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Shirley Darcus Sullivan

Shirley Darcus Sullivan

Shirley Darcus Sullivan (b. 1945) is a Canadian classical philologist whose patient lexical work constitutes the most complete inventory of the early Greek psychological vocabulary produced in the late twentieth century. Working in the line that descends from erwin-rohde, bruno-snell, and richard-onians, she extended the inquiry beyond Homer into Hesiod, the Homeric Hymns, the lyric and elegiac poets, and the Presocratic fragments, tracing noos, phrenes, thumos, kradie-etor-ker, and psyche across roughly four centuries of Greek literature before Plato.

Her method is quantitative and contextual. She counts — thumos over 750 times in Homer and the Homeric Hymns, phren over 300, ētor 101, kēr 81 — and reads each instance in its genre. Her 1995 volume, sullivan-psychological-ethical-ideas, published in the Brill Mnemosyne supplement series, does this cumulatively for the entire pre-Platonic corpus; her earlier psychological-activity-in-homer-phren (1988) performs the same labor for a single term. The chosen phrase “psychic entities” is deliberate: it preserves the ambiguity between agent and function that a later vocabulary of “faculties” or “capacities” would close.

The philologically load-bearing finding is that the early Greek interior is plural. Several named entities carry out the work the modern ego claims as its own, each distinct, each partly autonomous, each observed and addressed by the person who hosts them. Homer’s psychic entities “are not just parts of a self, itself not yet defined by a single word. Instead they are dominant, and perhaps even domineering, presences within, from which the person remains distinct, observing and responding to them” (Sullivan 1995, ch. 2).

For seba her work is load-bearing in two directions. First, it documents the pluralism of the early Greek self at a level of textual evidence the depth tradition would otherwise have to assume. It is the empirical apparatus behind bruno-snell‘s argument and behind homeric-plural-self, homeric-pluralism, and plural-psyche as the graph holds them. Second, it preserves the grammatical possibility — crystallized in her reading of sullivan-heraclitean-thumos-psyche (Heraclitus B 85) — that agent and affect are not yet two. That possibility is what Jung’s complex recovers, what Hillman’s polytheistic psychology recalls, and what the middle-voice grammatically encodes. Sullivan is seba‘s most granular philological witness to the headwaters the tradition returns to.

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