Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [15]
The body fills us full of loves and lusts and fears and fancies of all kinds…We are slaves to [the body’s] service. If we would have true knowledge of anything we must be quit of the body—the soul in herself must behold things in themselves; then we shall attain the wisdom we desire, be pure and have converse with the pure… And what is purification but the separation of the soul from the body?12
Soul, for Plato, is thus not only an incorporeal and immortal entity, as many Greeks had long believed: it is also mind. But he never explained how thinking can take place in an incorporeal essence. Since thinking requires effort and thus uses energy, whence would the energy come to enable the soul to think? Plato says that motion is the essence of the soul and that psychological activities are related to its inner motions, but he is silent about the source of the energy for such motion.
Yet he was a sensible man with wide experience of the world, and some of his psychological conjectures about the soul are down-to-earth and sound almost contemporary. In some of the middle and later dialogues—notably the Republic, the Phaedrus, and the Timaeus— he says that when the soul inhabits a body, it operates on three levels: thought or reason, spirit or will, and appetite or desire. Though he castigated the lusts of the body in the Phaedo, now he says that it is as bad for reason wholly to suppress appetite or spirit as for either of those to overpower reason; the Good is achieved when all three aspects of the soul function in harmony. Here too he resorts to metaphor to make his meaning clear: He likens the soul, in the Phaedrus, to a team of two steeds, one lively but obedient (spirit), the other violent and unruly (appetite), the two yoked together and driven by a charioteer (reason) who, with considerable effort, makes them cooperate and pull together. Plato came to this conclusion without conducting clinical studies or psychoanalyzing anyone, yet to a surprising extent it anticipates Freud’s analysis of character as composed of superego, ego, and id.
Plato also said, without any empirical evidence to go on, that the reason is located in the brain, the spirit in the chest, and the appetites in the abdomen; that they are linked by the marrow of the spine and brain; and that emotions are carried around the body by the blood vessels. These guesses are in part ludicrous, in part prescient of later discoveries. Considering that he was no anatomist, one can only wonder how he arrived at these judgments.
In the Republic Plato describes in remarkably modern terms what happens when appetite is ungoverned:
When the reasoning and taming and ruling power of the personality is asleep, the wild beast within us, gorged with meat and drink, starts up and having shaken off sleep goes forth to satisfy his desires; and there is no conceivable folly or crime—not excepting incest or parricide, or the eating of forbidden food—which at such a time, when he has parted company with all shame and sense, a man may not be ready to commit.13
And he portrays in almost contemporary terms the condition we call ambivalence, which for him is a conflict between spirit and appetite that reason fails to control. In the Republic Socrates offers this example:
I was once told a story, which I can quite believe, to the effect that Leontius, the son of Aglaion, as he was walking up from the Piraeus and approaching the northern wall from the outside, observed some dead bodies on the ground and the executioner standing by them. He immediately felt a desire to look at them, but at the same time loathing the thought he tried to divert himself from it. For