Homeric psychology

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Homeric psychology is a field of study with regards to the psychology of

Illiad and the Odyssey).[1]

History of Homeric psychology

The first scholar to present a theory was Bruno Snell in his 1953 book, originally in German.[2] His argument was that the ancient Greek individual did not have a sense of self, and that later the Greek culture "self-realized" or "discovered" what we consider to be the modern "intellect".[3]

Eric Robertson Dodds in 1951 wrote how ancient Greek thought may have been irrational, as compared to modern "rational" culture.[4] In this Dodds' theory, the Greeks may have known that an individual did things, but the reason an individual did things were attributed to divine externalities, such as gods or daemons.[5]

Julian Jaynes, in 1976, stipulated that Greek consciousness emerged from the use of special words related to cognition. Some of Jaynes' findings were empirically supported in a 2021 study by Boban Dedović, a psychohistorian. The study compared the word counts of mental language between thirty-four versions of the Iliad and Odyssey.[6]

References

  1. ^ Russo, J., & Simon, B. (1968). Homeric Psychology and the Oral Epic Tradition. Journal of the History of Ideas, 29, 483.
  2. ^ Snell, B. (1982). Die Entdeckung des Geistes The discovery of the mind: The Greek origins of European thought, on archive.org); (T.G. Rosenmeyer, Trans.). Harper. (Original work published 1953)
  3. ^ Snell, B. (1982). Die Entdeckung des Geistes The discovery of the mind: The Greek origins of European thought, on archive.org); (T.G. Rosenmeyer, Trans.). Harper. (Original work published 1953), p. vii
  4. ^ Dodds, E. R. (1951). The Greeks and the irrational (Vol. 25). University of California Press.
  5. ^ Dodds, E. R. (1951). The Greeks and the irrational (Vol. 25). Univ of California Press., pp. 11+
  6. ^ Dedović, Boban (2021). 'Minds' in 'Homer': A quantitative psycholinguistic comparison of the Iliad and Odyssey (Seminar thesis, University of Maryland, College Park, MD), pp. 31–42.