The Odyssey- psychosexual and psychosocial development and myth

I've used this blog, for the most part, to write about psychosocial development. Psychoanalysis was largely disappointing to me because it didn't make use of phenomenology. In that regard I introduced psychic bisexuality as a horizontal axis and the Ego Ideal and the forms of perfection and death as a vertical axis.

Now that phenomenology offers us a guide its time to pair the psychosocial with the psychosexual as it appears in myth.

Towards this end I've submitted the fathers of Greek mythology

Tartarus- Ocular  
Uranus-part-object/auto-erotic
Cronos- oral
Zeus  -anal
Heracles - phallic 

I've also shown that the sequence of imagoes goes

proto- mother
deutero- combined parent
"Oedipus"- both parents
trito- father

Thanks to the people at Theoi.com who supply a comprehensive collection on Greek and Roman myth we have fragments like this:

"By nightfall they [the Argonauts] were passing the Isle of Philyra. This was where Kronos son of Ouranos, deceiving his consort Rhea, lay with Philyra daughter of Okeanos in the days when he ruled the Titanes in Olympos and Zeus was still a child, tended in the Kretan cave by the Kouretes of Ida. But Kronos and Philyra were surprised in the very act by the goddess Rhea. Whereupon Kronos leapt out of bed and galloped off in the form of a long-maned stallion, while Philyra in her shame left the place, deserting her old haunts, and came to the long Pelasgian ridges. There she gave birth to the monstrous Kheiron, half horse and half divine, the offspring of a lover in questionable shape."

Here we have an oral primal scene and in Chiron we have a combined figure that would point to this as the oral deutero. Chiron means "skilled with the hands." and he trained Achilles. The focus on the hand may be significant here as a psychosexual object and the horse appears after the polyphallic stage (Medusa and Heracles' hydra) in the form of Pegasus which means that the horse may play a part in other deutero stages. Anyway, this kind of mapping of symbols for the deutero stages vs. what is individual to the stage is what has to be performed. The hand appears in older psychoanalytic literature as something that can be part of a confluence of drives and have sexual importance. I'll track it down and post it here.

Anyway, eventually this will have to be expanded past Greek myth into a comparative mythology and I wonder if there are people out there who are still interested in this kind of work...

Along with general Greek and Roman myth I have long conceived of the Odyssey as a work in psychosexual development. It follows the imago development pattern

Troy - proto and deutero
Cicones- Oedipus and defusion                   auto-erotic    
Lotus Eaters- trito

Cyclops- proto and deutero
Aeolus- Oedipus and defusion                     oral
Giants- trito

Circe- proto and deutero
Hades- Oedipus and defusion                       anal
Sirens- trito

Scylla and Charybdis- proto and deutero
Helios -Oedipus and defusion                       phallic
Calypso- trito

From Helios there was a return to Charybdis
From Hades a return to Circe
and something of a return can be seen when the winds of Aeolus return the ship back to being lost.
Also after Troy Odysseus robbed the Cicones and was forced out.

Odysseus' fleet is reduced beginning with the Cicones and this is an important structure in the story.

My hope is to begin with comparing Greek mythology in general with the specific story of the Odyssey and find the correlations between the symbols as they relate to specific stages and those that represent the proto, deutero, Oedipal, and trito.

This will be slow and I'll continue to post about other facets of my work but, I'm posting this now so I might find some other researchers who could work with me.