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What Homer’s Odyssey Teaches Us About Nostos

Odysseus and Calypso
Calypso offered him eternal youth and immortality. He chose home.

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

What’s Homer got to do with the sitcom Friends?

Over the past ten or fifteen years, journalists have contacted me time and again with questions about nostalgia. More often than not, they want to know the same thing: Why do we keep rewatching Friends? Why do we return to the same books, films, songs, and places, even when we know them by heart?

The obvious answer is that familiar things comfort us in uncertain times. That is true. But I have come to think there is a deeper answer—one that, almost three thousand years ago, Homer already understood.

If Homer’s Iliad is the epic of kleos (glory), his Odyssey is the epic of nostos (homecoming). As a psychiatrist and the author of a book on the emotions, I have been writing about nostalgia for many years. But only recently did I begin to see the Odyssey through that same lens.

The word nostalgia was coined in 1688 by the Swiss medical student Johannes Hofer. A portmanteau of nostos and another Greek word, algos (‘pain’ or ‘ache’), it originally referred to the homesickness of Swiss mercenaries fighting in flat and foreign lands. Military physicians blamed the condition, among others, on ear and brain damage from the constant clanging of cowbells. Today, of course, we no longer think of nostalgia as a mental illness but as a natural, common, and often beneficial emotion.

Although the word is relatively recent, the feeling is ancient. No writer understood it more profoundly than Homer.

When we first meet Odysseus, he is not blinding the Cyclops or resisting the Sirens. He is sitting alone on the shore of Calypso’s island, gazing out to sea and weeping. Calypso has offered him everything that human beings are supposed to desire. She is beautiful and deeply in love with him. More significantly, she promises him eternal life with eternal youth. Despite all this, he daily returns to the same lonely place by the water and pines for Ithaca.

At first sight, his yearning seems irrational. Ithaca is a small, rocky island. His wife Penelope has grown older. His palace has been overrun by arrogant suitors. Why exchange paradise for hardship, mortality, and uncertainty?

Because what Odysseus longs for is not a better life, but his own life.

This is what makes the scene so moving. Odysseus does not simply long for a place in his past. He longs for the life that belongs to him: his wife, his son, his kingdom, his mortality—in short, his identity. Ithaca is not merely a destination but the place in which he can return to being himself.

Later in the story, the Phaeacian bard Demodocus sings of the Trojan War. Odysseus, who is in disguise, covers his face and weeps. Homer compares his grief to that of a woman throwing herself upon the body of her fallen husband, before she is dragged away into slavery. Only then does Odysseus reveal his identity and begin to tell the tale of his wanderings. As he reclaims his story, his voice blends with that of Homer. Memory becomes narrative, and narrative begins to heal memory.

Virgil echoed the famous scene at the beginning of the Aeneid, the foundational epic of Rome. Arriving in Carthage, Aeneas sees murals depicting the fall of Troy. He too breaks down into tears, before telling his story. Mourning the loss of his Trojan kin, he cries out, Sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt: ‘These are the tears of things, and mortal things touch the mind.’

Neither was nostalgia limited to Mycenaean princes. In 586 BCE, Babylonian forces destroyed Jerusalem and the First Temple, forcing many Jews into exile in Babylon. In the Bible, these Babylonian captives lament the loss of their homeland, in verses later put to music by Boney M: ‘By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, Yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion.’ 

Different peoples, different ages, different homes—but always the same tears. Nostalgia may be a seventeenth-century coinage, but the feeling is as old as humanity itself.

Today, psychologists understand nostalgia not as a mental disorder or disturbance but as an emotional resource. Nostalgia strengthens our sense of self and identity by anchoring our present in a larger narrative and reconnecting us with the people and places that have shaped us. In fact, nostalgia can be thought of as the counterpart of anticipation, and seems to serve the same purpose. The hauntings of times gone by, and the imaginings of times to come, strengthen us in lesser times.

This is one reason so many of us return to Friends. Those of us who are old enough often say that we miss a world before mobile phones and social media, when friends met spontaneously, conversations stretched late into the evening, and no one thought of ghosting you. The Berlin Wall had fallen, the Cold War was over, and many of us were riding high on the Wind of Change. There is a lot of truth in that. But I suspect we are also longing for something more personal. We are remembering a time in our lives when connection seemed fuller, the future seemed more open, and we ourselves were younger. Friends becomes a doorway not only onto that lost world, but also onto the person who inhabited it.

We think of nostalgia as longing for the past. Homer suggests something deeper. We long not simply for what has been, but for the life that feels most truly our own.

