Psychological Activity in Homer: A Study of Phrēn

Psychological Activity in Homer: A Study of Phrēn (Shirley Darcus Sullivan, 1988) is the philological monograph that supplied the definitive modern account of phrēn — the faculty or organ of psychological activity that, in the Homeric poems, is the seat of thought, intention, feeling, and deliberation, and that stands at the center of the Homeric vocabulary for inner life alongside thumos and noos.

Sullivan’s method is comprehensive: every occurrence of phrēn and phrenes in [[iliad|Iliad]] and [[odyssey|Odyssey]] is read in its context, classified by grammatical construction and semantic register, and set against the constructions available to thumos, noos, kradiē, ētor, kēr, and psychē. The result is the reconstruction of a pre-classical psychological vocabulary that the plural self of Homer employs without contradiction and without reduction: several organs of the inner life, each with its own idiom, none yet unified under a modern concept of mind. The work is part of Sullivan’s lifelong study of the archaic vocabulary of the psyche, carried forward in Sophocles’ Use of Psychological Terminology and Psychological and Ethical Ideas. See shirley-sullivan.

Relationships

• phrenes
• homeric-plural-self
• shirley-sullivan