Home is not merely where we return, but where we are recognised.
The Odyssey is usually described as the story of a man trying to get home. But this is only half the story. The real journey is not geographical but psychological and moral. Odysseus is trying not merely to return to Ithaca, but to become the kind of man who can return.
This is why, after almost three thousand years, the Odyssey continues to speak to us. We are all trying to find our way home—not simply to a place, but to a life that feels genuinely like our own.
Every encounter presents Odysseus with a different temptation. The Lotus-Eaters invite him to forget who he is. Circe seeks to trap him into surrendering his humanity. The Sirens tempt him with endless fascination. Even after escaping the Cyclops Polyphemus, Odysseus succumbs to the temptation of pride. By revealing his true name, he forgets his true purpose and risks undoing all that he has achieved. Again and again, Homer asks the same question in different forms: what must we refuse if we are to remain true to ourselves?
The greatest temptation of all comes from Calypso. She offers Odysseus what human beings have always desired: immortality, together with eternal youth and freedom from suffering. Yet he refuses. He chooses instead to return to his ageing wife, his uncertain kingdom, and his mortal life. In doing so, Homer suggests that to become fully human is not to escape our condition, but to embrace it. Only by accepting the limits of human existence can Odysseus finally become himself.
From one perspective, it is a baffling decision. Why exchange paradise for hardship? Like the modern philosopher Bernard Williams, Homer intuits that a life derives its meaning not from its length but from being truly our own. We would rather live a finite life that belongs to us than an endless life that does not.
At last, Odysseus reaches Ithaca. But instead of returning as a conquering hero, he enters his own home disguised as a beggar. His wife does not recognise him. His servants do not recognise him. His kingdom does not recognise him. But one creature does.
Outside the palace gates lies Argos, the hunting dog that Odysseus had raised before leaving for Troy. Once magnificent, Argos has been left to grow old on a dung heap. Yet the moment Odysseus approaches, the dog recognises him. Disguised though he is, stripped of every outward sign of rank and identity, his faithful companion sees through it all. Argos wags his tail, lays back his ears, and, having seen his master one last time, quietly dies. In Homer, true recognition has nothing to do with appearances. We are recognised not for what we possess or the roles we play, but for who we truly are.
It is one of the most moving scenes in all of literature because it speaks to one of our deepest longings. We want our lives to amount to something. But we also want to be known and loved for who we are, beneath all our roles, titles, and disguises. Home is not merely where we return. It is where someone knows who we are—and remembers.
Before Odysseus can reclaim his kingdom, he must first reclaim his story. At the court of the Phaeacians, he recounts everything that has happened to him since leaving Troy. By weaving his adventures into a coherent narrative, he recovers not only his past but himself. We make sense of our own lives in much the same way: not merely by living them, but by telling them. There’s a lovely irony here. At the very heart of the Odyssey, Homer hands the poem over to Odysseus himself. Odysseus quite literally rises into the narrator of his own life, before finally heading home.
Perhaps that is why the Odyssey still feels so modern. We, too, leave home, lose our bearings, and become distracted by ambitions, comforts, fears, and false identities. We, too, sometimes wonder how we ended up living the lives we are living.
The Odyssey endures because Homer understood that the longest journey any of us will ever undertake is not outward across the seas, but inward into our hearts.
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If you enjoyed this article, you may also enjoy my book, The Meaning of Myth.
Greek mythology has captivated the Western imagination for almost three thousand years. Its stories of gods and heroes, monsters and marvels continue to inspire novels, films, paintings, and psychological and cultural theories. Yet, for all the reverence, modern readers are often struck by another recurring theme. Women seem repeatedly silenced or blamed, if not outright punished, pursued, or abducted.
The ancient Greeks undoubtedly lived in a patriarchal society. Political power, military glory, and public life belonged overwhelmingly to men, and many myths reflect the assumptions of the society that produced them. But Greek mythology is far too rich and varied to be reduced to a single attitude towards women. Some women serve as models of virtue, others as warnings against vice or excess; some are victims of gods and men, while others possess a power that rivals or even surpasses that of their male counterparts.
The women of Greek myth are queens and captives, wives and mothers, maidens and sorceresses, heroines and monsters. Together, they reflect the full spectrum of the Greek imagination. To understand what these stories are really saying about women—and about the civilisation that created them—we need to return to the myths themselves.
