In and Out of the Mind: Greek Images of the Tragic Self

The Tragic Self Is Not Interior but Invaded: Padel Recovers a Psyche Before the Ego

Ruth Padel’s In and Out of the Mind performs a radical act of excavation. By subjecting the language of Attic tragedy—Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides—to meticulous philological analysis, she reconstructs how fifth-century Greeks actually experienced what we call “inner life.” Her central finding overturns a comfortable assumption: the Greeks did not conceive of a sealed interior self that emotions merely colored. Instead, the tragic self was a permeable body, open to invasion by divine forces, erotic compulsions, and madness. The splanchna (innards), phrenes (midriff or diaphragm), and kardia (heart) were not metaphors for feeling—they were the literal sites where gods acted upon mortals. Ate, eros, mania: these entered from without. The vocabulary of tragic suffering is a vocabulary of penetration, darkening, and possession. Padel shows that when Sophocles writes of a mind “darkened” or “boiling,” the language points to a conception of consciousness as a vessel that can be filled, clouded, or shattered by forces the subject did not generate. This is not proto-Freudianism. It is a fundamentally different ontology of selfhood, one in which what we call “the unconscious” was experienced not as a hidden depth within but as an external agency pressing in through the body’s membranes.

The Body as the Site of Divinity Confirms Hillman’s Dictum That the Gods Have Become Diseases

The implications for depth psychology are immense. James Hillman famously cited Jung’s remark that “the gods have become diseases; Zeus no longer rules Olympus but rather the solar plexus, and produces curious specimens for the doctor’s consulting room.” Padel’s work provides the missing philological evidence for this claim. If the Greeks located divine action in the splanchna—the gut, the liver, the organs of visceral feeling—then the migration of the gods into somatic symptomatology is not a modern degradation but a return to an archaic truth. Hillman, in The Myth of Analysis, argued that “classical mythology is a textbook of pathopsychology; it is all there if we but read it in this light.” Padel reads it in precisely this light, but with the disciplined tools of classical scholarship rather than the syncretistic raids Hillman himself confessed to. Where Hillman acknowledged that his psychological method “ravages the scholarship of others,” Padel supplies what he pillaged from: a painstaking demonstration that tragic poets understood madness, grief, and desire as divine visitations lodged in specific bodily organs. The convergence is striking: Hillman’s archetypal psychology needs Padel’s philology to be taken seriously by the academy, and Padel’s philology needs Hillman’s psychological framework to reveal why any of this matters beyond the classics seminar.

Porosity Against Monotheism: The Tragic Self as a Polytheistic Structure

Padel’s account of the porous, multiply-invaded self resonates with Hillman’s critique of “psychological monotheism”—the insistence on a single ego in direct covenant with a single Self. In The Myth of Analysis, Hillman argued that the ego-Self axis “is, after all, only the usual Judeo-Protestant monotheism in psychological language,” and called for attending instead to “the plurality of the self, upon the many Gods and the many existential modes of their effects.” Padel’s tragic self is this polytheistic self made concrete. When Agamemnon steps on the purple carpet, when Ajax is darkened by Athena, when Phaedra’s phrenes are seized by Aphrodite, the self is not choosing; it is being chosen, occupied, multiplied. The tragic hero is not an ego navigating among options but a site where competing divine claims collide. This is precisely the “many-souled” condition Hillman described when he wrote that “anima makes us feel many parts” and that pathologizing “bears witness to both the soul’s inherent composite nature and to the many gods reflected in this composition.” Padel gives this insight its oldest documentary basis. She demonstrates that polytheistic psychology is not a modern therapeutic invention but a recovery of the experiential world that tragedy staged every year at the Dionysia.

The Middle Voice of Suffering: Where Padel Meets the Grammar of Tragic Endurance

There is a further dimension to Padel’s work that connects to recent scholarship on the Greek middle voice and the concept of thumos as a deliberative organ. Cody Peterson’s analysis of the “middle voice” as a grammatical and existential stance—neither purely active nor purely passive but constituted by what acts upon the subject—finds its dramatic correlate in Padel’s tragic figures. The hero who is invaded by ate does not choose madness (active) nor is simply destroyed by it (passive); the hero undergoes it in a way that is simultaneously self-constituting. Ajax’s madness is Athena’s doing, yet it is Ajax’s madness—it reveals his character, his ethos, precisely because the self is not a fortress but a resonant chamber. Padel’s philological work thus provides evidence for a claim that runs from Homer through Jung’s Active Imagination to Hillman’s soul-making: that the deepest psychological work happens not when the ego commands or collapses but when it holds the invasion, lets itself be the site of divine passage. The Greek tragic vocabulary—words for darkening, boiling, wandering of mind—charts exactly this middle territory.

This book matters because it does something no other work in the depth-psychological library accomplishes: it takes the metaphorical claims of archetypal psychology and demonstrates their literal truth in the oldest Western literary tradition. Padel is not “applying” psychology to tragedy or tragedy to psychology. She is showing that before there was a distinction between the two, there was a language for the soul’s porosity that modernity lost and depth psychology has been groping to recover. For anyone who has read Hillman and wondered whether “the gods in the diseases” is poetry or phenomenology, Padel answers: it was both, and the Greeks had the words to prove it.