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If this essay spoke to you, you might look into The Meaning of Myth and Heaven and Hell: The Psychology of the Emotions.

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What Homer’s Odyssey Teaches Us About Great Literature

Odysseus and Calypso
The longest journey is the one home to ourselves.

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

Why do some books remain alive for thousands of years while others, equally entertaining in their day, quietly disappear? The books that survive are those in which each generation discovers a different book. Even within a single lifetime, we never read the same book twice. Great books are mirrors. Every time we return to them, we see something different—not because the book has changed, but because we have grown. 

Homer’s Odyssey is perhaps the greatest example. No one simply receives Homer. Every translator, filmmaker, and reader enters into a conversation with him. Emily Wilson’s celebrated translation, the first complete English translation by a woman, has drawn renewed attention to aspects of the epic that many earlier translators scarcely noticed, particularly the experiences and voices of women. Wilson has argued that previous translators sometimes allowed their own assumptions to colour the text—for example, referring to enslaved palace women as ‘whores’ and ‘sluts’ where the Greek uses neutral terms or simple feminine pronouns. Christopher Nolan, meanwhile, has made a screen adaptation that many reviewers have read through the lens of contemporary concerns such as trauma, displacement, and identity. Every generation inherits the same three-thousand-year-old poem, yet somehow discovers a different Odyssey.

Part of the explanation lies in the hero himself. At first sight, Odysseus seems an unlikely everyman. He is a king, a war hero, the favourite of Athena, the architect of the Trojan Horse, and cleverer than almost everyone else. Yet Homer never reduces him to any one quality. Wilson famously translates his opening epithet, polytropos, as ‘complicated’: ‘Tell me about a complicated man. Muse, tell me how he wandered and was lost…’ Elsewhere Homer describes him as ‘much-enduring’ (polytlas) and ‘great-hearted’ (megalētōr). From the very beginning, Odysseus emerges not as a one-dimensional hero but as a many-sided human being, shaped as much by suffering as by triumph. In the twentieth century, Lord Raglan identified twenty-two recurring features of the mythical hero—miraculous birth, an attempt on the infant’s life, a royal destiny, and so on. Figures such as Theseus, Oedipus, and Moses satisfy twenty or more. Odysseus satisfies only eight. He stands halfway between mythical hero and ordinary man. Brave yet frightened, wise yet often foolish, loyal yet tempted, he struggles, learns, and changes. We do not admire Odysseus because he is perfect. We recognise ourselves in him because he isn’t.

Great books are psychologically spacious. Into them, we project not only ourselves, but our deepest concerns—and the concerns of our age. Looking into the Odyssey, Freud found a map of the unconscious. Simone Weil discovered a moral philosopher of attention. James Joyce found the voice of modern consciousness. Given my background as a psychiatrist and philosopher, I tend to read the Odyssey as a psychological and moral tale. On the surface, it is a geographical tale about a man trying to get home. But underneath, it is a psychological tale about finding our way home to ourselves and becoming the people we were meant to be. Every island offers Odysseus a different way of abandoning his journey—and abandoning himself. Each asks him the same question in a different form. The Lotus-Eaters ask, ‘Will you forget who you are?’ Circe asks, ‘Will you surrender your humanity to animality and pleasure?’ Calypso asks, ‘Will you give up your mortal life?’ The Cyclops Polyphemus asks, ‘Will you let your pride destroy you?’ The Cattle of Helios ask, ‘Can you resist immediate gratification?’ You, reading the same poem, may yet discover an entirely different Odyssey. That is not a weakness of the work. It is what enables it to endure.

Not all of us get to sail around the Mediterranean navigating Sirens and sea monsters. But all of us are on a journey home to ourselves. Like Odysseus, we too must grow and change before we can truly arrive. His wanderings are not simple delay but essential schooling. Every trial teaches him something—or, more importantly, strips something away. He must learn patience and perseverance, love and remembrance, humility and restraint… Only by losing and recovering himself does he become fit to return to Ithaca. Ithaca, or home, is not simply a place, but a life that feels genuinely our own.

The Odyssey does more than invite interpretation. It embraces it, making it part of the story itself. Many people imagine that the epic unfolds in straightforward chronological order, from Troy to Ithaca. In fact, most of the adventures for which it is famous—the Cyclops, Circe, the Sirens, Scylla and Charybdis—are narrated retrospectively, as Odysseus recounts them to the Phaeacians. But before he begins speaking, Homer has him weep. Hearing the bard Demodocus sing of Troy, Odysseus breaks down. Only then does he recover his own story. As he weaves his years of wandering into a coherent narrative, his voice blends with that of Homer. In telling his story, he transforms himself. His next journey will take him home.