Prometheus had stolen fire from the gods and given it, in a fennel stalk, to mankind. Not content with punishing Prometheus, Zeus set about also to punish mankind. He ordered Hephaestus to mould the first woman out of earth and water, and each of the other gods to endow her with a ‘seductive gift’. He named this living snare Pandora [Greek, ‘All-gifted’] and sent her off to Epimetheus with a jar of evils in dowry.
Prometheus had forewarned his slow-witted brother not to accept any gift from Zeus, but Epimetheus took Pandora in and soon married her. After the wedding, Pandora remembered the jar. Although she had been told not to open it, her curiosity got the better of her. As she unsealed the lid, she released every evil into the world, bringing man’s golden age to its close. Aghast, she hastened to replace the lid, but all the contents of the jar had already escaped—all, that is, except for hope.
Like Eve in Genesis, Pandora carries the blame for the fallen world in which we live. Like Eve, she is overwhelmed by the urge to do the very thing that had been forbidden to her. But whereas Eve succumbs to temptation, Pandora is herself the temptation. She is created not as a helpmeet, but as a punishment. As Hesiod puts it, in the simplest, most direct Greek, she is kalon kakon, ‘a beautiful evil’.
Nor is Pandora alone. Helen’s beauty launches a thousand ships and destroys a city. Clytemnestra murders Agamemnon upon his return from Troy. Phaedra’s forbidden desire destroys Hippolytus. Again and again, women appear as the catalysts of male suffering.
If these were the only women in Greek mythology, the charge of misogyny would be difficult to deny. But, of course, they are not.
Penelope: The Faithful Wife
Penelope embodies the ancient ideal of womanhood. For twenty years, while Odysseus wanders the seas, she waits for him in Ithaca. Besieged by over a hundred suitors who assume her husband to be dead, she preserves both her marriage and the kingdom through patience, intelligence, and deception. By day she weaves a funeral shroud for her father-in-law Laertes; by night she unpicks her work, delaying the choice of a new husband until Odysseus finally returns to slay the suitors.
Unlike Helen, Clytemnestra, and Phaedra, Penelope preserves rather than destroys her household. Unlike Pandora, who unleashes chaos, Penelope restores order. She is not merely faithful but resourceful, matching Odysseus’ own cunning with a quieter, domestic intelligence.
Although an archetype, Penelope is not an exception. We might also think of Nausicaa, Alcestis, and Antigone. When King Alcinous offers Odysseus his daughter’s hand in marriage, Odysseus, thinking of Penelope, politely declines. Nausicaa graciously accepts his refusal, asking only that he remember her as the one who saved his life.
In Plato’s Symposium, Phaedrus contrasts the chicanery of Orpheus in seeking to cheat death to be reunited with Eurydice with the willingness of Alcestis to lay down her life for her husband Admetus when not even his elderly parents would do so. Alcestis was allowed to return alive from Hades, a rare reward indeed, whereas Orpheus returned empty-handed to be torn apart by women.
The goddesses, too, command profound respect. Athena, the goddess of wisdom and strategic intelligence, defies Zeus to champion Achilles; Artemis fiercely guards her independence; while Demeter’s grief at the loss of Persephone brings famine upon the earth. Male gods may rule Olympus, but they do not always have the final word.
Medusa: Monster or Victim?
No figure better illustrates the changing fortunes of women in Greek myth than Medusa. According to Ovid, when still a fair maiden, she was violated by Poseidon in a temple dedicated to Athena, who punished not Poseidon but Medusa, by turning her beautiful braids into snakes. Henceforth, anyone who met Medusa’s gaze would be turned into stone.
The treatment of Medusa by the Olympian gods is an epitome of rape culture: assaulted by Poseidon, who thought he had every right, and then blamed and punished for it by Athena in a case of one woman turning upon another to get in with the patriarchy. In fact, Athena and Medusa are not so different. Both represent a pole or extreme of how to deal with the threat of female autonomy, authority, and sexuality. A woman can be either a virgin or a mother, and if she is neither, she must be a whore or a monster.
Ovid’s origin story for Medusa is almost certainly a later elaboration of the original myth, which sits in the Perseus cycle—in which Medusa is presented as one of the three Gorgon sisters. Nonetheless, it captures the modern imagination: suddenly Medusa becomes another victim, and Perseus’ triumph acquires an unsettling moral ambiguity. Is this the defeat of an evil monster—or the final destruction of a blameless victim?
