Hi, thanks for tuning in to ancient Greece, Declassified.

Episode R4.5, Anatomy of the Soul.

The 2015 Pixar animated film Inside Out tells the story of a little girl named Riley, whose parents suddenly decide to uproot the family and move far away because of their work.

Feeling isolated and deprived of her friends in familiar habitat, Riley struggles to adjust to her new environment.

But the real action of the movie doesn't unfold in her new neighborhood or school, it takes place inside her head,

in which five personified emotions sit around a sort of command center and collectively steer Riley's decisions in life.

Joy tries to be in the driver's seat, while fear, anger, disgust, and sadness also exert their influence,

sometimes even overpowering Joy and calling the shots without her.

In other words, Riley's inner self is depicted as a composite of five entities that are constantly

negotiating, cooperating, or even struggling with each other.

While this particular depiction of the inner self as a complex battleground, as it were,

is obviously fictional and comical, it resonates with us in part because we are used to thinking of the self as a composite thing,

like a computer with many separate tabs and programs running simultaneously.

Just open any book on psychoanalysis or neuroscience today,

and you'll read about the various parallel processes that are going on in our minds

and that influence, often subconscious subconsciously our thoughts and decisions.

But as mentioned briefly in the last episode, this way of thinking, which is all around us today,

was not the standard view throughout history and across cultures.

Of course, the feeling of inner conflict between opposing emotions or inclinations is probably something

that all humans throughout history have experienced.

But the question is, how do you explain that phenomenon?

Plato's hypothesis was that the soul is actually composed of three separate parts, the

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