addressing one’s own thumos — the grammatical site of dielexato — as an irreducible form of inner deliberation that cannot be reduced to modern voluntarist notions of will.
, Shame and Necessity, 1993thesis
the hero of Homeric epic does not merely “have” feelings; he engages the thūmos as an internal interlocutor, a semi-autonomous agent with whom he must negotiate the terms of existence.
Peterson establishes that the Homeric mode of interior speech, of which dielexato is the paradigmatic grammatical form, constitutes the self as a relation rather than a monolith, requiring a specific voice to navigate the gap between knowing mind and feeling chest.
, The Abolished Middle: Retrieving the Thumotic Soul from the Unconscious, 2026thesis
in the Middle, the subject is “interior to the process” (dans le procès), acting not upon the external world but within the sphere of their own being
Drawing on Benveniste, Peterson situates dielexato within the broader grammatical category of the middle voice, where the subject’s action is reflexively self-affecting rather than transitively directed outward.
, The Abolished Middle: Retrieving the Thumotic Soul from the Unconscious, 2026supporting
the Council was definitive and exclusionary. In Canon 11, the bishops anathematized those who taught that man has “two souls,” affirming instead that the human being possesses “one rational and intellectual soul”
Peterson traces the institutional suppression of the thumotic interior — the very domain in which dielexato operated — to the Fourth Council of Constantinople, reading the theological decree as the juridical abolition of the grammatical middle voice’s psychological referent.
, The Abolished Middle: Retrieving the Thumotic Soul from the Unconscious, 2026supporting
The Middle Voice is the grammar of this holding. It allows the subject to remain under convergence without collapse, to be constituted by what cannot be changed.
Peterson frames the middle voice — and by extension dielexato as its exemplary instance — as the grammar of endurance and self-constitution under constraint, a mode that neither conquers nor succumbs but transforms helplessness into character.
, The Abolished Middle: Retrieving the Thumotic Soul from the Unconscious, 2026supporting
complexes are in fact “splinter psyches.” The aetiology of their origin is frequently a so-called trauma, an emotional shock or some such thing, that splits off a bit of the psyche.
Jung’s account of complexes as splinter psyches with quasi-autonomous voices provides a structural analogue to the thumotic interlocutor addressed in dielexato, though the connection remains implicit rather than etymologically developed.
, The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche, 1960aside
complexes can have us. The existence of complexes throws serious doubt on the naive assumption of the unity of consciousness, which is equated with “psyche,” and on the supremacy of the will.
Jung’s critique of the unified will and the sovereignty of consciousness resonates with the thumotic psychology implicit in dielexato, where the self is already constitutively divided between speaking agent and inner respondent.
, The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche, 1960aside