Snell and the Prehistory of the Complex

The Jungian theory of the complex holds that the psyche is constitutively plural — that what we call the I is one voice in a federation of partial personalities, each capable of autonomous expression in dream, slip, possession, and affect. The thread this recon traces is that bruno-snell‘s philological reading of Homer supplies the historical evidence for this claim. The Homeric self is not a complex psyche disguised under poetic convention; it is a complex psyche described as it was experienced. The autonomous thumos that “casts strength” into Glaucus when he prays (Snell 1953, p. 20), the psyche that departs through the mouth at death, the menos that takes the warrior and the lion alike — these are not literary devices laid over a hidden ego. They are the everyday phenomenology of a culture that had not yet consolidated its many psychic agents under a single nominative.

What Jung claimed of the modern psyche under analysis — that its apparent unity is provisional, and that beneath it the autonomous factors continue their independent lives — Snell shows to have been the default condition of early Greek experience. The “discovery of the mind” Snell traces from Homer through Heraclitus is, read from the depth tradition’s vantage, the concealment of an older psychological truth. Modernity inherited the unified ego; depth psychology recovered, behind it, the federation Homer had simply seen.

Sources

• bruno-snell: the Homeric self is a federation of organs, not a unity (Snell 1953, p. 14-15)
• carl-jung: the psyche is a plurality of complexes, the ego one among many (analytic claim)
• james-hillman: polytheistic psychology recovers the many-souled Greek inheritance (extra-library, flagged)