The Early Greek Concept of the Soul

The Soul Was Never One: Bremmer Shatters the Unity That Depth Psychology Assumes

Jan Bremmer’s The Early Greek Concept of the Soul (1983) performs a deceptively quiet act of demolition. The entire edifice of depth psychology — from Jung’s collective unconscious to Hillman’s archetypal imagining to Giegerich’s logical life of soul — presupposes that “psyche” names a unified field. Bremmer shows that for the earliest Greeks, no such field existed. What Homer depicts is a plural economy of psychic agents: thumos as emotional impulse and life-force, noos as perceptive recognition, menos as battle-fury, and psyche itself as an entity that appears only when the other agents are absent — in fainting, dreaming, and death. The psyche in Homer is not the seat of consciousness; it is what remains when consciousness departs. This finding is not merely philological. It rewrites the origin story that every school of depth psychology tells about itself. When Hillman, in Re-Visioning Psychology, traces his lineage to Heraclitus’s dictum that “you could not discover the limits of the soul, even if you traveled every road to do so; such is the depth of its meaning,” he is citing a post-Homeric consolidation. Bremmer’s work makes clear that Heraclitus’s achievement was precisely to fuse what had been separate — to turn a plural inventory of psychic organs into a single depth. The “depth” that depth psychology inherits is not a given; it was made, and Bremmer reconstructs the workshop.

The Free Soul Is the Soul of Dissociation, Not of Interiority

Bremmer’s central analytical distinction — between the “free soul” and the “body souls” — draws on Scandinavian ethnography and comparative religion, particularly the work of Arbman and Hultkrantz on dualistic soul-beliefs among Uralic and North American indigenous peoples. The free soul is the soul that wanders during dreams, that departs during ecstatic trance, that survives as the shade in Hades. The body souls are the ones that animate waking life. Bremmer demonstrates that this dualistic structure maps directly onto Homer: the psyche (free soul) never thinks, feels, or wills during life, while thumos and noos (body souls) do all the cognitive and emotional work but vanish at death. The implications for Jungian and post-Jungian thought are profound. When John Beebe, citing Parkes and Dodds, describes Homer’s “plurality of centers of psychic awareness” as proto-dialogical — an “interior society” of agents prefiguring modern polyphonic selfhood — he is building on exactly the phenomenology Bremmer codifies. But Bremmer’s framework adds a structural dimension that Beebe’s dialogical model lacks: these agents are not all on the same ontological plane. The free soul and the body souls belong to different registers of experience. The psyche is not one voice among many in a polyphonic self; it is the voice that speaks only from the threshold of non-being. This is closer to what Hillman calls the soul’s “special relation with death” than to any model of internal dialogue. The archaic psyche is, in clinical terms, a dissociative structure — it emerges when ordinary ego-consciousness collapses.

Shamanism Provides the Missing Ritual Context for the Soul’s Journey

Bremmer’s most provocative move is his argument that the free soul concept in Greece bears the marks of shamanistic practice. Drawing on Dodds’s earlier suggestions in The Greeks and the Irrational, he traces traditions about Aristeas, Hermotimus, and Epimenides — figures whose souls reportedly left their bodies to travel — as evidence of a Greek shamanistic substrate. This is not mere comparative exoticism. It positions the psyche’s original function not as reflection but as ecstatic departure. The soul does not look inward; it leaves. Edinger, in The Psyche in Antiquity, approaches the early Greek material from the opposite direction: he reads each philosopher as articulating an archetypal image already latent in the collective unconscious, treating the historical sequence from Thales to Plotinus as a progressive differentiation of psychic contents. Bremmer’s philological rigor challenges this approach at its root. For Edinger, Anaxagoras’s nous is a “symbolic example of the process of separatio,” an archetype that the philosopher merely channels. For Bremmer, nous has a precise history: it originally meant a perceptive act of recognition (close to “seeing the true nature of a situation”) and only gradually acquired the cosmic scope Anaxagoras gave it. The concept was not always there waiting to be articulated; it was forged through specific cultural and linguistic pressures. This is not a refutation of archetypal psychology but a necessary correction: the archetypal reading gains depth, not loses it, when it knows the contingent history through which archetypal images first crystallize.

Why Bremmer Matters: The Philological Unconscious of Depth Psychology

Giegerich insists that “the soul’s life is at bottom logical life” and that psychology must advance beyond the imaginal to rigorous conceptual thinking. Hillman insists that soul is image, perspective, the reflective middle ground. Both positions inherit — usually without acknowledgment — a concept of unified psyche that came into existence only in the sixth and fifth centuries BCE, through the specific fusion Bremmer documents. This book is the missing philological unconscious of the entire depth-psychological tradition. It does not interpret the Greeks through Jung; it shows what the Greeks actually said before anyone unified their soul-language into a single field. For the clinician, the scholar, or the serious reader of depth psychology, Bremmer’s work provides the indispensable ground zero: the moment before “soul” became a totality, when it was still a network of partial agencies, each with its own phenomenology and its own relation to death, trance, and embodied life. No other book in the tradition offers this.