Early History in psychology 2. Plato

Plato was an ancient Greek philosopher born in 427 BCE and died in 347 BCE. He was a student of Socrates and the teacher of Aristotle. He founded the first university in Athens, called the Academy. Plato made great contributions to philosophy and laid the foundations for psychology through his profound ideas and theories.

Plato suggested that knowledge is innate and inborn; it resides within the mind of a person. This means that people already possess knowledge about everything—they do not acquire it through experience but are born with an understanding of the world around them. This concept is known as innate ideas, which are present in our minds from birth. These are things we simply know, not things we have learned through external experience.

According to Plato, we can access this knowledge by looking inward, through a process called introspection. Introspection involves inward reflection or observation, while discouraging reliance on external observation.

Plato was primarily a philosopher, and to understand his psychology one must study his philosophy, which provides the necessary background. Some questions of prime importance to him included: What is virtue? How is it acquired? Is it knowledge and, therefore, teachable? Or is it acquired by divine dispensation without deliberate thought?

Fundamental to Plato’s beliefs were faith in God, the immortality of the soul, and the natural aspiration of humanity toward God—all ideas consonant with later Christian beliefs. However, some of the corollaries of his theory diverged from later Christian thought. For example, his belief in reincarnation was literal, including the possibility of transmigration into lower forms of life.

Similarly, his theory of knowledge, called recollection, postulated that the soul acquires knowledge during each of its earthly incarnations and its otherworldly wanderings. This knowledge remains latent and only waits to be recalled. Plato demonstrated this with the famous experiment involving Meno’s slave, who initially showed no knowledge of a mathematical problem but eventually solved it seemingly on his own. In reality, Socrates helped the slave through questioning, a process Plato termed “mental midwifery,” assisting the birth of latent ideas.

Implicit in Plato’s theories was a belief in the duality of mind and body. Closer to psychology, his allegory of the cave depicted mortals as prisoners chained inside a cave, only able to look in one direction. They observed what appeared to be life and the world but were in fact only seeing shadows cast by the sun on the cave wall.

If a prisoner were released, he could see the objects casting the shadows directly and, ultimately, the source of illumination itself—the Sun. The Sun was equated with absolute good, or God, and was the source of all things, perceived more by its quality and intensity than by its form.

Plato also acknowledged the existence of the unconscious and repression. The role of unconscious thought processes in dreams was described in his work The Republic, where he wrote:

“...all this time the old beliefs he had as a boy about right and wrong and justice will be held in subjection by those newly released from slavery, who form love’s bodyguard and rule with him once they are let loose in sleep, when he dreamed while still under laws and a father and had a democratic government in his soul.”

Plato’s clearest psychological statement is found in his theory of the tripartite soul, developed from the idea of three lifestyles attributed to Pythagoras: (1) the philosopher, whose goal is wisdom; (2) the man of action, whose goal is distinction; and (3) the votary of enjoyment, whose goal is the gratification of appetite.

These correspond roughly to what modern psychology describes as cerebronic, somatotonic, and viscerotonic personality types. Plato developed this further into three active principles of the soul:

1. The rational element, responsible for judgment of good.

2. The appetitive element, encompassing numerous desires that may conflict with one another.

3. The spirited element, representing higher ideal emotions such as resentment against wrongs done by others, which supports the rational part when in conflict with the appetitive part.

The modern psychological equivalents are the ego, id, and superego, respectively, although Plato’s view had important distinctions. While the rational element interprets reality, there is no demonstrable executive function accorded to the appetitive element comparable to Freud’s theory. The spirited element shares many attributes with the superego but also exercises executive function and represents emotion.

When each element of the soul functions at its best, Plato believed the rational produces wisdom, the appetitive produces temperance, and the spirited produces courage. A harmonious balance of these three results in justice.

In the state, these elements corresponded respectively to the statesmen or guardians (rational), the general population (appetitive), and the military or excellence division (spirited).

For Plato, man was basically good, being a rational creature whose natural drive was toward virtue through the acquisition of knowledge. Man becomes degenerate through ignorance of his true goals or through imbalance among the three soul elements. Plato clearly described conflict and ambivalence within the soul, though these were conscious phenomena; he did not develop theories of conscious versus unconscious processes.

Regarding personality development and learning, Plato emphasized both heredity and education. Heredity called for sweeping changes in traditional family structures, such as separating newborn infants from their parents, while education adhered closely to established patterns, especially in mathematics and dialectic.

On psychopathology, Plato was less clear. He identified four etiological types of madness:

1. Divine origin (gift of prophecy)

2. Human inheritance (suffering and penance)

3. Free possession by the muses

4. Madness of love

While the second was clearly pathological, the other three were viewed as superhuman states, indicating that madness was held in high regard.

Though scant mention was made of neuroses and personality disorders, several descriptions can be interpreted in modern terms—for example, a stingy, hardworking individual satisfying only necessary desires, reminiscent of a paranoid personality.

Although Plato was not considered an expert in physiology or anatomy, he located the soul’s components in the body in ways still present in our language today—such as “using one’s head,” “affairs of the heart,” and “whose god is their belly.”

Plato famously stated:

“There will be no end to the troubles of states, or indeed of humanity itself, until philosophers become kings in this world, or until those we now call kings and rulers truly become philosophers.”

Plato’s psychology is nativistic but leaves ample room for developmental influences. He explicitly endorsed a multi-stage theory of cognitive development. In Laws, for example, the Athenian stranger asserts that virtue and vice are known to the young only as pleasure and pain. Since children instinctively love pleasure and hate pain, the principal task of the educator is to ensure that true virtue becomes the object of their love.