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

ancient Greek culture Ancient Greece ( el, Ἑλλάς, Hellás) was a northeastern Mediterranean civilization, existing from the Greek Dark Ages of the 12th–9th centuries BC to the end of classical antiquity ( AD 600), that comprised a loose collection of cul ...

no later than

Mycenaean Greece Mycenaean Greece (or the Mycenaean civilization) was the last phase of the Bronze Age The Bronze Age is a historic period, lasting approximately from 3300 BC to 1200 BC, characterized by the use of bronze, the presence of writing in ...

, around 1700–1200 BCE, during the Homeric epic poems (specifically the ''

Illiad The ''Iliad'' (; grc, Ἰλιάς, Iliás, ; "a poem about Ilium") is one of two major ancient Greek epic poems attributed to Homer. It is one of the oldest extant works of literature still widely read by modern audiences. As with the ''Odysse ...

'' and the ''

Odyssey The ''Odyssey'' (; grc, Ὀδύσσεια, Odýsseia, ) is one of two major Ancient Greek literature, ancient Greek Epic poetry, epic poems attributed to Homer. It is one of the oldest extant works of literature still widely read by moder ...

'').

History of Homeric psychology

The first scholar to present a theory was Bruno Snell in his 1953 book, originally in German. 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". Later, Eric Robertson Dodds in 1951, wrote how ancient Greek thought may have been irrational, as compared to modern "rational" culture. 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.

Julian Jaynes Julian Jaynes (February 27, 1920 – November 21, 1997) was an American researcher in psychology at Yale and Princeton for nearly 25 years and best known for his 1976 book '' The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind' ...

proposed a theory in 1976. He 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''.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.
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References

{{reflist Consciousness studies Philosophy of mind Philology Cognitive psychology Historical linguistics Arguments in philosophy of mind Homeric scholarship