The Many-Minded Man

The "Odyssey," Psychology, and the Therapy of Epic

Joel Christensen

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781501752353
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

In The Many-Minded Man, Joel Christensen explores the content, character, and structure of the Homeric Odyssey through a modern psychological lens, focusing on how the epic both represents the workings of the human mind and provides for its audiences—both ancient and modern—a therapeutic model for coping with the exigencies of chance and fate.

By reading the Odyssey as an exploration of the constitutive elements of human identity, the function of narrative in defining the self, and the interaction between the individual and their social context, The Many-Minded Man addresses enduring questions about the poem, such as the importance of Telemachus's role, why Odysseus must tell his own tale, and the epic's sudden and unexpected closure. Through these dynamics, Christensen reasons, the Odyssey not only instructs readers about how narrative shapes a sense of agency but also offers solutions for avoiding dangerous stories and destructive patterns of thought.

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HOMERIC PSYCHOLOGY

Alcidamas called the Odyssey a “fine mirror of human life”—ϰαλὸν ἀνθϱωπίνου βίου ϰάτοπτϱον

Aristotle, Rhetoric 1406b12

The Odyssey does not merely show emotional depth and inspire identification through its portrayal of homecoming and transformation. It also resonates with multiple theories about human psychology that developed during the twentieth century. I do not mean to suggest that the Homeric epics anticipate the discipline of modern psychology in some positivistic way. Instead, my belief is that the Odyssey shows an understanding of aspects of human experience (both functional and what we might call dysfunctional) identified and explored from a different perspective in modern scientific discourse. In emphasizing the resonance between the epic and psychology (therapeutic, cognitive, and theoretical), I aim both to contribute to arguments for the sophistication of Homeric epic (as a genre and a discourse) and to propose a therapeutic function for the performance genre itself. Indeed, I am not the first to propose that an ancient genre has such a function—Peter Meineck has argued that ancient tragedy functioned like “cultural therapy” to its audiences1—nor am I the first to frame epic in this way—Bennett Simon (1978) has made some similar arguments. This book, however, presents a reading of the Odyssey in its entirety from the perspective of modern psychology and relates it to the general therapeutic function of the poem.

In order to approach both goals, I will first explain my view of psychology in Homer. I will begin by suggesting that the Odyssey is particularly interested in a central psychological issue—agency—and that it demands that its audience consider issues of agency and responsibility throughout its plot. Second, and connected to this, I will distinguish my view of Homeric psychology from prior treatments among Homerists by introducing concepts from Jerome Bruner and Mark Turner (among others), who have written about connections between narrative and literature, on the one hand, and human psychology, on the other. These two authors conceptualize some generalizable concepts—Bruner’s “folk psychology” and Turner’s “everyday mind”—which provide frameworks for thinking of the Odyssey as therapeutic on a social level, especially in the context of repeated performances. In pursuing this last framework, I will start by teasing out some common threads that help to support the Odyssey as an investigation of human minds before addressing the issue of the engagement between the epic and collective mentalities.

A. Zeus, Fate, and Human Agency

The Odyssey begins with misdirection: the poem promises a tale of wanderings, then delays Odysseus’s naming, and begins with comments from an internal audience as the gods gaze not upon a languishing hero or his besieged family, but on an entirely different plot altogether (the story of Aigisthos’s death at Orestes’s hands, so frequently returned to as a model in the epic to come).2 We—the external audience—are treated to a compressed reminder of the events, which includes a slightly surprising detail—that Aigisthos was warned not to shack up with Klytemnestra and kill Agamemnon.3

But before he recites this inset narrative, Zeus interprets the tale to come by providing a moral of his own: “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). Responses to the structural function and meaning of this passage vary—it has been seen as simply starting the action, even though many scholars have noted that Zeus’s language recalls the proem’s characterization of Odysseus’s companions who perished after they ate the cattle of the sun.4 The language of responsibility invoked here, however, extends beyond the proem and Zeus’s comments: throughout the epic, invocations of mortal atasthalia, recklessness, set parallel the fate of the companions with the suitors at the epic’s end.5 This initiates a theme that is integral to the Odyssey and its use of narrative: From the proem’s prolepsis to the bloody struggles at its end, mortals are described as bearing some blame for their own suffering.6 When such a theme not only initiates the epic but extends through it, almost any audience might wonder rather quickly where in this Odysseus’s responsibility fits.

Such an interpretive impulse has met resistance for a long time—the Byzantine scholar John Tzeztes, for example, thought Homer had such a favorable view of Odysseus that he refers to him as “Homer’s little darling” (... ϰαὶ παίγνιον Όμήϱου Ὀδυσσέα, Allegories of the Iliad 7.32).7 While many modern scholars still see Odysseus as largely blameless, others allow for shared responsibility, even if they do not go as far as Jonathan Shay in preparing the hero’s court-martial.8 It is Odysseus’s complexity and multiplicity that prompts such divergent responses and that makes him such an effective character for the exploration of human psychology.

Sidestepping Odysseus’s character for a moment, another way to put the issue is that our epic is intensely engaged with questions of agency and responsibility and in addressing problematic articulations of causality. Such questions have been framed somewhat differently as critics have explored Homeric epic for its presentation theology and justice.9 In accepting Zeus’s comments as programmatic for the epic as a whole and as an interpretive framework for the audience—if not direct instructions—interpreters have emphasized the epic’s interest in prompting contemplation of the limits of human will and action.10 Such philosophical issues are also psychological and connected to the relationship between the narrative (tradition) and the world, not just of the poem but also of its audiences.

