Odysseus as Individuation Figure

The depth tradition returns to Odysseus more persistently than to any other Homeric figure, and the reason is the one Hillman names: Odysseus “resolved a morbid division fundamental to the Western psyche” — the puer-senex split (Hillman 2015). He is wounded before the poem begins; he is polytlas because he has borne what must be borne; he refuses immortality because it would unwind the substance his grief has forged (Peterson 2025). He is not the hero as unbroken invulnerability but the hero as scarred integration.

The odyssey gives the depth tradition its narrative form for individuation: nostos, the return, structured by nekyia (descent to the dead), by encounters with the archetypal feminine (Circe, Calypso, Penelope), by the patient work of endurance (tlao-endurance), and by the recovery of the oikos (household, inner home). Campbell’s monomyth — departure, initiation, return — is the Odyssean journey abstracted. Jung’s Red Book takes Odysseus’s nekyia as its operative figure for what the analyst does with the shades of the unconscious.

The thread is therefore protected across the graph: every later work on individuation as a process, from Symbols of Transformation to Hero with a Thousand Faces to Care of the Soul, is reading the Odyssey at some level of remove.

Sources

• james-hillman: Odysseus resolves the puer-senex division (Senex & Puer, Hillman 2015)
• cody-peterson: Odysseus’s refusal of immortality preserves the substance of the mortal thumos (The Iron Thūmos, Peterson 2025)
• carl-jung: the nekyia is the figure for active imagination (The Red Book)
• karl-kerenyi: Hermes is the presiding god of the Odyssey’s transitions (Hermes Guide of Souls, Kerényi 1944)
• joseph-campbell: the monomyth is the Odyssean journey generalized