This paper considers the question whether the human person is more correctly identified with the body, the mind, the soul (or spirit), the self, or some combination thereof. The conclusion that will be arrived at is that the person is best identified with a combination of all four, on the grounds that none of these concepts are independent: without all four of these, a human person cannot exist.
The apparent difficulties faced in dealing with such issues arise largely from the fact that our ordinary language derives from the vocabulary and concepts of ancient civilizations; so along with those words it drags the assumptions those people made about life as they experienced it. These assumptions all tended to be concerned with issues of religion and philosophy, rather than what we would consider scientific psychology. To consider the origins of this vocabulary, it is necessary to delve into these religious and theological matters.
The earliest writings of the Greeks--Homer, Hesiod, the pre-Socratic philosophers--assume that human beings consist of soma, psyche, and pneuma, the recognizable roots of such modern words as psychosomatic and pneumatic. As in the word "psychology," the Greek psyche meant something much more like "mind" or "personality." In order to have something like what we now mean by "soul," we must think of a compound of "mind" plus "spirit," of psyche-plus-pneuma. In the Greek view, when the body died, the psyche-plus-pneuma went to the underworld, to stand before the throne of Persephone, to be sentenced to reward in the Elysian Fields, or to punishment in Tartarus, before being reborn. This Greek belief is a major source of the common Christian concept that each person is judged and sentenced immediately after dying, when in fact the Christian scriptures seem to indicate only a general judgment in the ôlast daysö.
The question the ancients were trying to answer, one may suppose, is ôWhat is the differen...