“To understand “soul” we cannot turn to science for a description. Its meaning is best given by its context, and this context has already been partly stated. The root metaphor of the analyst’s point of view is that human behavior is understandable because it has an inside meaning. The inside meaning is suffered and experienced. It is understood by the analyst through sympathy and insight. All these terms are the everyday empirical language of the analyst and provide the context for and are expressions of the analyst’s root metaphor.
Other words long associated with the word “soul” amplify it further: mind, spirit, heart, life, warmth, humanness, personality, individuality, intentionality, essence, innermost, purpose, emotion, quality, virtue, morality, sin, wisdom, death, God. A soul is said to be “troubled,” “old,” “disembodied,” “immortal,” “lost,” “innocent,” “inspired.” Eyes are said to be “soulful,” for the eyes are “the mirror of the soul”; but one can be “soulless” by showing no mercy.
Most “primitive” languages have elaborate concepts about animated principles that ethnologists have translated by “soul.” For these peoples, from ancient Egyptian to modern Eskimo, “soul” is a highly differentiated idea referring to a reality of great impact. The soul has been imaged as the inner man, and as the inner sister or spouse, the place or voice of God within, as a cosmic force in which all humans, even all things living, participate, as having been given by God and thus divine, as conscience, as a multiplicity and as a unity in diversity, as a harmony, as a fluid, as fire, as dynamic energy, and so on.
One can “search one’s soul” and one’s soul can be “on trial.” There are parables describing possession of the soul by and sale of the soul to the Devil, of temptations of the soul, of the damnation and redemption of the soul, of development of the soul through spiritual disciplines, of journeys of the soul. Attempts have been made to localize the soul in specific body organs and regions, to trace its origin to sperm or egg, to divide it into animal, vegetable, and mineral components, while the search for the soul leads always into the “depths.”
— Suicide and the Soul, ch 3