Borderlands of psyche and logos in Heraclitus: A psychoanalytic reading

Heraclitus is the first philosopher to focus on the psyche, but he also raises language to a cosmological principle, thereby giving his enigmatic statements a unique status. They are not intended to describe cosmos as much as to evoke it, making his cosmology a psychology. The true subject of his work is the psychological process it initiates. Attempts by commentators to attribute a doctrine to Heraclitus or to impose an order upon his fragments have therefore always misrepresented him, since his "method" is to frustrate any method that would project itself upon him. Attempts to resolve the apparent contradictions of the fragments miss the point of his technique, which is to reflect the psyche back onto itself in order to discover the repressed contradictions there. This is why Heraclitus has a strange affinity with psychoanalysis, because both attempt to reveal invisible or hidden structures of the psyche. His logic is associative and mythological, as his poetic medium suggests, and his logos must be understood in this context: as a language of the soul. Heraclitus' prevalent theme of the conflict of opposites and the dynamic tension they produce also appears very conspicuously in the theoretical constructs of psychoanalytic theory. Psychoanalysis is the modern analogue of mythology insofar as both reveal the structures of the psyche using symbol, image, and metaphor. This dissertation consists of five sections; the first is an introduction to Heraclitus' method. The second is a study of Heraclitus' controversial use of logos and an examination of his use of language in this context. The following section is a study of Parmenides' poem and the historical development of eidolon, as it is advanced by Plato, particularly in the Sophist. The fourth section examines the archaic uses of psyche alongside Heraclitus' fragments, with special attention to the conflict of opposites and cosmology. The last section explores the theme of "psychical blindness", the peculiar oblivious state of human beings that is so ubiquitous in Heraclitus' fragments.