Odysseus

October 18, 2026

Homecoming

We invest a lot in the idea of home. Even if we don’t think about it, the old residence claims us. Our roots are to be found there—the place where some of our most intense experiences and feelings occurred.

At its best, “There’s no place like home.” At its worst, no dwelling is as destructive. I’ll address both sides, in order.

Our neighborhood is the location of firsts: the first place we lived, the first day of school, our first friends, our first love, our first victories and failures.

One of my best memories came early, when I had my mom and dad to myself much of the time. The folks and I went to a drive-in movie (a spot where you enjoyed films from your car, parked in a giant lot in front of an enormous movie screen).

The film was The House of Wax. It was summertime in 1953, and I was six years old.

I was small enough to lie across the car’s back seat (in the time before seat belts). Sleepy after a long day of play, I half-listened to my parents’ conversation as we returned home.

The rhythm of the car and the sense of safety that comes from the illusion of parental omnipotence and perfect benevolence made me feel as happy as I ever have been.

My bed beckoned, waiting for me in the refuge called home.

They sing songs about love, and almost as many about the innocence of such experiences and places.

Remember Homer’s Odyssey? Odysseus is sidetracked on his return from the Trojan War.

Over 10 years, he escapes the Cyclops, the Sirens, and all manner of trials and nemesis to return to Ithaca, his kingdom. His wife Penelope waits for him, fending off the advances of suitors who want her (and Odysseus’s estate) for their own.

Telemachus, his son, also waits. When Odysseus reaches Ithaca, he must battle the suitors and defeat them with the help of his only child.

Mankind hopes for family who will take our side. These are the relatives and friends who remember us and will always be there for us. People who have unending faith in us. People who love us and still exist in a place called home, long after we departed.

Think of The Wizard of Oz. It’s the same story, with a young woman, Dorothy, as the heroine.

Swept away from home by forces beyond her control, she searches for allies to help her find the “Wizard of Oz,” who can transport her to Kansas. Similar to Odysseus, she encounters an evil witch who makes her life miserable. Dorothy must survive many trials to return where she belongs.

Many of us, properly motivated, might write an autobiography about our quest for something worthwhile and the hurdles we overcame to reach a happy ending. The average life can have a heroic quality.

At last, Dorothy finds herself returned to the family farm in Kansas, where Aunt Em, Uncle Henry, and the people who love her reside. The movie ends with her words: “There’s no place like home.”

When comfortable, we often say we feel at home. In baseball, our goal is to score more runs than the opposition. How? By crossing home plate more often than they do. Doing it at one blow is called a home run.

Sports teams play better on their home field, supported by their loyal fans, stand-ins for family. And a part of our heart breaks when the stadiums of our youth are torn down and replaced.

We go to high school and college homecoming and to class reunions to encounter the old, friendly faces tied to us by the memory of home. Of course, these places and people age, but we still care about them.

Home is a place most humans idealize. Parents are rarely as perfect as we imagine them to be in retrospect. The good old days improve with age and distance.

The home (and the family therein) can also become a concept that is (like politics) “the last refuge of scoundrels.” In corrupt families, loyalty is placed above morality and decency. One member of the home covers for the others’ hateful, abusive, or illegal actions.

In such situations, the authority of parents, in particular, will trump any possibility of fairness.

Denial reigns in this group of blood and bloodied relations. Pity the individual who comprehends things as they are. The clarity of his vision requires that he be treated as an outcast.

Home and family have such a claim on us that we do not always recognize their dark side.

Blood relatives who are cruel, abusive, or dishonest demand the illusion of a loving group for fear of losing control and being exposed. Some other members, usually children, can be comforted by accepting that view to the point of moral blindness.

Unlike the Wizard, an unmasked kinsman, the scoundrel behind the curtain is not benign.

The loyalty, love, and attachment attributed to family are fitting for those who demonstrate caring and affection, not make-believe. In those families less satisfactory and less honest, most of a lifetime can pass before realizing what home was really like.

Home, then, seems like a den of thieves.

Harold Pinter’s play, The Homecoming, lifts the veil on such a place.

Watch it only if you dare.

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The first painting is Your Hands are Like Two Shovels, Digging in Me, 2021-22, by Julie Mehretu. The second is Untitled by Joan Mitchell, 1959.

January 24, 2010

Can You Sleep At Night? Being Ashamed and Feeling Guilty

There is an important distinction between being ashamed and feeling guilty. Both are connected to wrong doing, errors, mistakes, or failures. Both involve emotions. Feeling guilty, however, unlike being ashamed, doesn’t require an audience.