Medusa is both monster and victim. In this ambiguity or ambivalence, she is not alone. Helen oscillates between seductress and pawn, while Medea is at once a betrayed wife and an avenging murderess. Circe begins as a terrifying enchantress, before turning into Odysseus’s advisor and benefactor.
Philomela: The Silenced Voice
Ovid’s Metamorphoses reads almost as a catalogue of sexual assaults on women. Medusa, Daphne, Philomela, Io, Europa, Callisto…
Under the spell of Eros, Apollo fell head over heels for Daphne, and relentlessly pursued the sworn virgin. As he was about to catch up with her, she cried out, and her river god father Peneus turned her into a laurel tree. From then on, Apollo took to wearing laurel in his hair, whence the laurel wreath and our word ‘laureate’, as in, ‘Nobel Prize laureate’.
King Tereus raped his wife’s sister Philomela and then cut out her tongue. Unable to speak, she wove her ordeal into a tapestry and sent it to Procne, who in revenge killed her son by Tereus, cooked the boy, and served him up to his father. The sisters then presented Tereus with the boy’s severed head. As he pursued them with an axe, they prayed to be turned into birds: Philomela became the nightingale, and Procne the swallow.
Ovid’s pages are populated not only by dangerous women, but by women in danger. This growing sympathy may reflect Ovid’s own sensibilities, the influence of Greek tragedy, or changing attitudes over the centuries. Whatever the case, these women emerge not merely as symbols or warnings, but as fully human figures, capable of inspiring both horror and compassion.
The Greeks and Their Myths
Women in Ancient Egypt enjoyed many more rights than in classical Athens, for instance, the right to initiate divorce or dispose of property. In the art of the period, women are often depicted supporting or clasping their husband, and husband and wife referred to each other as ‘brother’ or ‘sister’, suggesting a relationship of near equality. In contrast, in classical Athens, women were regarded as chattel and were, in some respects, worse off than slaves. Aristotle, whose influence remains unsurpassed, regarded women as ‘deformed’ or ‘deficient’ males who lacked the deliberative capacity to rule. He even claimed that women had fewer teeth than men—when he could simply have looked into the mouth of Pythias, his wife (or perhaps his daughter; both bore the same name).
It would be surprising if the myths of the Greeks did not reflect their assumptions. Myth, however, is neither history nor ideology. It is less concerned with recording events or prescribing conduct than with exploring a culture’s deepest hopes, fears, and contradictions. Pandora expresses a fear of female autonomy and agency. Penelope embodies an ideal of fidelity and resourcefulness. Medusa explores the uneasy boundary between monster and victim. Philomela confronts the reality of violence and gives voice to the silenced victim. Athena, Artemis, and Demeter exercise an authority that surpasses even that of Agamemnon or Achilles. Rather than presenting a single image of womanhood, Greek mythology unfolds an entire panoply of female archetypes.
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If you enjoyed this article, you might also enjoy my book The Meaning of Myth, which contains a chapter on women in Greek myth—and much more besides.
Odysseus, Homer, and the Story That Shaped the Western Imagination
Arnold Böcklin, Odysseus and Calypso (1883). Offered eternity, Odysseus chooses home.
‘Tell me, Muse, of the man of many twists and turns…’ Few openings in literature are more famous—or revealing. The Greek is simpler still: andra, ‘the man’. Not the warrior, nor the king, nor the conqueror. Simply the man. It is an extraordinary way to begin. Homer could have sung of the Wooden Horse, the sack of Troy, or the countless heroes who fought and fell beneath its walls. His earlier epic, the Iliad, opens on overpowering passion: ‘Sing, goddess, the wrath of Achilles…’ One poem begins with wrath; the other with a person. One asks how a hero should fight and die; the other how a human being should live. Perhaps that is why, after nearly three thousand years, the Odysseystill feels so astonishingly alive.
Homer himself never seems to tire of Odysseus. He gives him more epithets than any other character: ‘the man of many sorrows’ (polypenthes), ‘the man of many devices’ (polymetis), ‘the man of many twists and turns’ (polytropos), and a score more. No single description suffices. Odysseus is king and sailor, warrior and diplomat, husband and father, beggar and storyteller, trickster and survivor. The first epithet Homer picks out for him, polytropos, has defeated generations of eminent translators. It has been rendered, among others, as ‘much-wandering’, ‘complicated’, ‘resourceful’, ‘versatile’, and ‘of many twists and turns’. All capture something of Homer’s meaning, but none exhaust it. Whereas Achilles burns with a single, blinding excellence, Odysseus is of many parts. He changes with circumstance without ceasing to be himself.
