BMCR 2022.12.25

The many-minded man: the Odyssey, psychology, and the therapy of epic

Joel P. Christensen, The many-minded man: the Odyssey, psychology, and the therapy of epic. Myth and poetics, 2. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2020. Pp. 360. ISBN 9781501752346. $39.95.

Review by

Stephan Renker, Shanghai International Studies University. stephan.renker@gmail.com

At the center of this densely argued book lies the everlasting question of the relationship between the human mind and literature. When Christensen claims that “many of the arguments we make about Homer, which we consider philosophical or philological, are already psychological” (p. 24), he positions himself against a diverse backdrop of research paradigms developed during the last 120 years or so.

At least since the beginning of the 20^th century, scholarship dealt with the question of the mind and literature in a tripartite manifestation. Whereas very early on, Freudian psychoanalysis focused on the mental disposition of the author, we subsequently see a shift in attention towards the text itself. Hence, both Russian Formalism and New Criticism address questions of cognitive representations by, for example, focusing on the depiction of characters. Finally, the Constance School (Wolfgang Iser, Hans Robert Jauß) again reoriented the focus by placing the reader at the center of attention. Subsequently, reader-response criticism (Stanley Fish and Norman N. Holland) solidified the approach, further stressing the relationship between the written word and the cognitive framework of the recipient. This trend finds it latest manifestation in large-scale research projects such as the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics in Frankfurt am Main (Germany).

The Many-Minded Man, Joel Christensen’s third book on Homer, now focuses on the last two aspects: the text itself and its effects on the audience. Accordingly, Christensen aims to find “Homeric analogs for modern psychological theories or frameworks and their effect on the structure of the epic” (p. 16) and to explore the epic’s potential “therapeutic function for its ancient and modern audiences” (p. 2). The book can thus be placed in a long tradition of cognitive/psychological readings of the Iliad and Odyssey, starting perhaps with Bruno Snell’s seminal Die Entdeckung des Geistes, further developed and scientifically grounded by Elizabeth Minchin (a classicist)[1] and culturally popularized by Jonathan Shay (a psychotherapist).[2] More recently, the rich interplay between psychology and classical literature has been explored in a broader sense in the edited volumes by Meineck/Konstan[3] and Lauwers/Schwall/Opsomer[4], and more narrowly by Konstantinos I. Arvanitakis[5] and Charles Underwood.[6]

In nine chapters (framed by an introduction and a conclusion, along with ample indices and a reliable bibliography), this carefully edited and beautifully designed book explores central passages of the Odyssey chronologically. In a highly readable and engaging first chapter, Christensen aims at delineating what he means when he says “Homeric psychology”. Starting from Zeus’s complaining exclamation at the beginning of the poem, “Mortals! They are always blaming the gods and saying that evil comes from us when they themselves suffer pain beyond their lot because of their own recklessness!” (Od. 1.32–34; Christensen’s translation as quoted in the book), the author discusses the central concept of agency and responsibility, delivers a concise overview on cognitive theories, and stresses the importance of constructing an identity through narratives and the therapeutic function of story-telling, especially within the framework of public performances. Equipped with these tools, the reader is very much able to understand Christensen’s following case studies of central passages of the Odyssey.

Chapters two and three can be read in tandem, as they both deal with the effect of isolation. The argument is that both Telemachus on the island of Ithaca and Odysseus on the island of Ogygia suffer from the psychological disposition called learned helplessness, “a state of paralysis that comes from repeated experiences of powerlessness and failure” (p. 72).[7] Whereas Telemachus’s suffering is caused by the lack of a proper peer group (the suitors) and apt educational figures (no present father), Odysseus’s helplessness is caused by both the emotional and physical effects of social isolation (e.g., “difficulties with memory, distorted perception of reality, and deterioration of language function”, p.76) and by traumatic setback experiences (loss of his companions). However, as Christensen shows, this passive state of helplessness is not static, but can be overcome by either re-educational processes (e.g., through the intervention of Athena/Mentor) or by experiences of both successfully active decision-making and execution (e.g., the building of a raft). Both showcase a therapeutical function and change the ways in which the characters (and the various audiences) perceive their own agency.

Agency and the creation of a sense of identity are also central to chapters four and five. Against the backdrop of the psychological concept of narrative therapy[8], Christensen first explores how and why the Apologoi (books 9–12 narrated among the Phaeacians) help Odysseus create a version of his past and of himself that allows him to complete the trip towards Ithaca. Expanding on the discussions on responsibility and human and divine causality initiated earlier in the book, this chapter argues for a therapeutic function for the epic’s audiences. Chapter five is closely connected to the previous one. With it, Christensen moves into the second part of the Odyssey and deals with one of Odysseus’s most central character traits, his cleverness (metis) and proclivity towards deceit and lies. This chapter is best read as an extension to chapter four, as it argues that Odysseus is again re-authoring his past experiences to allow him to “predict and act in the future” (p. 118). However, Christensen argues that while Odysseus’s retelling of his past experiences at the court on Skheria are more reflective in nature, his storytelling now develops towards manipulating his addressees (e.g., the disguised Athena, Eumaios, Penelope or his father) and finally predicting future events (especially in his addresses to the suitors).

