This work attempts a psychoanalytic listening to the 'oral' Homeric epics in an effort to extract, as it were, from the ancient text certain elements of psychoanalytic understanding that are of relevance to contemporary psychoanalysis. There is, in addition, a consideration of related philosophical and linguistic issues that are linked to the basic psychoanalytic concepts that emerge from such a listening. The main themes treated rotate around the central axis of time as it is expressed in the Homeric epics. Thus, questions of transition, loss, mourning, tolerance, identity, metaphor and...