De Anima (On the Soul)

Name: De Anima (On the Soul)
Author: Aristotle

De Anima (On the Soul) is a work by Aristotle (-350).

Core claims

De Anima does not discover the soul; it discovers that the question “What is soul?” cannot be separated from the question “What is a living body?”—collapsing the very dualism it inherits from Plato and inaugurating a framework that both depth psychology and neuroscience still struggle to surpass.
Aristotle’s hierarchy of soul-capacities (nutritive, sensitive, imaginative, locomotive, intellective) is not a taxonomy but a nested series in which each higher function presupposes and contains the lower, establishing the first genuine developmental logic of psyche—a structure Jung’s concept of psychic layering and Hillman’s archetypal stratification both silently depend on.
The single unresolved fracture in De Anima—whether nous (mind/intellect) can exist apart from the body when every other psychic capacity cannot—becomes the generative wound from which the entire subsequent Western debate about the soul’s immortality, interiority, and autonomy proceeds, including the depth-psychological insistence on a transpersonal dimension of psyche.

How does Hillman’s explicit rejection of “Aristotelian psychology” in Re-Visioning Psychology misread the actual De Anima, particularly Aristotle’s treatment of phantasia and appetite as irreducible to rational thought?
Edinger claims that Aristotle represents “the triumph of the ego” and the splitting of consciousness from its archetypal background—but does Aristotle’s hylomorphic definition of soul not accomplish the opposite, binding psyche to soma in ways that resist precisely the ego-inflation Edinger diagnoses?
How does Aristotle’s unresolved problem of nous—the mind that may be separable from the body “in the sense in which the sailor is the actuality of the ship”—prefigure Jung’s concept of the psychoid archetype as described in On the Nature of the Psyche?