For nearly three thousand years, we have become the Phaeacians, listening to a weary traveller trying to make sense of his life, as we try to make sense of our own. All along, we thought we were interpreting the Odyssey. All along, the Odyssey was interpreting us.

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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 why myths endure, and how they continue to shape our imagination, our values, and the civilisations we inherit.

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One Man’s Search for Meaning

Man in front of a bleak road
He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how. —Nietzsche & Frankl

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

Viktor Frankl (1905–1997) was an Austrian psychiatrist and neurologist, the founder of logotherapy. His experiences in Nazi concentration camps profoundly shaped his outlook, which found its fullest expression in Man’s Search for Meaning, one of the most influential books of the twentieth century.

Viktor Emil Frankl was born in Vienna in 1905. As a schoolboy, he attended evening lectures in philosophy and psychology. While still in his teens, he sent one of his papers to Sigmund Freud, who arranged to have it published in an international psychoanalytic journal. Frankl later joined Alfred Adler’s rival circle, only to break away after concluding that both Freud and Adler had got it wrong.

Freud argued that we are driven primarily by the pursuit of pleasure. Adler emphasised power, mastery, and the overcoming of inferiority. Frankl proposed a third possibility: meaning.

From 1928 to 1930, Frankl organised counselling programmes for suicidal students, which supported his growing belief that people needed reasons to live as well as reasons not to die. After qualifying in medicine in 1930, he specialised in neurology and psychiatry, treating patients with depression and suicidal thoughts.

The Decision

In 1941, Frankl obtained a visa to emigrate to the United States. Then one evening, he returned home to find his father holding a fragment of marble salvaged from a synagogue that had been destroyed by the Nazis. The fragment bore part of the Fifth Commandment: Honour thy father and thy mother. Frankl chose to remain by his parents in Vienna, tearing up his passage to safety.

The following year, Frankl and his family were deported. His parents, brother, and pregnant wife all perished. On arriving at Auschwitz, the guards confiscated the manuscript that he had been working on for years.

Stripped of his possessions, his profession, and even his name, he found himself wondering what remained of his former self.

He later recalled:

We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of human freedoms—to choose one’s own attitude in any given set of circumstances—to choose one’s own way.

Frankl’s conclusion echoes that of the Stoics: while our circumstances may be taken from us, our response remains our own. Instead of sinking into despair, Frankl found purpose in imagining the future. He pictured himself lecturing to students about the psychology of the camps, subliming his suffering into knowledge that might help others or illuminate the human condition. He silently reconstructed the manuscript in his mind and, after the war, painstakingly rewrote it from memory.

He also wrote Man’s Search for Meaning, which he drafted in little more than a week. Intended as a brief account of his experiences, it went on to sell many millions of copies.

The ideas he had carried through the camps became the foundation of an entirely new approach to psychotherapy.

The Will to Meaning

Frankl’s message is ultimately one of hope. Even in the most absurd, painful, and dispiriting of circumstances, life can be given meaning—and so too can suffering. Life in the camps confirmed his conviction that our deepest motivation is neither pleasure, as Freud had believed, nor power, as Adler had believed, but meaning. Pleasure and success matter, but they cannot satisfy us for long unless they serve a larger purpose. As Frankl wrote, ‘Happiness cannot be pursued, but must ensue.’

These ideas became the foundation of logotherapy (from the Greek logos, meaning ‘word’, ‘reason’, or ‘principle’), which is often described as the ‘Third Viennese School of Psychotherapy’ for coming after those of Freud and Adler. Part philosophy and part psychotherapy, logotherapy belongs to the existential tradition—but differs from its mainstream in holding that meaning is discovered as well as created.

Logotherapy seeks not merely to relieve symptoms but to help people discover meaning in their lives. According to Frankl, meaning can be found in three principal ways: through creating or contributing something of value; through our relationships, especially the loving ones; and through the attitude we adopt in the face of unavoidable suffering.

Depression and Meaning

Frankl coined the term ‘Sunday neurosis’ to refer to the dejection that many people feel at the end of the working week when they finally have time to realise how empty and meaningless their lives have become. This existential vacuum can lead to all manner of distractions and compensations: anxiety, avoidance, binge eating, drinking, overworking, and overspending. In the short term, these distractions carpet over the existential vacuum, but in the longer term, they prevent action from being taken and meaning from being found.

