On the Soul (De Anima)

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

Core claims

• De Anima is not a treatise about what the soul is but a systematic demonstration that psyche cannot be separated from the living body it organizes — making it the founding document of the very literalism that depth psychology would spend two millennia trying to overcome.
• Aristotle’s concept of entelechy — the soul as the body’s first actuality — inadvertently created the philosophical precondition for treating psyche as epiphenomenon, the “steam off the spaghetti” that Jung warned against, precisely by binding soul so tightly to organic function.
• The work’s greatest provocation for depth psychology is its treatment of nous (intellect) as potentially separable from the embodied soul, a crack in Aristotle’s own hylomorphism that anticipates every subsequent debate about whether psyche possesses a transpersonal dimension irreducible to biology.

Related questions

• How does Edinger’s characterization of Aristotle as “the triumph of the ego” in The New God-Image relate to Hillman’s critique of “Aristotelian orthodoxies” in Re-Visioning Psychology, and do they agree on what was lost when rational classification replaced imaginal participation?
• In what ways does Aristotle’s unresolvable problem of active nous in De Anima prefigure Jung’s distinction between ego and Self, and how does Gregory of Nyssa’s On the Soul and the Resurrection mediate between these positions?
• Hillman credits Ficino with restoring psyche as “the subject who studies” after centuries of Aristotelian objectification — how does Neumann’s account of the hero’s winning of the anima in The Origins and History of Consciousness offer a mythological parallel to this philosophical recovery?

See also

• Library page: /library/ancient-roots/aristotle-soul-de-anima/

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