Nowhere is this more delightfully illustrated than in the adventure with the Cyclops. Trapped inside the cave of Polyphemus, with no hope of overcoming the giant by force, Odysseus reaches for his greatest weapon: not his sword, but his wits. When asked his name, he replies, ‘Nobody.’ It is one of the oldest jokes in literature, and has scarcely aged. When the blinded Cyclops bellows that ‘Nobody’ has attacked him, his neighbours abandon him to his fate. Yet there are hidden depths to the comedy. Although Homer gives Odysseus more names than anyone else, the man’s greatest triumph comes from altogether surrendering his name. He survives by becoming Nobody. Only when his ship has safely put out to sea does he make the mistake of shouting his true name back across the waves. For one irresistible moment, the old heroic code reasserts itself—inviting Poseidon’s vengeance and prolonging the homeward journey by ten more years.
Here, perhaps, we arrive at the deepest difference between Homer’s two great heroes. Achilles is the supreme warrior, swift-footed and godlike, the embodiment of an aristocratic world in which honour is won on the battlefield and a glorious death is preferable to an obscure life. Faced with the choice between longevity and everlasting fame, he chooses fame without hesitation. Odysseus belongs to the same heroic age, yet already points beyond it. He fights not to die gloriously, but to live. His greatest victories are won not by brute strength but slippery guile. A civilisation founded upon Achilles would always risk being at war. A civilisation founded upon Odysseus might one day know peace and prosperity.
Again and again, Homer shows us what Odysseus longs for. Not glory. Not pleasure. Not even immortality. Home. When Calypso offers him eternal youth and everlasting life, he refuses. He knows that Penelope has grown older during his absence, and that she cannot offer him the eternal youth of an immortal goddess. Yet he pines for her all the same. He longs for Telemachus, for the columns of smoke rising above Ithaca, for the domestic life he left behind. Homer gives us one unforgettable image of the meaning of home. When Penelope, still testing the stranger before her, orders a servant to move their marriage bed, Odysseus protests that the bed cannot be displaced. For it was he who, long ago, fashioned it around the living trunk of an olive tree. Home, Homer suggests, is something like that, something living and deeply rooted, something that binds and shapes us. If Achilles seeks to transcend the human condition, Odysseus embraces it.
Perhaps that is why we feel so close to him. Homer never presents Odysseus as an invulnerable hero. He is brave, but he is also afraid; ingenious, yet capable of foolishness; resilient, yet often overwhelmed by grief. Indeed, the first time we meet him he is not fighting monsters but sitting alone on Calypso’s island, gazing across the sea towards Ithaca. Later he weeps again as the bard Demodocus sings of Troy, unable to hear his own story without reliving its pain. Homer never hides his hero’s tears, because he understands that strength and sorrow are not opposites but companions.
Perhaps this is also why Homer has a soft spot for him. We might admire Achilles, but we love Odysseus. Achilles may dazzle us, but he would also kill and dismember us, whereas Odysseus would sit down and tell us a story. Homer delights in his resourcefulness—which is, of course, a reflection of his own—but lingers just as tenderly over the moments of recognition that punctuate the poem. None is more moving than the meeting with Argos. Twenty years have passed since Odysseus sailed for Troy. The old hunting dog now lies neglected on a dung heap outside the palace, blind, flea-ridden, and too weak to stand. Yet as Odysseus approaches, disguised as a beggar, Argos lifts his head. He knows. His tail gives a final wag. Then he dies. Odysseus cannot embrace him. To reveal himself would be to risk everything. He can only turn away and brush a tear from his cheek.
We think of Odysseus as one of Homer’s two great heroes. Yet, he scarcely resembles the archetypal hero of myth. Lord Raglan famously identified twenty-two recurring features of mythical and legendary heroes, among them a miraculous birth, an attempt on the infant’s life, royal destiny, victory over monsters, a mysterious or sacrificial death… Figures such as Moses and Oedipus satisfy most of these criteria. Odysseus fulfils only eight. By the standards of comparative mythology, the greatest hero in Western literature turns out to be strangely incomplete. Which is, of course, precisely the point. He is no miracle child, no predestined saviour, no invulnerable demigod. He is simply a man—of exceptional intelligence and resilience, certainly, but recognisably human throughout.
