The Journey Home: Deepening our Individuation through Homer’s Odyssey

The Odyssey is a journey Home. And the perils that are Odysseus’s fate are psychologically his individuation journey, a soul’s journey to wholeness, and a deepened sense of Home. Persevering through the unconscious while trying to get home actually prepares Odysseus for Home. I will point out that The Odyssey is a re-integration of the archetypal feminine into a masculine era soaked in war, an epic that horribly abused women. Odysseus confesses these sins in the re-telling of his story, a re-membering of events and deeds that is a necessary undertaking for him to truly arrive Home. Telling one’s story is a form of homecoming to one’s Self. Depth psychologically Home can be understood as a metaphor for Jung’s vision of the Self.

During this presentation/reflection/discussion we will journey into the vibrant imagery of Homer’s Odyssey and unpack its rich metaphors that speak directly to our individual and collective soul. By way of the collective myth, we will wring-out our personal myth, our individual soul’s yearning, our way to a deepened sense of Home. Myth is the primordial language natural to psychic processes, and no intellectual formulation comes anywhere near the richness and expressiveness of mythical imagery. The psyche is fundamentally poetic because it is always making a myth. Jung recognized that mythological images give us ways of understanding the archetypal dimension. The images in myths are ‘as if’ a bridge to our deeper psychic layers.

Our personal myth is never alienated or divorced from collective myths. My personal myth is in large measure the consequence of how I structure my images of reality based on patterns I have developed from my own life experiences, as well as deeper pre-existing forms embedded in the collective psyche. Lurking behind these patterns are energy fields of psyche that are both unique to me and transcend me. These potent archetypal images participate in a much larger cosmos than my egoic self is willing to open to on its own.

The re-tellling of our story in likeness to an archetypal mythic story is a re-membering of our soul’s journey. James Hillman uses the term ‘Epistrophe’ which is, “reversion through likeness, a primary principle for the archetypal approach to all psychic events. Reversion is a bridge which connects an event to its image, a psychic process to its myth.” For Odysseus to return Home, he has to re-member his journey and narrate that story. And he does so using vivid mythic prose that invites us to journey with him through the primal metaphoric seas and islands of psyche to recover what is yearning to be re-found.

This session will begin with an introduction of how Depth Psychology frames our mythic imagination. Next, I will layout a summary of The Odyssey, hence it is not necessary for participation to have read The Odyssey. Finally, we will reflect on key excerpts, events, and images that will provoke our personal associations to the story as we make it our story. We will deepen our process through discussion and personal writing.