In chapters six and seven, Christensen again recenters his focus away from Odysseus towards those characters and communities who are affected by his stories. In my view, chapter six is the book’s strongest; it delivers an engaging and thought-provoking exploration into the possibilities of reading the epic’s marginalized characters against the theoretical backdrop of disability studies.[9] Careful not to fall into the manifold traps of anachronisms, Christensen showcases the negative effects of Odysseus’s homecoming narrative on the swineherd Eumaios, the nurse Eurykleia, and the slaves Melantho and Melanthios. Focusing again on the central concept of agency, Christensen concludes that the epic is “marking off those who are deprived of it” (p. 173). Chapter seven develops and concentrates on another marginalized character: Penelope. From the perspective of psychological and feminist theory, Christensen ponders the restricted availability of active social roles, the gendered body, and internalized oppression. Eventually, he arrives at a devastating conclusion: “Even the best woman in Homer does not get to be a fully realized human being” (p. 202).

After dealing with individual characters (Telemachus and Odysseus) and Odysseus’s family and community (Penelope, his father, Eumaios, and Eurykleia), chapter eight deals with the wider political framework on the island of Ithaca. Christensen convincingly argues that the Ithacan public is traumatized in a twofold way. First, Odysseus’s absence and the ensuing lack of political order fosters a feeling of helplessness within the wider community. Second, this fractured community leads to a lack of belonging, “an environment of uncertainty and suspicion” (p. 218). This focus on “communal psychology” (p. 239) allows Christensen to venture into a new interpretation of the epic’s rather sudden and unexpected ending. Drawing on modern theories and practices in political amnesties, Christensen argues that the epic’s final passages “experiments with different ways of foregrounding communal good over that of an individual or family” (p. 239).

Every story needs to end, and so does this book. Fittingly, Christensen’s last chapter equally deals with the epic’s last book. After a brief overview of the book’s content, Christensen, by drawing on various theories from cognitive science dealing with human expectations towards closure, ending, and completion, sets out to analyze to what extent the epic’s end is itself a contemplation “about how to end a poem” (p. 252). Christensen discusses the “unforgettable grief” (Od. 24.423) of Eupeithes, the father of one of the killed suitors, within the framework of the closure of a narrative, as well as Penelope’s famous (in-)completion of Laertes’s burial shroud and the often-overlooked underworld scene at the beginning of the book. The book ends with a short conclusion, focusing on the ancient allegorical tradition as well as on Teiresias’s prophecy of the oar mistaken for a winnowing fan (Od. 11.119–37 and 23.265–84).

Christensen provides experienced readers of the Odyssey with a plethora of fresh theoretical frameworks, engaging close readings and dense argumentations. This book is a welcome addition to the ongoing debate on psychology and literature, the mind and the written word, and the therapeutic effects of stories.

Notes

[1] Minchin, Elizabeth. 2001. Homer and the Resources of Memory: Some Applications of Cognitive Theory to the “Iliad” and the “Odyssey” (Oxford) and Minchin, Elizabeth. 2007. Homeric Voices: Discourse, Memory, Gender (Oxford).

[2] Shay, Jonathan. 1995. Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character (New York) and Shay, Jonathan. 2002. Odysseus in America: Combat Trauma and the Trials of Homecoming (New York).

[3] Meineck, Peter, and David Konstan (Eds.). 2014. Combat Trauma and the Ancient Greeks (New York). See especially William H. Race’s chapter “Phaeacian Therapy in Homer’s Odyssey”, pp. 47–66.

[4] Lauwers, Jeroen, Hedwig Schwall, and Jan Opsomer (Eds.). 2018. Psychology and the Classics: A Dialogue of Disciplines. (Berlin). In this volume, see especially the contribution by Siobhan Privitera, “Odyssey 20 and Cognitive Science: A Case Study”, pp. 32–46.

[5] Arvanitakis, Konstantinos. 2015. Psychoanalytic Scholia on the Homeric Epics (Leiden).

[6] Underwood, Charles. 2018. Mythos and Voice: Displacement, Learning, and Agency in the Odyssey (Lanham, MD).

[7] Developed by Mario Mikulincer 1994. Human Learned Helplessness: A Coping Perspective (New York).

[8] Central here are the works of Michael White, for example M. White 2007. Maps of Narrative Practice (New York).

[9] Central for Christensen’s approach are the works of Simi Linton. 1998. Claiming Disability: Knowledge and Identity (New York) as well as Rosemarie Garland Thomson. 1997. Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature (New York).

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One thought on “The many-minded man: the Odyssey, psychology, and the therapy of epic”

‘I ain’t a writer, I want that understood.’ (Woody Guthrie)

And ‘Homer’ wasn’t a folk singer or a writer.

But he was a ‘singer of tales’ (Albert Lord), including the Odyssey. One wonders what the singer of the Odyssey would make, if he could but read, of the number and variety of receptions of his song – or rather what purports to be his song – based on literary theory of the last hundred years or so.

