Breath-Soul from Anaximenes to Jung

The breath-soul is the archaic substrate beneath every later use of pneuma. Bremmer’s recovery of the multiple-soul doctrine shows that pre-philosophical Greek belief separated the free soul (psyche, released at death) from the body souls (thymos, noos, menos) — the unification under a single breath-soul is itself the philosophical move (Bremmer 1983, conclusion). Anaximenes’ B 2 fragment performs that unification: psyche-as-air “holds together and controls” the human body just as aer surrounds the cosmos (Sullivan 1995, p. 102). Diogenes of Apollonia adds noēsis to the air (B 4).

Edinger reads the chain forward into modern dream interpretation: “The later word pneuma became an image of immense importance for the thinkers who followed and for the psychology of modern dream interpretation, in which one encounters air, wind and tornadoes for example. The symbolism started with Anaximenes” (Edinger 1999, p. 21). The wind in the dream is the breath of Anaximenes.

The thread’s claim is conservative and load-bearing: the depth tradition’s spirit-archetype is not a free invention of the modern unconscious. It is the breath-soul of the Greeks, taken up by the Stoics, transmitted through the Hermetic-alchemical stream, and recovered phenomenologically by Jung as an autonomous content of the psyche. The continuity is symbolic, not doctrinal: the same image-complex (air, breath, wind, spirit) carries the same psychic phenomenon across the centuries.

Sources

• anaximenes: psyche as aer that holds and controls (B 2)
• jan-n-bremmer: the dualistic free-soul / body-souls model of archaic Greek belief
• shirley-sullivan: the philological reconstruction of Anaximenes’ B 2 and Diogenes’ B 4
• edward-edinger: the air-breath-wind-spirit complex as the substrate of dream pneuma (Edinger 1999, p. 21)
• carl-jung: pneuma as autonomous spirit-archetype in alchemical projection