ABSTRACT
The debt of Carl Jung to Neoplatonism has been acknowledged by scholarship: his ‘universal archetypes’ and ‘archaic patterns’ of the soul have significant counterparts in the Platonic transcendental forms and the Neoplatonic residual innate content of the psyche. According to the Neοplatonists, the soul kept this content after its fall from the One (= Neoplatonic ‘paradise’) to the sensible world. This specific katabasis resulted in oblivion of the soul’s genuine identity but also to the necessity of recollection. Stimulation of the soul’s forgotten knowledge by means of reckoning with deities has also been pointed out for Proclus by contemporary scholars, focusing, however, on theourgia and not on the means of language, given that: (a) Proclus is the first to explicitly associate language with bringing forward the soul’s divine remnants with help from linguistic phantasia and (b) his student Ammonius and the latter’s students, Simplicius and Philoponus, explicitly consider language as the only conventional tool for the psyche to be reminded of who she was. These philosophers from the School of Alexandria lay stress on the urgent and compulsory presence of human vocal sounds in contrast to the once-upon-a-time divine non-linguistic communication among the souls, emphasizing the uniqueness of linguistic expression as regards recollection. It can be said that contemporary psychology could be more profited from the Neoplatonic tradition as regards the first occurrence of the relation between language and recollection, than from the Neoplatonic theourgia; it is important that from Ammonius onwards, linguistic utterance is rendered as the only instrument by means of which the psyche can bring forward what is deeply hidden, the only way to remember its unification with the universal soul, as Carl Jung would put it, the only way to come closer to her genuine self.
