The tale of Odysseus: the anxiety of getting closer

We all want to belong to something, to someone, to ourselves, but why do so many people struggle to find it? I think of Odysseus, who spent 20 years getting back to his wife Penelope, and of the psychological functions that seem to pull us away from getting closer to the things we want. This is a tension as old as the Odyssey itself, and it may shed light on the pitfalls of human desire and connection, and the role we play in them.

For many of us, home isn't one static thing. It can be a physical object, like having a roof over our heads, a door we can close, and a bed to lie in. But it can also represent a feeling, or a person, or the quietness of being settled in ourselves.

Home can be an essential part of the way we relate to ourselves and how we relate to others. I hear this a lot from people when they describe the difficulties we all experience in finding a place of belonging, a person, a version of themselves that feels comfortable, and then the strange things that go wrong once they finally do find it. It is as if a door is finally open, and something in them desperately wants to close it.

The push and pull of closeness

Karen Horney, a German-American psychoanalyst, spent most of her career challenging traditional Freudian ideas. Freud saw neurosis as a conflict between our basic instincts and the demands of society. On the other hand, Horney focused more on how relationships and society can shape our anxiety and behaviours around closeness.

In her 1945 book Our Inner Conflicts: A Constructive Theory of Neurosis, she proposed that people under the grip of anxiety tend to organise themselves around three basic strategies to cope with others. Horney argued that we all use one or more of these strategies: we can move towards, move away, or move against the object we desire, and that is activated by an unconscious anxiety.

In our universal attempts to relate with each other, we will then find ourselves gravitating between these strategies of coping with the anxiety that relationships can bring up for all of us, and I think it might be helpful to be aware of them as a way to gain an understanding of what is happening to us.

Moving toward people is the part of us that seeks safety through love and approval, and we will likely believe, at some unconscious level, that if we can get someone to love us, they will not hurt us. The opposite would be when we move away from something, which is a more detached strategy and is an attempt to say to ourselves that we do not need anyone, and we find safety in being self-sufficient and distant, even when this will likely cost us the very same connection we are craving.

Horney also described a third pattern of moving against, a more aggressive strategy toward others, but I want to sit with the first two here because they map so precisely onto the shape of Odysseus's journey.

The reason this theory still holds up eighty years later is that we aren't just talking about character types that we can sort people into. They're pulls that are unconscious and contradictory, and Odysseus’s tale shows us how they can operate in the same person, sometimes in the same day, sometimes even in the same relationship. Therefore, we can desire a home wholeheartedly and still find ways to sabotage that from materialising.

Twenty years too long

On the surface, the Odyssey is a story about a man who is trying to get home. Odysseus, just like many of us, wants nothing more than to return to Ithaca, to his wife Penelope, and to his son Telemachus, who was an infant when Odysseus last saw him.

Somehow, the geography of the story keeps getting in the way, and if only he had modern navigational systems to rely on. A journey that should have taken him a few weeks by modern standards becomes a decade-long odyssey. Today, the word has become a synonym for a long, difficult journey beset with detours that Odysseus does not seem to be trying very hard to avoid.

For example, consider Circe's island, where Odysseus and his men stayed for a whole year, or even Calypso's island, where our hero remained for seven years. It is worth noting that he was not a prisoner in any simple sense, but a man who seemed to have stopped straining to get back to his journey home, at least for a time.

These are not just obstacles thrown in his path by capricious Greek gods and ethereal women. For this reason, we benefit from reading Odysseus’s trials and tribulations through Horney's perspective, and in this way, we can start picturing them as moments of moving away; a form of retreat into a kind of suspended safety. A place where the terrifying vulnerability of arriving home after ten years away can be indefinitely postponed.

Because for Odysseus, home would have meant facing a wife who has waited, a son who barely knows him, a household in disarray, and the terrifying possibility that after everything, he might not belong there anymore. Therefore, it is psychologically easier to stay a little longer on the witch’s island or in the nymph’s attractive embrace, since these spaces ask nothing of him except to remain.

At some point Odysseus’s tale takes a turn in the opposite direction, and we start to see his movements toward home. Odysseus finds himself weeping on Calypso's beach, staring out at the sea toward a place he cannot reach, and we see him crave the place we call home. In a bold move, he refuses her offer of immortality because he does not want to stay there forever. Earlier, when his men eat the lotus and lose all desire to return home, he drags them back to the ships by force, unwilling to let anyone erase their homesickness. This is not a man who has simply forgotten what he wants. We can see Odysseus as a man for whom wanting and reaching are two different things.

Even toward the end of the poem, this tension continues. As Odysseus finally arrives at the shores of Ithaca, he avoids walking straight into his own house and declaring that he is back. Instead, he disguises himself as a beggar to test his wife, his son, his old dog, and his old servants. In this way, he is delaying the moment of full recognition even after twenty years of waiting for this moment. It's as if arriving home all at once would be too much, so he needs to approach it sideways, rather than directly.

How does this have anything to do with us?

Obviously, very few of us will have to fight a year-long war and then get blown off course by an angry god. But we can learn something by focusing on the underlying pattern: wanting closeness desperately and finding ourselves circling it instead of walking straight toward it. I believe that this is one aspect that most people can relate to from somewhere in their own lives.

Think about the person who says they want a committed relationship and then feels something akin to claustrophobia the moment someone gets close enough. We can also see it in people who dream of settling down in one place and then, every time they get close, they find a reason to move again.

Beyond these more obvious patterns, it can also show up in smaller, quieter ways: putting off a phone call to someone we love, staying late at work instead of going home to the people waiting there, keeping a version of ourselves slightly hidden even from those closest to us.

None of this typically feels like avoidance from the inside for most of us. It would likely feel like circumstance, like timing, like a hundred good reasons. That is precisely what makes Horney's framework invaluable: it helps us name the mechanisms that operate beneath the reasons on an unconscious level.

What Horney seemed to understand, and what the Odyssey captures so vividly about the human condition, is that anxiety about connection can be just as powerful as the desire for it. It is rather rare that the two announce themselves separately. I want to highlight that we are unlikely to experience it as "I want to move away from this"; instead, we experience it as being busy, tired, unready, anywhere but where the longing points.

Can we come home anyway?

In an attempt to be more hopeful, it might be useful to read the Odyssey for the fact that Odysseus is not presented as someone who overcame his ambivalence but rather as someone who keeps moving despite it. He lingers, he retreats, he takes the long way, but he also keeps getting back in the boat. The moving away doesn't seem to cancel out the moving toward. The two exist together, simultaneously pulling at the same person, for the same two decades.

Perhaps a practical takeaway in any of this is that it might be less about eliminating the feeling of wanting to pull away from home, someone, or something, and that it is more about recognising when the feeling shows up. It is in noticing the moment we reach for a reason to stay on Circe's island a little longer, and asking, honestly, what we're protecting ourselves from. Home, love, or that sense of belonging, after all, was never really the destination that was hard to find. It was the arriving.