Ancient templates: the classical origins of psychoanalysis.

Abstract

In dreams The beastly and savage part (of the mind) ... endeavors to sally forth and satisfy its own natural instincts ... there is nothing it will not venture to undertake as being released from all sense of shame and all reason. It does not shrink from attempting to have intercourse with one's mother, or with any man, god, or animal. It is ready for any foul deed of blood... and falls short of no extreme of mindlessness and shamelessness ... there is in every one of us, even those who seem to be most moderate, a type of desires that is terrible, wild and lawless. While one might confidently assume that the preceding passage was written by Freud, it is startling to discover that it was composed by Plato two and a half millennia ago and appears in his masterpiece The Republic (1). Freud paid Plato appropriate homage by calling him divine, but interestingly asserted that his knowledge of Plato was fragmentary. Bergmann,1 however, has demonstrated that Gomperz's Greek Thinkers, with its extensive sections of Socrates and Plato, was cited by Freud as one of his favorite books. Further, Freud translated into German, John Stuart Mill's 1866, 67-page article on Plato. Freud, like many original thinkers, is not alone in denying intellectual ancestors and as a final convincing piece of evidence of the link between Plato and Freud, Bergmann juxtaposes a quotation from Plato with one from Freud. In Phaedrus (2) Plato states: I divided each soul into three-two horses and a charioteer; and one of the horses was good and the other bad: ... the right-hand horse is upright and cleanly made; he has a lofty neck and an aquiline nose; his color is white; his eyes dark; he is a lover of honor and modesty and temperance; and the follower of true glory; he needs no touch of the whip, but is guided by words and admonition only. The other is a crooked lumbering animal.... he has a short thick neck; he is flat-faced and of dark color; with gray eyes and bloodred complexion; the mate of insolence and pride, shaggered and deaf, hardly yielding to whip and spur. Now when the charioteer beholds the vision of love, and has his whole soul warmed through sense, and is full of the pricking and tickling of desire, the obedient steed, then as always under the government of shame, refrains from leaping on the beloved; but the other, heedless of the pricks and blows of the whip plunges and runs away, giving all manner of trouble to his companion and the charioteer. (pp. 253-254) In The Ego and the Id (3), Freud wrote: In its relation to the id it is like a man on horseback, who has to hold in check the superior strength of the horse: with the difference that the rider tries to do so with his own strength while the ego uses borrowed forces. The analogy may be carried a little further. Often a rider if he is not to be parted from his horse, is obliged to guide it where it wants to go; so the same way the ego is in the habit of transforming the id's will into action as if it were its own. The ego represents what may be called reason and common sense, in contrast to the id, which contains passions. All this falls in line with the popular distinction which we are all familiar with .... (p. 25) Bergmann suggests that Freud's term, popular distinction, can be used as a denial of the Platonic origins of this metaphor. Notwithstanding Freud's abjuration of any debt to Plato, it is clear that this ancient Greek philosopher anticipated the creator of modern psychodynamic theory when he articulated in The Republic a conflict model of the psyche in which instinctual drives represent a constant threat to rational behavior. Some years ago, Simon (4) demonstrated the presence of three main models of mind in ancient Greece, elements of which remain with us in contemporary psychotherapeutic and psychiatric practice. The first of these conceptual models Simon labeled the poetic (mainly Homeric). In the Homeric model there is no clear idea of mental structure, and, as in many preliterate societies, mental illness is viewed as something sent by wrathful gods from outside the individual. …