For Frankl, depression results when the gap between what a person is and what they ought to be, or once wished to be, becomes so large that it can no longer be carpeted over. The person’s goals seem far out of reach and they can no longer envisage a future. As in Psalm 41, abyssus abyssum invocat—’hell brings forth hell,’ or, in an alternative translation, ‘the deep calls unto the deep.’

Thus, depression is our way of telling ourselves that something is seriously wrong and needs working through and changing.

Unless change can be made, there will continue to be a mismatch between our lived experience and our desired experience, between the meaninglessness of everyday life and the innate drive to find meaning, to self-actualise, to be all that we can be.

From an existential standpoint, the experience of depression obliges us to become aware of our mortality and freedom, and challenges us to exercise the latter within the framework of the former.

By meeting this ultimate challenge, we can break out of the cast that has been imposed upon us, discover who we truly are, and, in so doing, begin to give deep meaning to our lives.

After the War

After the war, Frankl returned to Vienna, where he rebuilt both his life and his career. In 1947, he married Eleonore Schwindt, with whom he had a daughter, Gabriele. He became head of neurology at the Vienna Polyclinic Hospital and lectured at universities around the world. He refused to let himself be defined by his wartime experiences. He remained an enthusiastic mountaineer into old age and, in his sixties, fulfilled a lifelong ambition of earning a pilot’s licence.

By the time of his death in 1997, Man’s Search for Meaning had sold millions of copies in dozens of languages. It continues to inspire psychologists, philosophers, doctors, teachers, clergy, and countless ordinary readers searching for purpose amid suffering, loss, and uncertainty. He helped broaden psychology beyond pathology, arguing that resilience depends not merely on optimism or self-esteem but on having a reason to get up in the morning.

His message has become more relevant than ever. Many people today enjoy unprecedented freedom and prosperity, while struggling with loneliness, anxiety, and a pervasive sense of emptiness. Technology offers endless distraction, consumerism endless temptation, and social media endless comparison. Yet none can answer the question that mattered most to Frankl: What is my life for?

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I revisit Frankl in The Meaning of Madness and The Art of Failure: The Anti Self-Help Guide.

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Why the Answer Is More Complicated Than It Seems

A lizard in a drawer
Some emotions are so ancient that we share them with lizards.

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

One day, while holidaying in Mauritius, I opened a kitchen drawer to find a large lizard staring back at me. Before I had time to think, I jumped back and slammed the drawer shut. Only afterwards did I notice that my heart was racing and my body primed for action. But as soon as reason reasserted itself, the fear evaporated, leaving me with nothing more than a mildly inconvenient lizard problem—which, if memory serves, I chose to ignore.

The lizard’s reaction, of course, was just as swift, if not swifter. It darted for cover before either of us had had time to think. In that split second, human and reptile behaved in remarkably similar ways.

This encounter raises an intriguing question. Are some emotions so ancient and basic that they are shared across much of the animal kingdom?

An Ancient Idea

The idea that some emotions are more fundamental than others is an old one. The Book of Rites, one of the Confucian classics, identifies seven basic ‘feelings of men’: joy, anger, sadness, fear, love, liking, and disliking.

In the twentieth century, psychologists sought a more scientific answer. Paul Ekman proposed six universal emotions—anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise—while Robert Plutchik proposed eight, arranged in opposing pairs.

The theory was simple and elegant. These emotions evolved because they solved recurring problems faced by our remote ancestors. Fear helped us escape danger. Disgust kept us away from disease. Anger enabled us to defend ourselves and our resources. Being evolutionarily ancient, these basic emotions are thought to be ‘hard-wired’: fast, automatic, and largely unconscious.

It’s an appealing idea—and Plutchik’s Wheel does look striking. But is it true?

Plutchik's WHeel
Plutchik’s Wheel

Is Fear the Most Basic Emotion?

The difficulty is that psychologists cannot even agree on the list. Some propose six basic emotions, others seven or eight, still others many more.

But there is one emotion on which almost everyone agrees: fear. Fear is found almost everywhere in the animal kingdom. A gazelle bolts before a lion. A cat startles at a loud noise. A lizard darts for cover. Before any of these creatures has had time to think, its body has already kicked in.

Fear, more than any other, may be the prototype of a basic emotion.

Beyond Fear

Other emotions are less straightforward. Take anger. We often become angry not simply because something unpleasant has happened, but because we believe we have been insulted, cheated, or treated unfairly. Those judgements involve much more than an unthinking reflex.

Someone pushes past you in a queue. If you assume they simply failed to notice you, you may feel only mild irritation. But if you conclude that they deliberately ignored you because they think they’re more important than you, you are much more likely to become angry. Same event. Different interpretation.

