The Seba library treats Epimeleia Tes Psyches in 7 passages, across 3 authors (including Vernant, Jean-Pierre, Jung, Carl Gustav, Sullivan, Shirley Darcus).
ameleia ruins the best of souls, just as it does the best land and the healthiest body, but epimeleia and ponos are both fertile and productive.
Vernant, via Plutarch, establishes epimeleia and ponos as the productive antithesis to ameleia, framing soul-care as an agricultural and athletic discipline that overcomes even adverse nature.
, Myth and Thought Among the Greeks, 1983thesis
we need an exercise which can constantly renew the memory of what we have known, dei gar tes meletes ananeouses hemin aei ten mnemen hon egnomen.
Proclus, as read by Vernant, identifies melete — disciplined practice — as the instrument by which the soul resists the amnesiac drift of becoming, connecting epimeleia directly to anamnesis and immortality.
, Myth and Thought Among the Greeks, 1983supporting
Epimeleia (Care), 180, 183 Epimethean attitude, 179, 183–84 function, 352 mentality, 189–90 principle, 187
Jung's index places Epimeleia as 'Care' in direct structural proximity to the Epimethean attitude, implying that reflective soul-tending is the positive counterpart to the unreflective, retrospective Epimethean disposition.
, Psychological Types, 1921supporting
psyche became important not only when death approaches but during life. It is now associated with certain emotions: joy, love, pain. It is related to qualities in a person.
Sullivan documents the historical shift by which psyche acquires the interiority that makes epimeleia meaningful — the soul becomes something present and cultivable in the living person rather than merely a post-mortem shade.
, Psychological and Ethical Ideas What Early Greeks Say, 1995supporting
only it survived death. Unlike noos, phrenes, thumos, kradie, etor, and ker, that perished with the body, it had a form of permanent existence, however unenviable in nature.
Sullivan establishes psyche's singular durability among Homeric psychological entities, providing the ontological basis upon which the later imperative of soul-care rests.
, Psychological and Ethical Ideas What Early Greeks Say, 1995supporting
psyche has become important not only when death approaches but during life. It is now associated with certain emotions: joy, love, pain.
Sullivan traces the lyric poets' expansion of psyche into an agent of emotional and volitional life, preparing the conceptual ground for the Socratic injunction to care for what now has genuine inner content.
, Psychological and Ethical Ideas What Early Greeks Say, 1995aside
These psychai appear to have undergone some form of purification in the underworld. In their reincarnation… they return to earth as people particularly endowed with authority, power, and wisdom.
Pindaric reincarnation doctrine, as examined by Sullivan, implies that moral quality accrues to or is lost from psyche across lifetimes — an eschatological extension of the epimeleia imperative.
, Psychological and Ethical Ideas What Early Greeks Say, 1995aside