fragments
Within the depth-psychology corpus, ‘Fragment’ operates on at least three distinct registers simultaneously, and the tension among them is generative rather than merely terminological. In its most philosophically charged sense, the fragment is a broken remnant that paradoxically preserves an original wholeness — as when Schiller’s diagnosis (transmitted through Abrams) identifies the modern person as ‘everlastingly chained to a little fragment of the Whole,’ a being whose inner unity has been severed by the specialisation of labour and consciousness. This anthropological use resonates powerfully with depth psychology’s concern for psychic integration. In a second register, the fragment is the primary textual form of pre-Socratic wisdom: the Heraclitean fragments are not ruins but concentrated oracles, each holding a complete thought in compressed form. Here the fragment is epistemically productive — not a deficit but a mode. A third register appears in Jaynes and Sullivan, where named ‘fragments’ of ancient lyric poetry serve as archaeological evidence for the emergence of introspective vocabulary in archaic Greek psychology. Across all three registers, the fragment resists totalization while gesturing toward a whole it cannot contain. The concept thus stands at the intersection of hermeneutics, ontology of the self, and the history of consciousness.
everlastingly chained to a jingle little fragment of the Whole, man himself develops into nothing but a fragment.
Schiller’s diagnosis, as relayed by Abrams, posits that modernity’s division of labour reduces the whole human being to a mere fragment of itself — the quintessential depth-psychological indictment of alienated consciousness.
, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature, 1971thesis
I know not what to do; my noemata are in two parts . . . (Fragment 52). This puts the emphasis on the imagined internal metaphor-thing that is hypostasized into a thought.
Jaynes uses named lyric fragments — especially from Sappho — as primary evidence that archaic Greek speakers were developing a nascent introspective vocabulary, treating the fragment as a window into the emergence of consciousness.
, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, 1976thesis
the passages state a poetics of dissonance — another reason Heraclitus remains so urgently contemporary.
The Heraclitean fragments are presented not as damaged remnants but as a deliberate poetics of concentrated, dissonant insight — the fragment as an epistemological form rather than a textual accident.
, Fragments: The Collected Wisdom of Heraclitus, 2001supporting
The Greek word Sibylla, or ‘Sibyl,’ appears in this fragment for the first time ever. No one knows where it came from.
The editorial apparatus around the Heraclitean fragments demonstrates how individual fragments serve as originary textual sites — loci where concepts (here ‘Sibyl’) first enter recorded thought.
, Fragments: The Collected Wisdom of Heraclitus, 2001supporting
The usual translation of koros, as satiety, gives the literal meaning, but loses the strong connotation of insolence, important to the personifying logic of this and many other fragments.
Each Heraclitean fragment is shown to carry a dense personifying logic that literal translation cannot fully recover, affirming the fragment’s status as a semantically overdetermined unit.
, Fragments: The Collected Wisdom of Heraclitus, 2001supporting
We have just one fragment of Anaximenes which reads: Just as our psyche, which is air, controls us, so breath and air encompass the whole world-order.
Sullivan treats a single surviving fragment as sufficient to reconstruct Anaximenes’ entire psychological cosmology, illustrating how the fragment functions as an epistemically load-bearing unit in pre-Socratic psychology.
, Psychological and Ethical Ideas What Early Greeks Say, 1995supporting
In fragment B 125 of Democritus we hear of a response that the senses make to phren: ‘wretched phren, do you take your beliefs (pisteis) from us and then overthrow us? Our overthrow is your downfall’.
Individual Democritean fragments are mobilised as direct evidence for the conflict between sensory knowledge and deeper cognition — central to early Greek psychological epistemology.
, Psychological and Ethical Ideas What Early Greeks Say, 1995supporting
The fragment in which Empedocles claims the power to stay the winds, cause or prevent rain, and revive the dead, appears to belong, not to the Purifications, but to the poem On Nature.
Dodds uses the ambiguous location of Empedoclean fragments to argue against ‘genetic’ explanations of inconsistency, showing how the material condition of the fragment shapes interpretive possibilities.
, The Greeks and the Irrational, 1951supporting
Things may well be absent to the eyes… but look at things absent, although firmly present to noos.
A Parmenidean fragment is shown to associate noos with inner vision that supersedes sensory appearance — the fragment itself enacting the very epistemological claim it makes.
, Psychological and Ethical Ideas What Early Greeks Say, 1995supporting
Bill Wilson, ‘A Fragment of History: Origin of the Twelve Steps’ (A. A. Grapevine, July 1953; Language of the Heart, p. 201).
Wilson’s self-designation of his historical account as ‘A Fragment of History’ echoes, in a recovery context, the broader corpus tendency to treat partial narratives as legitimate — if incomplete — sites of truth.
, Writing the Big Book The Creation of A A , 2019aside
the metrical correspondences on the basis of which we assign the fragment to the Hymn are far too striking to be explained as accidental agreements.
Snell’s philological work on Pindaric fragments illustrates the methodological challenge of reconstructing continuous thought from discontinuous textual survivals.
, The discovery of the mind; the Greek origins of European, 1953aside