So, a central starting point for this discussion and the work of this book is that many of the arguments we make about Homer, which we consider philosophical or philological, are already psychological in nature. Narrative poetry does not work like a philosophical scientific treatise—as S. Douglas Olson describes it “... Homer’s tale represents a careful and consistent meditation on the origin of human troubles and the problem of how we are to live in an apparently chaotic and arbitrary world ...,” an opinion echoed by Fred Miller who argues that the point of the epic is not to offer a theory of “agency and responsibility” but instead to raise the relevant questions.11 The Odyssey, as John Peradotto suggests, implicitly integrates into its narrative a series of problem sets for balancing responsibility and causality. For the audience, Odysseus cannot be to blame because everything is already motivated by known outcomes, by fate and divine decree. And, yet, human agency and responsibility are consistently even if problematically emphasized.12 In this way, we may read Zeus’s comments as a redress against the atemporality of myth (where stories are always coming in different sequences) and the behavioral determinism of a narrative-driven culture.

To summarize and simplify: the Homeric Odyssey faces a narrative situation imposed by traditional storytelling in myth, which may present an overly deterministic worldview. This view might posit that Odysseus and even his companions are mere objects of fate and therefore in some way not responsible for their actions. The epic begins by addressing this potential worldview directly: Zeus states clearly that human beings are in fact partly responsible for their sufferings and then provides a striking illustration of how this is true by claiming that Aigisthos had foreknowledge of the consequences of his action and therefore had agency in making his decisions. The resulting suffering is, accordingly, also his responsibility. Such a pattern is offered as a heuristic for the stories that follow. This does not mean that each story will satisfy the same conditions, but rather that the opening sequence sets up interpretive guidelines by which the audience will judge the narratives to come.

The term agency itself is a bit loaded—but when I use it I draw on the work of theorists like Shaun Gallagher, who focus not on some absolute category like “will,” but instead on an individual’s subjective awareness of making decisions to act in the world (200:14–21). (Gallagher and others use the phrase “sense of agency”). When I use agency in this book, what I mean is an individual’s subjective sense of agency in their world as depicted (again subjectively) by narrative. From a neurological perspective, Kantian “contracausal” free will may very well be illusory—so many of the decisions we make are based on subconscious activities and cultural influences—but self-control and decision-making in response to external causes are demonstrably available to what Patricia Churchland (2013:183–85) describes as a ‘normal’ brain. And, the ability to exercise self-control appears to be paired neuro-physiologically with the human ability to learn, analyze, and predict outcomes in the world (Churchland 2013:170). But, beyond the neurobio-logical, what I will focus on mostly is representation of the impact of experience and cultural discourse on a given character’s (represented) sense of agency. Odysseus, as a heroic figure prized for his intelligence (and self-control), is also a prime test case for epic to explore the tension between what people choose to do in the world and what happens to them.13 Regardless of theological considerations, then, Zeus’s emphasis at the beginning of the Odyssey aims at making Odysseus (and his audiences) responsible because of choice not fate.

Through the medium of storytelling, the Odyssey does not set out to resolve the issues it presents clearly or merely to offer some simplistic, moralizing view (as Zeus appears to at its beginning); instead, it offers a dynamic set of responses and further questions. How to talk about who is responsible is a question at the heart of audience responses to Zeus’s assertion and applicable as an interpretive framework to all of the epic’s players.14 Because of this, the connection between what we say about why things happen and what we think is possible or in our control is essential to understanding the Odyssey as a psychological narrative.15

B. Some Theoretical Frameworks

The connections I will draw between the form of the sequential narrative and notions of agency are essential to what I think it means to talk about psychology in Homer. The epic projects and then invites its audiences to reflect upon implicit understandings of the way the human mind works and the limiting effect that prior assumptions about action can have under certain circumstances. Although the approaches and authors I have already mentioned discuss these issues, they do not represent the core of work that has been done on Homeric psychology.

Scholarship on Homeric psychology has focused on theoretical or philosophical questions, such as whether or not Homeric heroes make real decisions, the implications of the lexical range for Homeric expressions of emotions and thought, and cultural implications of these inquiries.16 These debates, however, have developed alongside, and often apart from, modern reformulations of articulations of agency with scientists weighing the influence of behaviorism and biology against autonomy and philosophers debating the status of free will against ideology and discourse.17

More recent publications have illuminated cultural and social issues reflected in the poem through the application of cognitive psychology.18 Throughout these studies, we find a sometimes explicit assumption that there is a correlation between the worldviews expressed in the poem and those of their (putative) audiences.19 Psychoanalysts (e.g., Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung) noted the paradigmatic nature of cultural narratives as extensions and expressions of generalizable human psychology.20 Recently, Siobhan Privitera has argued that Homeric poetry may demonstrate psychological understanding through a “three-way dialogue” that “reaffirms the potential of cognitive science.” Reading Homer alongside cognitive science, moreover, can explicate important features of Homeric representation and situate Homeric narrative within the movement of “cognit...