Crito

Name: Crito
Author: Plato

Crito is a work by Plato (-360).

Core claims

The Crito is not a treatise on civic obedience but a dramatization of the ego’s final confrontation with the Self’s demand—Socrates’ refusal to escape is the culminating act of an individuation process in which the daimonion’s prohibition against external action has been fully internalized as ethical structure.
The dream of the white woman quoting Homer—“the third day hence to cloddy Phthia shalt thou come”—is not a literary ornament but, as von Franz demonstrated, the eruption of an anima figure whose nobility reveals that Socrates’ lifelong erotic displacement onto male youths concealed a highly differentiated, transpersonal feminine that could only appear at the threshold of death.
Crito’s arguments for escape represent not reasoned pragmatism but the voice of collective opinion (doxa) itself—the very shadow of the Socratic project—so that Socrates’ refusal is simultaneously a philosophical act and a psychological one: the final differentiation of the individual from the projections of the group.

How does von Franz’s interpretation of the white woman dream in the Crito as an anima-psychopomp compare with Hillman’s account of the anima’s demand for “space” and “movement” in Healing Fiction—do they describe the same figure or two fundamentally different operations of soul?
Peterson argues in his work on Homeric thumos that Plato’s restructuring of the soul demoted feeling from a sovereign faculty to a servant of reason. Does Socrates’ behavior in the Crito—calm endurance in the face of death—represent the last expression of Homeric tlaō or the first triumph of Platonic apatheia?
Edinger reads Plato’s cave allegory as an image of psychological projection. If we apply that reading to the Crito, in what sense is Crito himself a prisoner of the cave, and how does Socrates’ prosopopoeia of the Laws function as an attempt to turn him toward the light?