Socrates: First Psychotherapist

And this, he said, is the reason why the cure of many diseases is unknown to the physicians of Hellas, because they disregard the whole, which ought to be studied also, for the part can never be well unless the whole is well…. And therefore if the head and body are to be well, you must begin by curing the soul-that is the first and essential thing. And the cure of the soul, my dear youth, has to be effected by the use of certain charms, and these charms are fair words, and by them temperance is implanted in the soul For this is the great error of our day in the treatment of human beings, that men try to be physicians of health and temperance separately.¹

For the Greeks themselves, Socrates formed a turning point in the history of philosophy. “He turned men's eyes from the speculations about the nature of the physical world which had been characteristic of the Presocratic period, and concentrated attention on the problems of human life,”² to understand what it meant to be a human being and for what purpose one was in the world. He alone brought philosophy into human life, in order to discover what was the right way to live. In Plato's Gorgias¹ Socrates asks, “What ought the character of a man to be, and what his pursuits, and how far is he to go, both in maturer years and in youth?”

The great historical difficulty in distinguishing between Socrates and Plato has obscured the fact that they really were quite unlike and played entirely different roles in the intellectual history of mankind. We actually have four main sources² of knowledge about Socrates (469-399 B.C.). The first of these is Xenophon, a contemporary of Plato, who is rather pedestrian and unimaginative in his reports. Second, we have a brutal and completely wrong-headed caricature of Socrates at about age 47 (423 B.C.) in Aristophanes' Clouds, which is still useful because it does lend some historical