In and Out of the Mind: Greek Images of the Tragic Self

by Ruth Padel

Ruth Padel explores Greek conceptions of human innerness and the way in which Greek tragedy shaped European notions of mind and self. Arguing that Greek poetic language connects images of consciousness, even male consciousness, with the darkness attributed to Hades and to women, Padel analyzes tragedy's biological and daemonological metaphors for what is within.

Genres: Tragedy, History, Nonfiction

232 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1992

About the author

Ruth is an English poet and writer. She has published poetry collections, novels, and books of non-fiction, including several on reading poetry. She has presented Radio 4′s Poetry Workshop, visiting poetry groups across the UK to discuss their poems.

Her awards include First Prize in the UK National Poetry Competition, a Cholmondeley Award from The Society of Authors, an Arts Council of England Writers’ Award and a British Council Darwin Now Research Award for her novel Where the Serpent Lives.

Ruth lives in London and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, a Member of the Bombay Natural History Society, an Ambassador for New Networks for Nature, a Patron of 21st-Century Tiger and a Council Member of the Zoological Society of London.

Reviews

[Evie · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have no idea why I bought this book really, except maybe for its obvious link to psychology. OK, now I remember, I'm continuing research on the soul. Duh.

I didn't read every chapter, but rather skimmed the book until something caught my eye. Now I have a bunch little yellow sticky tags to mark interesting passages about Hermes, and, in general, about how the Greek notion of "psychology" or trying to figure out what was going on with the person was related to what was going on with the body. You can get to know someone, for example, by getting to know their "splanchna" (innards). Feeling sorry for someone, splachna softens; if you're angry, they become hot. Interesting tidbits of information, not particularly useful for paying the bills and definitely not summer reading, but a great for those into the classics and psychology. Well-written, relatively easy to read for a scholarly book, and well-explained terminology.

[Jess · Rating 4 out of 5]

Four stars for great scholarship and affable readability. Padel states her aim clearly--to use tragedy to 'explore some aspects of what the Athenians who wrote and watched them thought was inside and outside human beings. What came in from outside? What came out from within?' Her approach is language-driven: philological nuance drives the theoretical take-aways. Classics isn't really my thing so I'm in no position to judge, but it feels very responsible.

Notable passages: 

'It has traditionally been part of a philologist's job to prise apart a word's "shades" of meaning in a particular passage. It is against philology's grain to say that a Greek word has simultaneously an abstract or metaphorical as well as a literal and concrete sense. But the shades of meaning we find will always be directed by the relationship between Greek and the language or languages in which we ourselves think, and it may be that our own languages are not the best ones through which to approach these words and the picture of consciousness they enshrine.'       

'Wings, teeth, claws, running and kicking feet, goads, ropes, stings, poison, arrows: animals and daimones together created a spectrum of assault. All the ingredients of science fiction start here: insects, carnivorous grotesque pursuit, invisible enemies and masters, cosmic rays. Western technological imagination has added a bit to this arsenal, but mainly it glosses and rearranges these essentially Greek ingredients. ... But our continuing use of these shapes can get in the way of our seeing them in a Greek context, with specific Greek (rather than universal) significances ... we see more freshly if we try to separate our particular categories and preconceptions from the Greek material. For example, our assumption that emotion, sleep, misfortune, and gods are different sorts of thing is challenged by patterns of tragic language, which imply that all these act on the self in the same way.'

'But structuralism's early model for Greek approaches to the nonhuman was implicitly, and I think anachronistically as far as the fifth century is concerned, taxonomic. Taxonomy is dear, in the fourth century, to Aristotle's heart. But even he had to abandon it at some points. ... We should beware, I think, of superimposing later, taxonomic, worked-out models of relationships on fifth-century mentality, with its essentially unworked-out, disunited, kaleidoscopic vision of the nonhuman.'

'Fifth-century listeners did not have our option of saying that something is metaphorical, "therefore not real." Personification, as the fifth century inherited and used it, was not an isolatable trick of language, but part of explaining what happened to and inside people. Lived reality was air filled with nonhuman forces. There were good reasons to think of these as the main source of human feeling and experience: a style of thought that continued into Augustine's vision of demons and beyond.'

'Animate, chthonic, dangerous female multiplicity is the background for destructive tragic passion, and underlines by gender tragedy's general implication that the forces disturbing the tragic self, the male self, are not self, that human passion is nonhuman.'

[Taylor Swift Scholar · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5. This is very clearly written and quite convincing. Padel uses the language and cultural position of tragedy in Greece to explore how Greeks conceived of themselves. Essentially, she argues that the physical imagery of the emotions are not modern metaphors, but a reflection of the contemporary understanding of what's going on inside the body. Organs such as the liver are physically bitten, torn, engulfed, flooded, etc. by various emotions. The emotions enter the body through pores, including eyes and ears and they can come from demons, gods, other humans, etc. Padel makes her case using not only the language of the tragedies themselves, but the Hippocratic texts as well.

[Andrew · Rating 4 out of 5]

Masterly... a personal paradigm-shifter about 5th century Athenian consciousness as undifferentiated from tragedy, ideas of the body, daemonic and animal presence, elemental forces, and the emotions.