The Odyssey of Research
On loneliness and home-coming:
The odyssey of deep research
A surprising number of my graduate students describe their academic life as homecoming. For them, pursuing a doctoral degree is an odyssey of the mind, heart, and soul, noetic and imaginal. Unlike Odysseus, I assure them, they need not wander for ten years, feeling truly lost, though they will meet some monsters along the way—Jung’s shadow, which he described as the apprentice-piece of the individuation process—and be seduced, distracted, and disoriented at times—possibly by anima figures, an encounter Jung described as the master-piece in individuation. To those familiar with Homer’s Odyssey, the metaphor is ominous because, at different points on Odysseus’ journey, his crew is killed. Some of the most imaginative students begin to wonder: will I be Odysseus and reach Ithaca—or will I die along the way?
To be true to the Jungian tradition of holding the tension of the opposites, the answer is “both.” They will die and they will reach home. An aspect of any graduate student will be Odysseus who wearily steps ashore at Ithaca after ten long years, but home will look deeply strange. Another aspect will be like Odysseus’s hapless crew, devoured on the journey, the life when they embarked on the doctorate so utterly transformed that they will be unrecognizable to themselves.
I could say more about that, but few believe me until they have reached their own Ithaca.
So let us ponder the last part of Odysseus’ journey. Our sympathy naturally may incline toward the unnamed, doomed crew. Without question, their fate is pitiable. But let us imagine, for a moment, how Odysseus feels once his last shipmate dies before he reaches Ithaca, shockingly alone, battle-scarred, and fatigued. I imagine the silence falls upon him as a terrible weight, because he is stripped of human companionship and the driving, musical energy of the crew’s skilled rowing. He is truly alone yet the journey is far from finished. What does this have to do with the odyssey toward the Ph.D.?
The cohort system, like Odysseus’ crew, makes the journey homeward feel warmer, more companionable, and more possible. When dissertation research commences, a profound archetypal shift occurs, one that looks like a precipice and feels like an abyss: Students suddenly become the bereft and isolated Odysseus. I cannot prepare my students for this archetypal shift, though I know it is necessary and meaningful. Students must face what Odysseus faced: the solitude of the final part of the journey.
Yet dissertation research is only solitary and desolate from one perspective. From another, it is an invitation for researchers to discover novel forms of companionship in the figures who are present, and have been all along: figures from dream, waking vision, and active imagination, myth, legend, and fairy tale. Indigenous peoples, from Lakota Sioux to Saami to Celts, know that the veil between the worlds of ordinary reality and non-ordinary reality, matter and spirit, is permeable. It is only we moderns who make a strong distinction between them. Students can invite the ancestors, the little people, the lares andpenates, the genius loci into their research as part of the simple daily ritual of doing the work. To be depth psychological, they must.
Perhaps, like Odysseus, any of us is stripped of human companionship in order to turn toward the soul of the world, the anima mundi. Perhaps the computer screen we face each day glows with emptiness for a purpose. It waits until we begin to feel the presence, around the edges, of our enduring companions on the journey, which includes the ancestors who shaped the central research question, the tribe who has already written about the topic, and all those who will be enriched by our inquiry when we arrive home.