historical “psyche”

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‘Psychal’ and ‘psychalness’ also allows more-direct association with its classical Greek root, psyche, which is revealing of the Self/self Difference.

The combining form ‘psych-‘ originally meant “life, spirit, soul, self” (M-W Unabridged). All of that! life itself? life as “spirit”? essentially spirit, but life apart?

Greek psyche is “akin” to Greek psychein: to breathe, blow. I blow, but do I breathe?: Forgetting that I breathe, by attending to anything in my day, “I” continues to breathe, as if there is another I within me: spirit, like the wind of Nature breathing.

recalling intra-psychal differences

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1 | When a child personifies a toy, their enjoyment of actual interpersonal relations is mapped into relating to the toy (creating a “real” relation-
ship). Multiple toys, multiple personified relations; but the child has a dim conception of being one self having multiple personified relations.

2 | Likewise in actual interpersonal relations. Being personal is relative to relations with actual others; and multiple relationships are multiple interpersonal relations that don’t clearly cohere. To be “personal” is ordinarily to be [inter]personal variably.

psychalness again

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I posted over a year ago that “I began using ‘psychal’ in mid-March, 2011, because I wanted a correlate of my term ‘mindality’,” which is “associable with phenomenological interest.” [“psychalness,” Jan. 2019]. “…Psychal interest in mind or psyche is experiential (or phenomenological). Psychological interest in mind is methodic, structural, or conceptual...” (sweet transgression, Mar. 2011).

The middle ’o’ of ‘psychological’ is merely a conventional connector between the root ‘psyche-’ and ‘-logical’. I substitute ‘a’ for inquirial (inquiry-al) interest in psychalness: psychalogical interest.

I mentioned in November, 2011 that “...my preference for ‘psychalogical’ over ‘psychological’…is analogous to a difference between [interest in] phenomenal experience and systematically-interpreted experience” (“...developmental interest”). But that is better represented as two kinds of inquirial interest: phenomenological and empirical.

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