Plato’s Attack on Homer as Psychic Necessity

The reading Havelock’s Preface to Plato establishes and the Lineage inherits: the banishment of the poets in Republic X is not aesthetic moralism but psychological necessity.

Sources

• eric-a-havelock: Plato “is pleading for… the invention of an abstract language of descriptive science to replace a concrete language of oral memory” (Havelock 1963). The poets stand indicted because they held the Hellenic community in the poetized-state-of-mind that the reflective soul could not inhabit.
• plato: “Our next task is a critical examination of tragedy and Homer the prototype thereof” (Republic X, cited in Havelock 1963). Homer is displaced because he carries the encyclopedic authority the Academy must now carry — episteme replaces mousikē as the instrument of paideia.
• eric-a-havelock: the psyche is simultaneously reconfigured as the seat of thinking, “an innate faculty which, like a physical eye, must be converted towards new objects” (Havelock 1963). The attack on the poets and the reconstitution of the soul are a single move.

The thread converges with phaedrus-critique-of-writing in a productive tension: Plato requires literacy for the reflective psyche, yet distrusts writing as dead speech. Havelock reads the Phaedrus as the ambivalent conscience of the Republic — the philosopher acknowledging, even as he enforces the new order, what the old order preserved.

For the depth tradition the thread is load-bearing. It names the founding trauma of the Western interior: that the reflective ego was purchased by the silencing of the mimetic choir. The Jungian recovery of the archetype and the archetypal image is, on this reading, a retrieval of what Plato’s program suppressed — not a regression but a compensation. What james-hillman calls the archetypal critique of ego-psychology stands downstream of this original expulsion.