POETRY AND HEALING

My Odysseus: A Multiplicity of Selves

by David Shaddock

This regular column looks at poetry to illuminate issues relevant to health, mental health, and coping with our lives today.

1975, GEORGIA STRAIT. On the chart it looks like I can clear the bridge that spans the two halves of Pender Island. But the tide is higher than I figured, and now my backstay is snagged on a turnbuckle. I manage to backwind the jib to get some reverse momentum, and—after a near-eternity—the wire rope twangs loose with a terrible recoil and we spin away. It's hardly Scylla and Charybdis, but the combination of pig-headedness and clever escape makes this story at least Odyssey-adjacent.

I'm forever looking for myself in poems. Sometimes, when I'm dressing, I'll say to the mirror, quoting William Carlos Williams, "Who shall say I am not / the happy genius of my household." I just counted five translations of the Odyssey on my bookshelf. A life spent with the poem, mostly in awe and perplexity. As a young man, it was the tests and quests that grabbed me. I've always been attracted to sea stories. I saw Jason and the Argonauts a half dozen times as a child, slurped up Joshua Slocum. Throw in a little Joseph Campbell and you have a picture of me as a young man. In midlife, it was Odysseus's lostness that moved me, trying to find the way home, back to his family. The appearance of Emily Wilson's terrifically readable translation in 2018 sparked another phase. I read it to my grandson every night for months, and I've been studying it in a group with other poets for a year and a half. And now, with Christopher Nolan's movie on every screen in town, we're having an Odyssey moment together. (For what it's worth, I saw the movie two times, loved it the first, felt more meh the second. Matt Damon seems too exuberance-free, as if he were auditioning for Hamlet.)

Homer uses the word polytropos to describe Odysseus, which Wilson translates as "complicated," while I might say "hard to pin down." Joseph Campbell sees an archetypal hero, while James Joyce turned him into a dreamy Jewish Dubliner. I see Odysseus as both the cleverest guy in any room and the guy everyone misunderstands and kicks around. Both of which ring the "just like me" bell. I'd hoped to be a running back in high school, but the coach put me on the offensive line, where I learned two things: I love to hit but hate being hit. This must have showed, since I lasted only a year on the team. In pickup games, though, I did master a head fake, looking left and throwing right.

God-vexed and god-defiant, hapless beggar and remorseless-spear-thrower, Calypso-diddler and philandering-slave-girl-hanger: along with every character in the poem, I'm asking, "who is this guy?" "What makes him tick?" Questions of Odysseus's motivation and identity slide me into my therapist chair. Psychoanalytic theory, where I spend a lot of my time, has often discovered (or projected) clues to human nature in the classics. Is the key to both our natures the internal struggle to restrain our sexual and violent instincts, as Freud thought, and metabolize the guilt these instincts engender? Is the human condition really a "theater of the mind," in which "guilty man" emerges chastened but more-or-less intact? Or are our lives buffeted by forces and histories over which we have little control, as later, developmentally minded theorists like Heinz Kohut maintained? In Kohut's view, childhood deficits in caregiver attunement and responsiveness can create "tragic man," buffeted by the vicissitudes of life, just as Odysseus is buffeted by the sea and the monsters and demigods that inhabit it. Or, as more contemporary psychoanalytic theory holds, is the idea that we have a definable, unitary self an illusion? Are we some one thing, or does Odysseus, "the lord of lies," reveal a profound truth when he says to Cyclops that "Noman" put out his eye? Let's look at Odysseus through these different lenses.

Guilty Man. First up: Freud's theory of guilty man. Though Matt Damon looks stricken as Calypso helps him retrieve his memories, it is difficult to map a Freudian interpretation onto the text of the Odyssey. Empathy, which allows us to imagine another's suffering—and thus is a prerequisite to guilt—is mostly absent. Blown off course on the way home from Troy, he comes to the land of the Cicones. "I sacked / the town and killed the men. We took the wives and shared the riches equally among us," he tells his host Alcinous. He blames his men, not his own lack of preparation, for their being drunk when the Cicones counterattacked. Freud assumed our libidinous and violent impulses were drives, a universal substratum of the human psyche. Hence his famous dictum, "Where Id was, Ego shall be." But the distinction between Id and Ego is not that clear in Odysseus, and, more importantly, not that troubling to him. He barely glances at the dying suitors "heaped across each other like fish." "Still scheming," he does not miss a beat. He kills the sword-bearing suitors as well as the disarmed supplicants. He does, however, spare the poet.

