The Psyche in Antiquity

The Psyche in Antiquity is Edinger‘s late return to the classical root. Published posthumously in 1999 by Inner City Books, edited by Deborah A. Wesley and dedicated to Marie-Louise von Franz as honorary patron, the first volume reads the pre-Socratics through Plotinus as the headwaters of depth psychology.

The work takes Thales, Heraclitus, Pythagoras, Empedocles, Parmenides, and the Neoplatonic succession not as philosophical curiosities antecedent to psychology but as figures in whose vocabulary the psyche first articulated itself. The Greek terms — ψυχή, λόγος, νοῦς — are received as the native categories of individuation rather than as later scholarly glosses.

The book is the natural joint at which Edinger’s corpus meets Domain 7 of the tradition. It is where the Jungian analyst becomes a reader of classical philology — not as a specialist but as a son of Jung who understood that “the whole fabulous nature of primordial being” (Jung, cited in Edinger 1999) cannot be read out of Jung without being read back into the Greeks.

The volume’s position in the Edinger corpus is valedictory. Edinger died in 1998; Wesley completed the editing. Daryl Sharp’s publisher’s tribute in the volume names Edinger as “a true spiritual son of Jung” (Edinger 1999) and places the book in the line of classic Jungian commentary.

Concepts introduced or developed

Cited by

Jungian classical scholarship generally