Early Psychological Thought: Ancient Accounts of Mind and Soul

The modern view of the mind is the result of thousands of years of thought, discussion, and experimentation. This volume examines how the foundations of this concept were laid in the ancient world, focusing on the role of ^Ipsyche^R in the thought of the most influential philosophers, poets, and physicians from archaic Greece to the fall of Rome. The authors show how the various processes we now group together under the general rubric psychology-such as thought, emotion, desire, and will-began as relatively disparate parts of the Greek conceptual scheme, only converging gradually over the course of centuries into what we now call mind. By reconstructing what the ancient Greeks and Romans understood by terms such as ^Ipsyche^R, ^Iphrenes^R, and ^Inous^R, this survey of the early development of psychological thought highlights the legacies of their accounts, which can still be found embedded in modern psychological assumptions.