For me, the absence of guilt in the Odyssey is both bracing and troubling. The Homeric gods are as Id-driven as Odysseus, sometimes more so. At times they uphold a higher moral order, other times they seem to cherish mayhem for its own sake. But it's the bracing side that gets me. I've referred to our endless inner dialog of resentments and disappointments as "slightland." It's a relief to get an exit visa. I'm thrilled by energetic lines like "Screaming filled the hall, / as skulls were cracked; the whole floor ran with blood." I once told a wise therapist that my totem animal was a dolphin. He suggested that I should consider adopting the shark as well.

Tragic Man. Most of the time in the Odyssey we see Odysseus as a man of action, cocksure and lacking in remorse, even when his actions have caused the death of his men. But there are instances when we see the suffering inside that façade. Here he is in Phaeacia, near the end of his exile, listening to a poet describe his quarrel with Achilles, in which Achilles holds him responsible for the suffering the war brought:

When [the poet] would start again; Odysseus

would moan and hide his head beneath his cloak.

only Alcinous could see his tears, and heard

his sobbing.…

Alcinous, sensitive to Odysseus's grief and his shame at being exposed, quickly urges the start of athletic games as a distraction. A poet's song triggering memories, a kindly king's comforting gesture: this is a moment of vulnerability and relationship.

Heinz Kohut, a follower of Freud who helped initiate what came to be known as the relational turn—away from guilt and drive theory and toward a world of relationships and interdependency—coined the term "tragic man" as an alternative to Freud's "guilty man." Our tragedy is that, as the philosopher Martin Heidegger says, we are "thrown" into life. Haunted, in Kohut's view, by early deficits of needed recognition and encouragement. It's the gods, not our parents, who play this role in Homer. An analogy made a bit more plausible when we consider how messed up the gods—with their impulses, jealousies and vexations—turn out to be. Nonetheless Odysseus, like the great Creedence Clearwater song, just keeps chooglin'.

A Man of Many Selves. Some contemporary psychoanalytic theories challenge the idea that we have a unitary self at all. One theorist jokingly refers to this approach as a "no-person" psychology. Are we just a collection of many selves, (or "self-states"), as multitudinous as grass blades, as Whitman maintained? The idea that we are not one but many lines up with complexity and systems theory, in which who we are at any moment emerges from the interplay of factors beyond our reckoning.

The "no person" psychological lens allows us to enjoy Odysseus's twists and turns without trying to figure him out. One minute he is the clever master of his fate, deceiving all, the next minute he's a lotus-addled zonker. What if his indeterminacy is the point? Odysseus as coyote, the trickster, master of disguises and improvisation? Readers can see so many aspects of themselves in him because he has moved beyond the trap of a single identity. Odysseus as pure improvisation? I find the idea exhilarating. If life is a riff we play on the tragic circumstances of vulnerability and mortality we are thrown into, then we had better stay light on our toes.

In this sense, what I am looking to find of myself in a poem is just that, poetry. In 80,000 lines, Homer manages to stay light, to avoid turgid descriptions, to invent an Odysseus who is right for each particular moment. Whether it's the heave of the dactyls that Fagles captured or the deftness of Wilson's iambs, it's rhythm that moves us forward like a prow in waves. In a time when President Cyclops and his Laestrygonian followers dominate the airwaves, we may nod familiarly at the old-brain reactivity in the Odyssey. But the poem itself is, gloriously, a new-brain activity, dazzling and supple enough to make each new translation an event worth noting.

I'll end, as I did with my column on the Iliad, with the poet sounding a note of pure grief at the carnage of war. It's from the last book of the Odyssey, where Agamemnon's spirit describes to Achilles what happened after he was slain:

All nine muses

sang lamentations in their lovely voices.

No one could keep from crying at the sound,

so moving was their song. The gods and men

were mourning seventeen long nights and days

and then we gave you to the pyre.…

David Shaddock PhD is a poet and psychotherapist. His new poetry book is Tehachapi Pass; his previous collection is A Book of Splendor: New and Selected Poems on Spiritual Themes. He is also the author of Poetry and Psychoanalysis: The Opening of the Field, from Routledge, and two books on relationships and couple therapy. He lectures widely on those topics, and maintains a private practice in Berkeley.

— posted September 2026