For all its monsters, enchantresses, storms, and marvels, the Odyssey is not ultimately a poem about adventure. It is a poem about home: about memory, fidelity, identity, and belonging. Odysseus does not journey merely to recover his kingdom. He journeys to recover himself. This is why the Odyssey still speaks to us.
Or perhaps that is only part of the explanation. For many tales have been told of exile and homecoming. Many heroes have endured suffering, temptation, and loss. This raises another question. Why did this particular story become one of the foundational stories by which an entire civilisation came to understand itself?
The answer cannot simply be that the Odyssey is a great poem. Great stories abound. Homer became much more than a great storyteller. He became the educator of Greece. Long before Socrates knocked about, generations of Greeks had learnt from Homer what courage looked like, what honour demanded, what it meant to be a husband, a father, a king, a host, a guest—even what it meant to be human. His poems furnished the imaginative material from which philosophy itself would arise.
In Plato’s dialogues, Socrates often begins an investigation with a Homeric commonplace. Plato himself repeatedly challenged Homer, even proposing, in the Republic, to banish poets (meaning mainly Homer, Hesiod, and Simonides) from his ideal city. Yet, Plato quotes Homer so frequently that he seems unable to think without him. Even as he seeks to supplant Homer as Greece’s teacher, he continues to converse with him. Aristotle is more admiring, praising Homer as the unsurpassed master of epic poetry. The three greatest philosophers of antiquity differed profoundly in temperament and outlook. Yet all three remained rooted in Homer, each responding to him in his own way.
That is what distinguishes a foundational story from a work of literature, however great it might be. It does not merely entertain or even inspire. It furnishes the imaginative world within which a civilisation comes to understand itself. Successive generations may react to it, reinterpret it, or seek, like Plato, to transcend it—but always from within it.
Every civilisation seems to possess one or two such treasures. India has the Mahabharata, Persia, the Shahnameh, the Hebrew world, the stories of the Bible. Remarkably few people, though they may keep a copy, read these vast works from cover to cover. Many Europeans and Americans who revere Homer have never read the Iliad or Odyssey, just as many Indians, though familiar with the Pandava brothers, have never pored over the hundred thousand verses of the Mahabharata. We do not choose these stories any more than we choose our native language. We inherit them. They become part of our mental landscape, furnishing our images, our ideals, and our sense of what it means to be brave, faithful, cunning, or wise.
They are as the sacred fire tended by the Vestal Virgins in ancient Rome: seldom approached, yet somehow reassuring simply because it continues to burn. Quietly, they illuminate the language, values, and images through which successive generations come to understand themselves. Because they are so rich, they are never exhausted. Each age returns to them with new questions and finds new answers.
The history of the Odyssey is, in part, a history of these returns. James Joyce transformed Odysseus into Leopold Bloom, erring not across the wine-dark sea but through the sooty streets of Dublin. Derek Walcott carried the Odyssey to the Caribbean, discovering in it a language for exile, colonialism, and homecoming.
The Odyssey is an ancient poem about one man’s journey home. Perhaps that is why we have never stopped returning to it.
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If this essay has left you wondering why certain stories continue to speak across centuries, you may enjoy The Meaning of Myth—an exploration of how myths become enduring sources of meaning, shaping not only our imagination but the civilisations we inherit.
Whatever is done for love always occurs beyond good and evil. – Nietzsche
Splitting is a very common ego defense mechanism; it can be defined as the division or polarization of beliefs, actions, objects, or persons into good and bad by focusing selectively on their positive or negative attributes. This is often seen in politics, for example, when members of the Labour Party portray members of the Conservative Party as narrow-minded and self-interested, and conversely when members of the Conservative Party caricature members of the Labour Party as self-righteous hypocrites. Other examples of splitting are the deeply religious person who thinks of others as being either blessed or damned, the child of divorced parents who idolises one parent and shuns the other, and the hospital in-patient who sees the doctors as helpful and dedicated and the nurses as lazy and incompetent. An example of splitting in literature can be found in JD Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye. The main protagonist, Holden Caulfield, is mystified by adulthood. To help cope with his fear of becoming an adult, he thinks of adulthood as a world of entirely bad things such as superficiality and hypocrisy (‘phoniness’) and of childhood as a world of entirely good things such as innocence, curiosity, and honesty. He tells his younger sister Phoebe that he imagines childhood as an idyllic field of rye in which children romp and play, and himself as the ‘catcher in the rye’ who stands on the edge of a cliff, catching the children as they threaten to fall over (and presumably die/become adults).
Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody’s around – nobody big, I mean – except me. And I’m standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff – I mean if they’re running and they don’t look where they’re going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That’s all I’d do all day. I’d just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it’s crazy, but that’s the only thing I’d really like to be.
In contrast to JD Salinger, Miguel de Cervantes uses splitting to great comical effect as his main protagonist, the self-styled Don Quixote de la Mancha, guides us through a world that he has repopulated with heroes and villains, princesses and harlots, giants and dwarves – with the heroes being the greatest, the villains the most cruel, the ladies the fairest and most virtuous, and so on. ‘Take care, your worship,’ cries Sancho Pancha, Don Quixote’s peasant-turned-squire, ‘those things over there are not giants but windmills.’ Splitting diffuses the anxiety that arises from our inability to grasp the nuances and complexities of a given situation or state of affairs by simplifying and schematising the situation and thereby making it easier to think about; it also reinforces our sense of self as good and virtuous by effectively demonizing all those who do not share in our opinions and values. On the other hand, such a compartmentalization of opposites leaves us with a distinctly distorted picture of reality and a restricted range of thoughts and emotions; it also affects our ability to attract and maintain relationships, not only because it is tedious and unbecoming, but also because it can easily flip, with friends and lovers being thought of as personified virtue at one time and then as personified vice at another (and back and forth). Splitting also arises in groups, when members of the in-group are seen to have mostly positive attributes, whereas members of out-groups are seen to have mostly negative attributes – a phenomenon that contributes to groupthink. Finally, it is worth noting that both fairy tales and the Church feature a number of sharp splits, for example, heroes and villains, good and evil, heaven and hell, angels and demons, and saints and sinners; and that the greatest characters of literature, such as the Achilles or the Odysseus of Homer and the Anthony or the Cleopatra of Shakespeare, contain large measures of both good and bad, with the one being intimately related to the other.
There is no coming to consciousness without pain. - CG Jung
Carl Gustav Jung was born in 1875 in the canton of Thurgau to Paul Jung, a poor rural pastor in the Swiss reformed Church, and to Emilie Preiswerk, a melancholic woman who claimed to be visited by spirits at night. His paternal grandfather Carl Gustav Jung, after whom he was named, was a physician who was rumoured to be the illegitimate son of Goethe, and who rose to become Rector of Basel University and Grand Master of the Swiss Lodge of Freemasons. His maternal grandfather Samuel Preiswerk was an eccentric theologian who had visions, conversed with the dead, and devoted his life to learning Hebrew in the belief that it was the language spoken in heaven. He used to make his daughter Emilie (Jung’s mother) sit behind him while he composed his sermons, so as to prevent the devil from peering over his shoulder. When Jung was three years old, his mother had a nervous breakdown for which she needed to spend several months in hospital. In his autobiography of 1961, Memory, Dreams, Reflections, he wrote ‘From then on I always felt mistrustful when the word ‘love’ was spoken. The feeling I associated with ‘woman’ was for a long time that of innate unreliability.’ Jung’s father was kind but weak-willed, and all too accepting of the religious dogma in which he had long lost all faith.
Jung was a solitary and introverted child who imagined that he had two personalities, that of a typical schoolboy of his time (Personality No 1), and that of a dignified, authoritative, and influential man from the past (Personality No 2). He once carved a tiny mannequin into the end of a wooden ruler, which he kept together with a painted stone in a pencil case in his attic. He periodically returned to the mannequin, bringing to it scrolls inscribed in a secret language of his invention. Perhaps unsurprisingly, he was not popular at school. At the age of 12, he received a blow to the head and for a moment was unconscious. He lay on the ground for much longer than necessary and thought, ‘Now you won’t have to go to school anymore’. For the next six months, he avoided school by fainting each time he was made to go, an experience which gave him an early insight into hysteria.