Even fear, perhaps the most basic of all emotions, can be triggered by beliefs and values that are themselves shaped by culture. Imagine waking up in a cold sweat, believing that you have slept through an important exam. Your panic has little to do with the examination itself, and everything to do with what the examination represents: success or failure, opportunity or disappointment, status, perhaps even self-worth. A lizard can fear a predator, but not an examination. The emotional machinery may be ancient, but what sets it in motion is often anything but.

With fear, culture often shapes the object of the emotion. With more complex emotions, it can shape the emotion itself. Schadenfreude (German, ‘harm-joy’)—the pleasure derived from another person’s misfortune—is not common to all peoples in all times.

Neither is romantic love, which seems to have emerged in tandem with the novel. In Madame Bovary, itself a novel, Gustave Flaubert tells us that Emma Bovary only found out about romantic love through ‘the refuse of old lending libraries’.

The Emotional Animal

The search for the basic emotions has taught us something important, even if it has failed to produce a definitive list.

Some emotions are so ancient that we share them even with birds, lizards, and fish, although what triggers them may be entirely different and shaped by our beliefs and values. Others depend increasingly upon language, memory, imagination, and culture.

Perhaps, then, the question is not Which emotions are basic?

It is How much of every emotion is basic?

The startle reflex, the racing heart, and the impulse to flee belong to our evolutionary inheritance. But what those responses are directed towards—and, in more complex emotions, even the emotions themselves—are increasingly shaped by language, culture, and the stories we tell ourselves.

Our emotions are at once among the oldest things about us—and among the newest.

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I explore the basic emotions and much more in Heaven and Hell: The Psychology of the Emotions.

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Why Are People No Wiser Than Before?

The priestess of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi (Oracle of Delphi)
 
The priestess of Apollo at Delphi. Before seeking answers from the oracle, visitors first met with the words, ‘Know Thyself.’

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

Critical thinking has never been more popular. Schools, universities, and employers encourage us to evaluate evidence, identify logical fallacies, and recognise cognitive biases. Entire books are devoted to helping us think more clearly.

Yet intelligent people continue to believe ridiculous things.

They buy into political propaganda, dubious medical claims, financial scams, cults, conspiracy theories, and all manner of comforting or self-serving lies. They do so not because they lack intelligence, and often not because they lack evidence.

They do so because modern critical thinking shares our greatest blind spot. It teaches us how to analyse arguments, but not how to analyse ourselves.

Most books on critical thinking treat reasoning as though it were mathematics. Learn the rules and you will think more clearly. But reason is not merely an intellectual achievement. It is also a moral and psychological one. We do not merely need sharper minds, but greater courage and honesty.

The greatest obstacle to reason is neither dullness nor ignorance. It is our unconscious need to protect our sense of self. This is the realm of self-deception.

Unlike ordinary deception, self-deception is unconscious. We do not deliberately lie to ourselves. Instead, we unconsciously reshape reality to preserve a comforting image of who we are. We rationalise our failures, project our faults onto others, and convince ourselves that what we want to be true is true. These are not simply errors of reasoning but acts of self-protection.

This is why intelligent people can cling to implausible beliefs despite overwhelming evidence. Often, they are not defending an argument so much as defending themselves.

Cognitive biases explain how our thinking goes astray. Self-deception explains why.

To think clearly, then, it is not enough to study logic, rhetoric, and cognitive bias. We must also understand the unconscious forces that distort our judgement before reason has even had a chance to speak. Self-deception is not peripheral to critical thinking. It belongs at its very heart.

More than two thousand years ago, Socrates reached much the same conclusion. Rather than speculate about the natural world, he turned philosophy towards the study of ourselves.

In Plato’s Phaedrus, as they pass the place where Boreas is said to have carried off Orithyia, Phaedrus asks Socrates whether he believes the story. Socrates politely declines the invitation. While still ignorant of himself, he says, he has no interest in such questions:

I must first know myself, as the Delphian inscription says; to be curious about that which is not my concern, while I am still in ignorance of my own self, would be ridiculous.

For Socrates, self-knowledge came before all other enquiry.

Perhaps it should also come before critical thinking.

Socrates had been inspired by the oracle at Delphi, the greatest oracle of the ancient world. Long before there were textbooks on critical thinking, there was a two-word inscription above the Temple of Apollo at Delphi:

Γνῶθι σεαυτόν

Know thyself.

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If this essay spoke to you, you might look into Hide and Seek: The Psychology of Self-Deception and How to Think Like Plato and Speak Like Cicero.

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