lungs
Within the depth-psychology corpus, ‘lung’ occupies a curious double register: it is simultaneously a physiological organ and, in the archaic and classical traditions that feed depth-psychological thinking, a seat of mind, emotion, and prophetic consciousness. The most sustained treatment appears in Onians’s philological archaeology of Greek thought, where the phrenes — long equated with ‘lungs’ — are shown to have functioned as the organ of cognition, feeling, and inspiration before the diaphragm appropriated that name. Padel, working adjacent to this tradition, illuminates how the lungs participate in the ancient hydraulics of breath and emotion, channels through which liquid and pneuma alike pass. Plato’s Timaeus offers a philosophical anatomy in which the lung is placed around the heart as a buffer, cooling the spirited element so that passion may serve reason. Hakuin Ekaku, from the Zen medical tradition, situates the lungs within a five-organ cosmology governed by the metal principle, coordinating the exhaled breath with heart and the inhaled breath with kidneys and liver. Ogden’s somatic-psychotherapy tradition treats the lung functionally, as the medium through which breath regulation intervenes in trauma and dissociation. Across these registers — archaic Greek, Platonic, East Asian, and contemporary somatic — the lung emerges as a threshold organ: neither purely visceral nor purely mental, but the site where air, affect, and consciousness interpenetrate.
Love is praised as omnipotent, ‘for it melts its way into the lungs of all who have life in them… it tyrannises over the lungs of Zeus without spear, without steel’
Onians demonstrates that for Sophocles and the lexicographers, the lung (pleumones) was the organ of erotic and emotional seizure, directly inheriting the affective role of the phrenes.
, The origins of European thought about the body, the mind,, 1988thesis
The lungs had another name, TTAEOHCOV, which, for its descriptive quality, could not be transferred. That name occurs in the text of Homer, which might suggest that phrenes and prosthides should be referred to something else
Onians argues that the semantic migration of phrenes from ‘lungs’ to ‘diaphragm’ was caused precisely by the lungs already possessing the rival term pleumones, leaving the diaphragm to inherit the older psychic designation.
, The origins of European thought about the body, the mind,, 1988thesis
originally praecordia could not mean the heart itself (cor), so that again we are left with the lungs… pulmo remained, as TTAEUHCOV for the Greeks, to express ‘lung’ without reference to the mind
Onians traces the Latin praecordia to a pre-philosophical stage in which the lungs, not the heart or diaphragm, bore the burden of psychic meaning before Greek influence displaced that meaning onto pulmo as purely anatomical.
, The origins of European thought about the body, the mind,, 1988thesis
if the phrenes were the lungs, naturally thus coloured, we can understand why evil phrenes are described as leukoi by Pindar… The contrast, as we may now see it to be, to the colour of the healthy lung, organ of mind
Onians marshals colour-language from Pindar and Aeschylus to confirm that the phrenes originally designated the lung as the ‘organ of mind,’ with its dark complexion serving as the natural referent for the epithet.
, The origins of European thought about the body, the mind,, 1988thesis
The dead prophet has phrenes, lungs, and has breath, intelligence. It is by the thumos in his phrenes or by what is breathed into them by some god that a live prophet divines.
Onians establishes that prophetic cognition in archaic Greek thought was localised in the lungs (phrenes), with divine inspiration operating literally as inhalation into the pulmonary seat of intelligence.
, The origins of European thought about the body, the mind,, 1988thesis
they cut the channels of the windpipe to reach the lung, and set the lung itself around the heart as a sort of buffer, so that, when the spirit therein was at the height of passion, the heart might leap against a yielding substance and be cooled down
Plato’s Timaeus assigns the lung a structural and psychological role as a buffer organ that moderates the spirited element’s passion in service of reason, integrating physiology and moral psychology.
, Plato’s cosmology the Timaeus of Plato, 1997thesis
The lungs, manifesting the metal principle, are a female organ located above the diaphragm… The exhaled breath issues from the heart and the lungs; the inhaled breath enters through the kidneys and liver.
Hakuin presents a Sino-Japanese five-organ cosmology in which the lungs embody the metal principle and govern exhalation, situating pulmonary function within a comprehensive energetic and gendered metaphysics of the body.
, Wild Ivy: The Spiritual Autobiography of Zen Master Hakuin, 1999supporting
The porous ones, like the spleen and lungs, ‘enlarge when fluid is added.’ When they ‘receive or drink up the fluid… the porous hollows are filled.’
Padel’s analysis of ancient Greek physiological thinking shows the lung as a porous, fluid-absorbing organ, grounding the archaic equation of emotion with drink and liquid suffusion in the pulmonary interior.
, In and Out of the Mind Greek Images of the Tragic Self, 1994supporting
These are housed in the organs inside the trunk: heart, lungs, belly, liver, spleen, etc. The position, structure, and functions of these organs are described… in relation to the feelings
Plato’s commentary situates the lung among the thoracic organs whose anatomical arrangement is described not physiologically but as loci of emotion and appetite, linking somatic structure to psychological life.
, Plato’s cosmology the Timaeus of Plato, 1997supporting
Most decisive of all, perhaps, is the word metaprenon, which it is recognised should mean ‘the part behind the phrenes’, a strange name to use at all for a large area if the phrenes meant merely the membrane dividing the thorax from the abdomen.
Onians uses Homeric anatomical nomenclature — metaprenon — to argue that phrenes cannot have referred to the thin diaphragm but must have indicated the substantial, space-occupying lungs.
, The origins of European thought about the body, the mind,, 1988supporting
it reaches to the lungs, and receives the air inhaled by breathing, and also exhales it and passes it out from the lungs… breath is inhaled by the lungs and heart
Cicero’s naturalistic account of the trachea and lungs as the organs of breath-reception and expulsion situates the lung within the classical philosophical tradition of respiratory anatomy that underlies later depth-psychological engagements with the breath-soul.
, De Natura Deorum (On the Nature of the Gods), -45supporting
By moving air in and out of our lungs, essential fuel is delivered to places in the body that need it, and chemical excesses and wastes are removed.
Ogden grounds somatic-psychotherapy breath-work in the lung’s physiological role as the organ of gaseous exchange, framing pulmonary function as the biological substrate for trauma regulation.
, Sensorimotor Psychotherapy Interventions for Trauma and, 2015supporting
LSJ s. vv. drósos II (‘the lung of animals’)
Renehan’s lexicographical note preserves a marginal Greek gloss equating a dew-related term with animal lung, attesting the range of archaic Greek vocabulary applied to pulmonary tissue.
, Greek lexicographical notes A critical supplement to theaside