ABSTRACT
Psychology is usually conceived as the study of what happens “inside” people, of their feelings, emotions, impulses, desires, fantasies, ideas, reactions. But psychology can also be conceived quite differently. Rather than placing the soul on the one side of this opposition vis-à-vis the other side, it could view “the soul” as what animates in depth the particular form that the entire relation of man and world takes in each major historical situation. The practical benefits for individuals that the incredible progress of, e.g., modern medicine bring and the idea that the very point of technology is to benefit us is only the bait, as it was, necessary to harness our energies for the project of technological progress and to spur our enthusiasm and inventiveness. During that age, man also did not live in positive, naked reality, in nature, in his body—as the psychological century used to imagine—, but cocooned in a kind of “web,” namely in myth.
