The ego as historical achievement

The unified first-person ego that Jungian psychology takes as the center of consciousness is not a human constant. It is a historical acquisition that the Greek-speaking world made visible across roughly four centuries — from the plural-faculty Homeric self through the lyric I of Sappho and Archilochus to the Platonic tripartite soul under the charioteer’s governance. The modern ego is Platonic in structure; Jungian psychology, even in its recovery of the collective substrate, presupposes the Platonic inheritance.

Sources

• bruno-snell: the lyric poets discover the self; “the discovery of self which is ascribed to the lyric poets by Snell … is undocumented so far as vocabulary is concerned” (Havelock, noting the gap even as he accepts the thesis). The movement from Homer’s externally-addressed faculties to the lyric interior is where the first-person singular is born as psychological reality.
• homer: the homeric-plural-self — θυμός, φρένες, νόος, κραδίη, ἦτορ — a populated interior without a unified I (Bremmer 1983; Sullivan; Caswell 1990).
• eric-a-havelock: “Achilles can ‘live fully’ as a human being without benefit of any Socratic belief that he must ‘tend his soul’. The gulf between the two men is bridged by a transition from the imaginative consciousness to the intellectual self-consciousness” (Havelock 1963).
• plato: the tripartite-soul — λογιστικόν, θυμοειδές, ἐπιθυμητικόν — with the rational governing part (the Phaedrus‘s charioteer) consolidating the unity. This is the structural form the Jungian ego inherits.
• Williams, Bernard: Shame and Necessity (1993) argues against the evolutionary reading that treats the Homeric plurality as deficient — the Homeric self is differently organized, not less organized. The Platonic unification is a legitimate psychic form but not the only one.