A person typically feels guilty almost automatically when he believes that he has done wrong. It matters not whether anyone else knows or finds out. Often, it doesn’t even matter that others might forgive the transgression. Thus, a sense of guilt is an internal state connected directly to an act thought to be wrong.

Shame, on the other hand, requires an audience, or at least, others’ knowledge of the inappropriate behavior or failure, even if they did not directly witness it.

By these definitions it is possible to feel guilty without being ashamed. One need only believe that one has done wrong. But someone who has been shamed (in other words, found out and condemned) might only come to feel bad if his behavior is widely known.

You might think that this always happens, but it doesn’t. Take the recently removed Governor of Illinois, Rod Blogojevich, who has yet to admit any guilt and who certainly doesn’t act ashamed; indeed, who appears quite shameless. Shamelessness is never a compliment, but rather a statement about someone who has no “shadow,” no sense of ever doing anything inappropriate.

To cite a couple of other examples, one a therapist and one a minister, neither felt guilty even after having their iniquity publicly exposed. In both cases the misbehavior was of a sexual nature that involved infidelity, as well as a violation of the code of ethics of their professions.

In the former case, the therapist had sex with ex-patients; in the latter example, the clergyman had sex with parishioners. Both were married (not to each other) at the time of these acts. The public exposure of their actions and ensuing humiliation mortified each of them and, indeed, each one contemplated suicide. But neither really believed what had happened was terribly wrong, and rationalized the transgressions in defense of his own self-image. In both cases the rationale involved holding the sexual partners largely responsible for the romantic encounters.

The connection between shame and suicidal depression is interesting and can be found even in the epics of Greek mythology. When Achilles died in battle, the Greeks held a vote to decide who among them should be awarded the splendid armor of Achilles, which had been fashioned by the god Hephaistos. Ajax (Aias) the Greater, the best warrior after Achilles, lost this competition to the cleverest of the Greeks, Odysseus, who had designed the Trojan Horse strategy that won the war. In his humiliation, Ajax went mad and eventually killed himself. Such is the devastating effect of a “loss of face.”

It should be said that the therapist and the minister I have referred to were quite narcissistic people who saw themselves through a very forgiving lens. Both terminated contact with old friends following their public embarrassment, in order to avoid facing them. In a sense, the self-love and lack of a well-developed conscience of the two people in question set the stage for their wrong doing — they believed that they were without moral flaws and therefore that anything they thought to do would automatically be a morally acceptable behavior.

Beware of those who say that they can sleep easily at night and use this standard as their primary method of judging or evaluating their own behavior. I doubt that the worst of the totalitarian rulers and despots of history would have failed this test of moral correctness, despite the murder, unhappiness, and genocide they created.

In the USA, on the political front, we have seen lots of people who don’t admit wrong, who rationalize what they do, and who serve themselves while claiming to be acting “on behalf of the American People.” I’m sure some of them come to believe their own story, their own rationale — shameless, as I said before; indeed, almost a kind of self-delusion.

In my experience, people who come to psychotherapy because they feel ashamed (but not particularly guilty) don’t usually take responsibility for their actions in the course of treatment. Rather, if the process follows the typical course, they will recover from the injury to their ego and be able to go on with life, still guarded against significant self-awareness. Moral self-reflection doesn’t seem to come easily or naturally to them.

By contrast, individuals who experience guilt that causes them to enter counseling often can learn to forgive themselves and recover from the depression that usually accompanies their guilt. For them, however, the risk is in taking too much responsibility and being too severe in their self-judgment, exactly the opposite of the person who is only ashamed.

It is useful to be capable of feeling guilt, to admit wrong doing, and to feel ashamed; that is, if one is to lead a moral life. On the other hand, it might be argued that those who are shameless and who rarely feel guilt probably have more fun in life and are less troubled — the mirror reflects their image back to them in the way that they want to see it, and not in the way it actually looks. They live in a state of ethical blindness. Whether that permits a satisfying life is another story.

You be the judge.

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The above image is Shame by Libertinus Yomango, sourced from Wikimedia Commons.

January 10, 2010

What Do Antidepressants Really Do?

I believe that the oldest reference to an antidepressant medicine comes in Homer’s Odyssey, which “could not have been completed much before the end of the eighth century B.C” according to Richmond Lattimore. The reference occurs when Menelaos (brother of Agamemnon),  Telemachos (son of Odysseus), and others are grieving the loss of friends and relatives in the Trojan War. Helen, the wife of Menelaos, is also present. It was her departure to the walled city of Troy with Paris that triggered the assault on that fortress to retrieve her. Having since returned to her husband, she wishes to salve the emotional pain of the men who are gathered at her home. The passage reads as follows in Lattimore’s translation:

“Into the wine of which they were drinking she cast a medicine of heartease, free of gall, to make one forget all sorrows, and whoever had drunk it down once it had been mixed in the wine bowl, for the day that he drank it would have no tear role down his face, not if his mother died and his father died, not if men murdered a brother or a beloved son in his presence, with the bronze, and he with his own eyes saw it.”

