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his successors. The title of one of Galen’s tracts sounds promising
—The Diagnosis and Cure of the Soul’s Passions—
but it contains only warmed-over Stoic and Platonic notions about the control of emotions through reason. Elsewhere, however, he developed in some detail a classification of emotions that Plato briefly suggested in the
Republic
, namely, that they are either of the “irascible” kind, having to do with anger or frustration, or the “concupiscible” kind, arising from the desire for various pleasures and the satisfaction of bodily needs. 15 Virtually all modern psychologists who have classified the emotions have made a similar distinction.
    Galen’s major effect on psychology, mentioned earlier, was his theory of personality based on Hippocrates’ theory of the four humors. It was a negative contribution, since for many centuries it misled physicians and others as to the causes of personality patterns and psychological disorders. He did, however, recognize and correctly describe one kind of physical symptom produced by the emotions. He noticed one day that a female patient’s pulse speeded up when someone happened to mention the name of a male dancer. Galen arranged to have someone enter the room during her next visit and talk about the performance of a different male dancer, and to repeat the experiment on another day with another dancer’s name. In neither case did the patient’s pulse accelerate. On the fourth day someone mentioned the first dancer’s name again, her pulse became rapid, and Galen confidently diagnosed her ailment as love sickness, adding that doctors seem not to realize how bodily health can be affected by the suffering of the psyche. 16 Unfortunately, he went no further with the thought, which was not pursued until the advent of psychosomatic medicine in our own century.
Plotinus
    The Egyptian Plotinus (205–270) made a wholly different kind of contribution to psychology. By his time, Roman civilization was decadent,corrupt, and violence-ridden. In that atmosphere, many troubled people were attracted to Plotinus’s Neoplatonism, which combined the ethics of Stoicism with the mystical and unworldly components of Plato’s beliefs, including the most nonscientific and spiritual components of his psychology.
    Plotinus, after studying Greek philosophy in Alexandria, came to Rome in 244, where, although a pagan, he lived like a Christian saint amid the city’s luxuries. Regarding the body as the prison of the soul— his biographer and disciple, Porphyry, says Plotinus was actually ashamed that his soul had a body—he took no care of himself physically, was unconcerned about dress and hygienic matters, ate the simplest foods, avoided sexual activity, and refused to sit for his portrait on the grounds that his body was the least important part of him. Despite these austerities, he was a popular lecturer and much sought out for his advice on sundry matters by well-to-do Romans.
    Like Plato, whom he revered—usually alluding to him simply as “He”—Plotinus considered the evidence of the senses inferior to that of reasoning. He believed that the highest wisdom, the ultimate access to truth, came when the soul temporarily slipped free of the flesh in a trancelike state and perceived the world beyond. He himself, he wrote, had had a number of such experiences.
    Many times it has happened. Lifted out of the body into myself; becoming external to all other things and self-encentered; beholding a marvelous beauty; then, more than ever, assured of community with the highest order; acquiring identity with the divine, stationing within It * by having attained that activity; poised above whatever in the Intellectual is less than the Supreme: yet, there comes the moment of descent from intellection to reasoning, and after that sojourn in the divine I ask myself how it happens that I can now be descending, and how did the Soul ever enter into my body, the Soul which even within the