The Homer we read (the work of one or two singers, at best guess) is for the most part a descendant of the text (written, of course) that was regularised by the scholars of Alexandria, 500 or so years after the composition of the songs. This has been augmented (though largely ignored by editors) by copious finds of papyri over the last few hundred years, some of them possibly suggesting that there may have been several singers of the same traditional material, if not ‘as many Homers as you please’ (the slogan of Homer Multitext). The text we use, whoever its editor is, is in no way the ‘correct’ text, a notion that is almost meaningless when used of an oral composition with numerous different performances (and possibly performers). We have no way of establishing the performances that were the song, nor how they were received by their audiences. Theory tells us that we can make what we like of a ‘text’ – and we do. But we are in no position to make anything of an oral composition-in-performance that by its nature we are unable to have any experience of.

What the author makes of his or her own work is the least important consideration, if a consideration at all, according to Theory. Allegorical accounts in Antiquity are far-fetched enough without having to grapple with the abstruse scrutiny of Theory. And here comes another one, this one based on psychology and therapy. Aristotle maintained that tragedy was cathartic of pity and fear, so why shouldn’t epic be psychological and therapeutic? But for whom? Ancient or modern recipients of epic? Readers of texts or audiences of songs? Both?

My comments are based on the hypothesis (we are not justified in going further) that Homer’s Odyssey was a composition-in performance, or rather performances, not a written text, and that we can have no knowledge of what effect the performances of the songs had on their audiences. Our only possible glimpse of their possible effects is the description of the songs performed by Demodocus and Phemius, and the assumption that Homer was an aoidos like them, performing to audiences like theirs. And we do not know how similar or different the actual performances of the Odyssey were, compared with their modern counterparts studied by Parry and Lord. Crucially, we do not know how different they were from our modern texts and papyri, our only access to something that was lost as soon as it was created. We never shall, until someone can demonstrate that what was composed without writing is what has been preserved by writing. As for the role of dictation in recording an oral composition, there is no way that what was dictated was an actual performance. This would have been impossible both for singer and scribe, not to mention an audience, whatever its social composition.

We hardly need to be told that literature is productive of feeling on the part of the reader, or in this case of the audience. We don’t need to be told either that the text alone is what matters as far as the ‘meaning’ of the work is concerned. The Odyssey was not a text (in the ordinary sense of ‘text’) and its singer was not a writer. Our copies of it are texts, the work itself was a composition-in- performance, as Albert Lord termed it, not accessible to literary scrutiny, and certainly not by the aesthetics of the written word. ‘Reader-Response’ theory is not appropriate, for obvious reasons. And we have no idea of how the audience of a composition-in-performance responded to the song; there may have been some audience participation, more like a happening then than a poetry recital. If you want to theorise about how we respond to a written text, fair enough. But don’t imagine that you are theorising about Homer’s Odyssey. We don’t even know the name of the singer and whether he gave his song a name.

Any exegesis of a work like the Odyssey that is based on written copies of the work and claims to disclose the reception of the work by its earliest audiences, must be fundamentally misguided. You can produce any exegesis you like of any written text of the song, including the psychological and therapeutic effects claimed for its readers; but don’t present it as an exegesis of Homer’s Odyssey. No such enterprise is possible, any more than is restoring the composition-in-performance that was the song. Or rather one should say of the songs, since there would have been many different singings of it, with many different audience responses.

There is another difference between a written text and a composition-in-performance. For us the Odyssey and the Iliad are works of literature, and (for the most part) of fiction, and we approach them as such. How else could we approach them? It is not clear that the singer’s 8th./7th. century non-literate audiences regarded them as fiction, creations of the imagination, especially as the events and characters of the songs were set in a dim and distant past and in an age different from their own. And how might they have distinguished fiction from non-fiction in any case?

When readers of copies of the songs began to regard them as works of fiction, and regard Odysseus and Achilles not as ‘real’ persons, is not known. Perhaps it was as early as certain of the 6th. century Presocratics, when the name of Homer first appears in Xenophanes and Heraclitus. It was the Presocratics who first gave naturalistic and (more) realistic accounts of the physical world, false but not fictitious, falsifiable (in principle) if not verifiable. The philosopher of science, Karl Popper, had a high regard for the Presocratics generally (‘the greatest and most inventive period in Greek philosophy’): they were asking the right sort of questions, if not providing the right answers. Heidegger too was taken by them (especially Heraclitus). It is difficult to think that such people believed in a world controlled by gods. Which is not to say that the rest of the Greeks did not believe. They continued unquestioningly to pay cult to them as if their very lives, communities, and wellbeing depended on it. The trial of Socrates for disrespecting (as they saw it, perhaps unjustfiably) the gods of Athens was no show or sham trial in this respect.

Apologies for the length of this comment and any repetitions.

*On Theory and Classics, see my article for Theory neophytes in Journal of Classics Teaching 21, 80-85. Cambridge University Press. It is online and you can Google it.