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In and Out of the Mind: Greek Images of the Tragic Self
In and Out of the Mind
Padel’s major scholarly study of the tragic interior. The governing claim: Greek tragedy represents what happens inside human beings in a double register — biological and daemonic — in which the two cannot be separated. The tragic self has splanchna, not a head. Its interior is dark, hollow, flowing, continuous with the underworld and with the female body; its passions arrive from outside as personified daimons; its prophetic knowledge issues from the same darkness that madness inhabits.
Structurally, the book proceeds inward and outward. Early chapters recover the vocabulary of the innards — splanchna, phrenes, kardia, hepar — and the practice of extispicy, divination by animal entrails, as the same set of signs read twice. Middle chapters develop the flux-of-feeling: the liquid, purpling, darkening waves of emotion that rise in the splanchna as storms rise in the sea, because the outer kosmos and the inner body share one fabric. Later chapters turn to the daemonology proper: ate, lyssa, the erinyes, and the general Greek principle that “what we think of as our ‘own’ emotions: these are the gods’ best weapon against us.” A final movement returns to the body as the site where all three registers — physiological, daemonic, gendered-cosmological — meet.
The work is load-bearing for Seba because it furnishes the philological ground beneath the Jungian claim that the psyche is peopled, embodied, and continuous with the world.