LITERATURE + LECTURES

The Jung Center of Houston presents Bed, Breakfast, and Beyond: The Soul between Home and Homeless in The Odyssey.  In this lecture, Jungian analyst Ronald Schenk explores Homer's complex understanding of the experiences of home and homelessness.

What does it mean to journey home? While we usually take refuge in a sentimental understanding of Homer's Odyssesy as a story of yearning, return, and homecoming, Homer's intention is far more complex. His understanding of "journey" and "home", two central metaphors in Western consciousness, paradoxically interweaves both ideas. Seen psychologically, neither is what we expect, and each becomes an aspect of the other —with an underworld of chaos becoming the central element of both. Home has all the discomforts, disruptions, uncertainties and violence of the journey, and the journey becomes a meandering home tour without beginning or end.

Ronald Schenk, PhD, Jungian analyst, is currently in private practice in Dallas and Houston, and his interests are in clinical training, cultural psychology, and post-modernism. A longtime senior training analyst and recent president of the Inter-Regional Society of Jungian Analysts, he has written three books and several essays in recent Jungian publications.