Bremmer’s Multiple Soul Supersedes the Dualist Reading

Bremmer‘s 1983 monograph refines the field in two moves. First, against Arbman’s anthropological dualism (free soul vs. body-souls), he argues that “Greek soul belief might best be characterized as multiple” — psychē plus thumos, noos, and menos, each distinct, each with its own range of operation (Bremmer 1983, ch. II, conclusion). Second, against Snell’s strong thesis that “the early Greeks did not yet know any concept denoting the psychic whole,” Bremmer observes that Snell “neglected the importance of the individual’s name: Homer speaks of a named individual’s psychē, thumos, and noos” (Bremmer 1983). The Greeks “could easily say ‘I wish’ or ‘I thought’ and, consequently, must have had a general sense of psychic coherence and, at least, an imperfect notion of the unity of the personality.”

The synthesis Bremmer offers is structural: the psychē of the living person in Homer is the free soul — inactive in waking life, detached at death as eidōlon — while thumos, noos, and menos are the body-souls that conduct affect, cognition, and volition while the body lives. “All else is lost with the body including the psychic entities responsible for psychological activities. Noos, phren, thumos, kradie, etor, ker all fade. Psyche itself flies off to Hades” (Sullivan 1995, p. 78, reading the same structure). The consolidation into a single psychē-as-consciousness is a fifth-century development driven, Bremmer proposes, by literacy and the rise of political self-determination.

The thread holds the thesis that the plural self is not defect but architecture. The Jungian reading is authorized by this architecture: the complex-psyche is not an atavism but the continuity of the multiple structure beneath the unifying word.

Sources

• jan-n-bremmer: “Greek soul belief might best be characterized as multiple”
• bruno-snell: corrected — the named individual’s psychē/thumos/noos attests psychic coherence
• shirley-sullivan: body-souls fade at death; psychē alone survives
• homer: the evidentiary substrate