That would be a potent brew indeed. But the idea of it prompts me to say a few words about what an antidepressant can and cannot do, for there is much misunderstanding on this point. And, by the way, the first real antidepressants only became available in the 1950s.

An antidepressant does not make you giddy about your life or impervious to emotional pain; it doesn’t make you forget bad things. In other words, it is not what Helen of Troy administered. If an antidepressant is working well, it helps put a floor under you. That is to say, many people with depression feel as though there is nothing holding them up (metaphorically speaking), no bottom to their suffering.

An effective medication creates that bottom, relieving them of the sense that they are without any support underneath them. It reduces their suffering too, makes them less prone to crying, less exhausted, and less subject either to over-eating or having no appetite, and usually able to sleep better. In other words, the medicine helps you tolerate life and helps normalize that life.

Some people, including quite a number who shy away from psychiatric medications or medication or any kind, actually are attempting to “doctor” themselves with drugs or alcohol.

There is danger here, naturally.

You probably know some of the dangers, but one I want to mention in particular is the depressant-effect of alcohol. It might make you feel better in the short-run, but in the long-run it is likely to fuel your depression, not to mention create a dependency.

As the old Chinese expression goes, “First the man takes the drink, then the drink takes the man.”

I suspect that you know someone who believes that psychotropic medication (and perhaps psychotherapy too) is a crutch. There is no denying that being treated for emotional problems can produce negative judgments and a stigma. Moreover, historically speaking, insurance companies have paid less well for therapy and psychotropic medication than for “physical” illnesses. That has just changed in 2010, but the stigma won’t be legislatively erased by the US congress, as was achieved by “parity” legislation that now requires equal insurance coverage of both physical and “mental or nervous” conditions.

Yet some categories of depression are certainly just as “physical” as an imperfect gall bladder is, for instance. Specifically, Bipolar Disorder, also called Manic-Depressive Disorder, is one such biologically-based psychiatric category where medical intervention is often enormously helpful, if not essential.

Would you want your severely diabetic loved-one to avoid the “crutch” of necessary medication? If your answer is “no,” then you shouldn’t be put-off by treating a biologically-based depression with a proper medication to stabilize his mood.

Nonetheless, it is true that many depressed individuals do not have any biological flaw or chemical imbalance, but rather are reacting emotionally to difficult life circumstances such as repeated losses (e.g. divorce, job loss), unfinished grief, or abuse of one kind or another. Very often psychotherapy is able  to successfully treat these people without the benefit of medication. Indeed, sometimes patients are too quick to obtain antidepressant prescriptions which take the edge off their feelings enough to reduce their motivation to address difficult life circumstances, including repetitive patterns of behavior that lead to unhappiness.  In that event, they will risk having to stay on antidepressants lest they fall back into depression.

For those patients, on the other hand, who successfully address their issues in psychotherapy, antidepressants may never be needed or, if they are used, might be required only temporarily.

If you are seeing a therapist for depression, talk with him about medicine for your condition, especially if you feel that you need immediate relief or are having suicidal thoughts. Beware equally of therapists who never want their patients to go on medication, as well as those who always do.

I should mention that while many depressed people obtain medication from their family or primary-care physician or general practitioner (GP), this isn’t always the best source of psychotropic mood-altering substances. While some GPs are both comfortable with and experienced in prescribing such medication, some are hesitant or unsure. The latter group may be less adept at identifying the precise antidepressant which is best for you given your particular symptoms; moreover, their hesitation can cause them to give you too low a dose to obtain a therapeutic benefit.

A good psychiatrist, by contrast, is absolutely up-to-date on everything about the medications available to treat you, adept at identifying which of the available antidepressants is the best fit for your particular situation, and knows how to get you to a therapeutic level of the medicine as quickly as possible. Since those in pain so often feel as if there will be no end to their suffering, and since antidepressants often take a several weeks to produce relief, getting the medicine right as quickly as possible is very important.

If you do choose to obtain medication, be sure to educate yourself about your condition and the possible side-effects of the medication being suggested. Not all physicians are good about describing those side-effects before-hand, even including the sexual side-effects produced by some antidepressants. Be your own advocate. Don’t be passive in treatment. It is your body, it is your life.

Last I heard, you only get one of each.