Inspired by a dream, Jung entered the University of Basel in 1895 to study natural science and medicine. His father’s premature death one year later prompted his mother to comment, rather eerily, ‘He died in time for you’. During his early years at the University of Basel, Jung had a dream in which he was making painful headway through dense fog, with a tiny light in the cup of his hands and a gigantic black figure chasing after him. When he awoke he realised that the black figure was his own shadow, brought into being by the light that he was carrying: ‘…this light was my consciousness, the only light that I have. My own understanding is the sole treasure I possess, and the greatest.’ After presenting a paper on The Limits of the Exact Sciences, he spent two years attending and recording the séances of a young medium, his cousin, Hélène Preiswerk. He submitted his observations in the form of a doctoral thesis entitled On the Psychology and Pathology of So-Called Occult Phenomena.
Towards the end of his studies, a reading of Krafft-Ebing’s textbook of psychiatry led Jung to choose psychiatry as a career. The Preface alone had such a profound effect on him that he had to stand up to catch his breath: ‘Here alone the two currents of my interest could flow together and in a united stream dig their own bed. Here was the empirical field common to biological and spiritual facts, which I had everywhere sought and nowhere found.’ Jung was taken on at the renowned Burghölzli Psychiatric Hospital in Zürich as an assistant to Eugen Bleuler, who went down in history as the man who coined the term ‘schizophrenia’. Bleuler set Jung to work on Galton’s word-association test, and in 1906 he published ‘Studies in Word Association’, which he thought provided hard evidence for the existence of unconscious complexes. He sent a copy to Freud, and on their first meeting in Vienna the two men conversed without interruption for thirteen hours.
Jung needed a father as much as Freud needed a son, and Freud formally anointed Jung his ‘son and heir’. However, as time passed, it became increasingly clear that Jung was unable to accept Freud’s assumptions that human motivation is exclusively sexual, or that the unconscious mind is entirely personal. For Jung, sexuality was but one aspect or mode of expression of a broader ‘life force’, and beneath the personal unconscious there was a deeper and more important layer that contained the entire psychic heritage of mankind. The existence of this ‘collective unconscious’ had been hinted at by Jung’s childhood dreams and experiences, and confirmed by the delusions and hallucinations of psychotic patients which contained symbols and images that occurred in myths and fairy-tales from all around the world. In his book of 1912, Transformations and Symbols of the Libido, Jung replaced Freud’s concept of libido with a much broader concept of undifferentiated psychic energy, arguing that undifferentiated psychic energy could ‘crystallise’ into the universal symbols contained in dreams and myths, for example, into the hero’s slaying of the dragon, which represents the struggle of the adolescent ego for deliverance from parental dominance. For Jung, the purpose of life was ‘individuation’, which involves pursuing one’s own vision of the truth and, in so doing, realising one’s fullest potential as a human being. If this meant disagreeing with Freud, then so be it. In 1913, on the eve of the First World War, Jung and Freud broke off their relationship.
Once again Jung was alone, and he spent the next few years in a troubled but highly creative state of mind that verged on psychosis and led him to a ‘confrontation with the unconscious’. By then Jung had had five children with his wife Emma Rauschenbach, the daughter of a rich industrialist. Despite being happily married, he felt that he needed a muse as well as a home-maker, observing that ‘the pre-requisite of a good marriage … is the license to be unfaithful’. The marital strife that resulted from his affairs, and particularly from his affair with a former patient called Toni Wolff, contributed to his troubled state of mind, and Emma accepted Toni as much from a concern for Jung’s sanity as from a desire to save her marriage. During his confrontation with the unconscious, Jung gained first-hand experience of psychotic material in which he found a ‘matrix of mythopoeic imagination which has vanished from our rational age’. Like Gilgamesh, Odysseus, Heracles, Orpheus, and Aeneas before him, he travelled deep down into an abyssal underworld where he conversed with Salome, a beautiful young woman who was the archetype of the feminine, and with Philemon, an old man with a white beard and the wings of a kingfisher who was the archetype of the wise old man. Although Salome and Philemon were products of his unconscious, they had a life of their own and said things that he had not previously thought. In Philemon, Jung had at long last found the father-figure that both Freud and his own father had singularly failed to be. More than a father-figure, Philemon was a guru, and the projection of what Jung himself was later to become – the ‘wise old man of Zürich’. At the end of the First World War, Jung re-emerged into sanity, and considered that he had found in his madness ‘the prima materia for a lifetime’s work’.
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