Žižović Olivera: Ahilejeve suze

Olivera Žižović: Achilles' Tears

An archetypal journey through Homer's "Iliad"

Olivera Žižović's latest book, Achilles' Tears, represents, as indicated by its subtitle, an archetypal journey through Homer's Iliad. Starting from Gadamer's hermeneutic position that each epoch has its own way of understanding the inherited text (because that is how it tries to understand itself), the author approached the ancient Homeric epic by looking at its mythological contents and layers. Given that myths arise in the collective unconscious and are archetypal based, therefore universal, universal and eternal, the methods of Jung's analytical psychology are used in their understanding. Such a new and creative reading of Homer turned out to be extremely fruitful, and the insights that Žižović brings are unexpected and exciting.

Through a coherent analysis that is faithfully based on the text of the Iliad, the author reveals to us the unconscious contents and archetypes behind the actions of Homer's heroes, their behavior and the fateful decisions they make at key moments in their lives. These contents, embodied in people, and condensed and shaped in the representations of Greek gods, represent powerful forces - benevolent, supportive and motivating or threatening and destructive. They do not stay only on Olympus or at the foot of Troy as the immediate initiators or actors of the Greek-Trojan conflict, but to a large extent, and often primarily, are parts of the inner lives of the heroes themselves. Tears of Achilles is therefore not only a book about Achilles, Agamemnon, Hector, Andromache, Paris, Helen or Phoenicus, Meleager and his lover Cleopatra, but also a book about ancient mythology and almost all its important gods: Zeus and Hera, Athena, Aphrodite, Artemis, Apollo, Areus, Hephaestus, Thetis, but also underground deities: Hades, Eris, Moira, To the Erinyes.

If we keep in mind that the concept of gods in the ancient Homeric epic is a manifest of what Jung calls archetypes, it is clear that the presented content - existentially and psychologically - is indeed alive, effective and omnipresent in our lives as well. After all, myth has always contributed to the specific self-awareness and self-understanding of man and the knowledge of the world in which he lives. This is still the case today, and it will undoubtedly be so in the future.

Therefore, this research is not intended only for philologists and those who professionally deal with literature or are devoted readers. It is also intended for those who are primarily interested in depth psychology. The aim of the book is not only to discover new, often neglected aspects of Homer's ancient and countless times read epic, but, like any archetypal journey, it takes us to the center of ourselves - revealing to us how vitally alive, ubiquitous and current Homer is still - in man, nature and the world that surrounds us.