Seba.Health
Work · Seba Knowledge Graph
The Early Greek Concept of the Soul
The Early Greek Concept of the Soul
Bremmer’s 1983 monograph applies Ernst Arbman’s comparative framework for soul-belief — the distinction between a free soul active outside the body in dream and ecstasy, and body souls operative only in the living body — to the archaic Greek evidence. The method is conservative in its lexicography (“the meaning of a word can only be derived from its use in the language”) and bold in its framing: early Greek soul-belief is dualistic, and the Homeric psychē sits squarely on the free soul side of Arbman’s divide, even if the dream-activity the classification would predict is visible only in post-Homeric material.
The book’s contribution to the depth-psychology lineage is twofold. First, it supplies the anthropological architecture that Rohde’s Psyche (1894) gestured toward but did not theorize, situating Greek evidence within a global typology of soul-belief. Second, it cautions against the literary artifact of Homeric dream-description: Homer’s “objective” dreams — the figure standing above the sleeper’s head, delivering speech, vanishing — are a narrative convention, not a documentary record of archaic dream-experience. What the archaic Greek actually dreamed is partly hidden behind the convention, and the convention itself is already doing interpretive work on figural visitations of the kind Jung would later name archaic remnants.
The book sits alongside Dodds, Snell, and Onians as a primary source for the philological reconstruction of the pre-philosophical Greek psyche.