We bring the story of Telemachus and Odysseus, of a father and a son, of two people who learned from their mistakes. We also bring the testimony of Massimo Recalcati, the Italian psychiatrist who has written more than most about Telemachus and Odysseus, about a son's need for his father and a father's need for his son. He shares with us his own experience of his father, of his father's absence, and of what he inherited from him.

All of us have been Telemachus at least once, have gazed at least once at the horizon of the sea, waiting for someone or something to return to us from there, to come to us and restore our strength for living. Today's Telemachus is the young person in a state of alienation: without a clear future, wrecked from within, without perspective, without authentic experience, without desire, enslaved to pleasure, unemployed, insecure. Our children do not inherit a Kingdom, but a dead body, an exhausted land, a ruined economy, unlimited debt, a lack of work, and no horizon for life. Our children are exhausted.

Telemachus was a beloved child, the only son of Odysseus, king of Ithaca, and Penelope. Literally, the word Τηλέμαχος means "far-off fighter", or perhaps, rendered a little more freely, "fighter on distant roads" – a very vivid expression of a person's existential maturing, which does not happen in a single moment, in the blink of an eye, but presupposes a long, challenging, demanding, and at times problematic and risky process, involving a great deal of personal engagement and effort from those in one's closer and wider surroundings. In reality, Telemachus is in fact an orphan who does not remember his own father, since Odysseus left him as an infant when he set off for the Trojan War.

Telemachus, now grown considerably, has learned that simply sitting, weeping and hoping that someone will come to save him will solve nothing. At a certain point he recognises that he must take responsibility for his own actions – he discovers his sonship. Odysseus, too, has to learn that he is not always the best, the shrewdest and the wisest. We discover that at one moment he falls silent – that "moment of grace" is his greatest feat. In that moment he perhaps discovers the most important thing about himself – his fatherhood.

Unlike Odysseus, Telemachus's father, his mother Penelope was at her son's side throughout his whole childhood and youth. Πηνελóπεια appears, by most accounts, to be a compound of πήνη, meaning "weaving thread", and λέπειν, meaning "to unravel, to tear apart" – an allusion to the way Penelope deceived her suitors by promising to marry one of them once she had finished weaving a shroud for her elderly father-in-law. What she wove by day she would undo by night, and in this way put off her final decision about remarrying for a full three years, until at last one of her maidservants betrayed her. In her outward bearing as much as in her inner character, in her words and conduct, in her private and public manner and demeanour, and above all in the attitudes that can be read throughout the Odyssey, Penelope was a very wise, intelligent and prudent woman – a lovely Spartan princess who stood as the very embodiment of marital fidelity. She saw the suitors as men who were bringing dishonour on her, on her husband, on her household, on her child, on her kin and on her servants.

 

At the start of the epic, Odysseus has already been gone for twenty years, and no one knows whether he is alive or dead, whether Penelope is still a wife or already a widow, or whether Ithaca has a king or needs a new one. Telemachus – whom Odysseus left as a newborn when he went off to fight at Troy, and who is now a young man in his twenties, raised by a single mother – must somehow learn how to become a hero, how to take control of the chaotic situation in Ithaca, how to strip the Suitors, his mother's would-be husbands, of their power, and how to establish himself as leader, prince and future king. In other words, he must learn to grow up: to become the kind of man his absent, or vanished, father once was.

We find him in low spirits, sitting in the banqueting hall of the royal palace, doing nothing but complaining without acting, while the suitors humiliate and shame him. At one point he tries to say something in his own defence, but they merely tolerate him without paying him any real regard. The young man calls on a gathering of the citizens of Ithaca and tries to persuade them to help him. But after delivering a brief speech and condemning the suitors, he bursts into tears and sits down, bitter and helpless.

After a while Telemachus, prompted by the goddess Athena, leaves home for the first time to go in search of news of his father. He travels first to the Peloponnese and then to Sparta, questioning his father's war companions and trying to find out from them what might have happened to him. For the first time he learns how to introduce himself to strangers, how to be a guest in the homes of people he does not know, how to win people's sympathy, how to obtain information – in short, how to deal with people. In other words, we see him learning to grow up.

When Odysseus finally returns to Ithaca he still keeps himself hidden, because he does not yet know who has remained loyal to him and who has not. At one point he reveals his identity to his astonished son. That first encounter is fairly disappointing for Telemachus, who at first refuses to accept his father; they cannot "recognise" one another, because in truth they have never actually known each other.  Little by little they get to know one another and, after a while, the two of them begin plotting against the many suitors – a plan that slowly takes shape and shows just how responsible and mature the young man has become. Although their chances of success are slim, since there are so few of them in that fight, father, son and two loyal servants stand ready to help them carry out their plan.

Whenever Telemachus thinks of his father's return, he always pictures him as glorious, great. His father, the great warrior, will return and overpower the enemy. In reality, Odysseus does return, but disguised as a beggar. He enters Telemachus's life in such a way that, at first, his son does not recognise him. Only with time will he learn who he is, once he recognises in him the leader disguised as a beggar. At first it will be traumatic for him to meet his father in the poor house of the servant Eumaeus. Telemachus can hardly believe this is his father: "I am no god. Why do you liken me to the immortals? I am your father, the one for whom you weep, for whom you long, and for whom you have suffered so much pain enduring the violence of the Suitors."

So he said, and he kissed his son, while the tears he had always held back fell from his cheeks to the ground. Telemachus, still not believing that his father stood before him, said: "No, you are not Odysseus, you are not my father – this is some god deceiving me, so that I will suffer even greater pain and weep even more. A mortal cannot work such wonders by himself, unless a god intervenes, who can easily make him young or old at will. A moment ago you were an old man dressed in wretched rags, and now you resemble the gods who possess the boundless heavens." Shrewd Odysseus answered him: "It is not right, my son, for you to be so astonished, so taken aback, that your father has returned. No other Odysseus will ever come back here again. I am the one who is returning, with all my faults and all my suffering, after twenty years, to the land of my fathers."

Odysseus and his companions are armed, while the Suitors are not. Odysseus has made sure that the room in which all the palace's weapons are stored is kept locked. And so, when the fighting begins, Odysseus and his men at first have the upper hand. But at one point, after Telemachus goes back to the storeroom to fetch more weapons, some of the Suitors are seen carrying armour and weapons from the storeroom: clearly someone must have left the storeroom door open. That "someone" is Telemachus. When he sees his armed enemies, Odysseus immediately thinks that one of the servants has betrayed his plan, but in a remarkable scene Telemachus coolly takes responsibility upon himself: "Father," he answers, "it was I who erred, no one else. I left the sturdy door only half closed. And someone shrewder than I took advantage of my mistake."

As commander, in response to his son's admission of fault, the father says nothing at all about what has happened. He simply forgives his son and goes on fighting until final victory and the liberation of Ithaca from the tyranny of the suitors.

It may be that the Odyssey is a poem about two educations. First of all, the education of a boy who, over the course of the story, grows up and learns how to become a man. But it is also the education of an already grown man who believed, as all of us do from time to time, that he was exceptionally clever, but who showed the best of himself only once he realised that he still had so much left to learn, even from someone so much younger than himself – his own son. True formation and true learning always run in both directions, mutually.

Telemachus is not an angry son, or at least he is not angry with his father. He is a son who waits for his father, who lives out his own crisis as a son awaiting his father's return, who is searching for meaning in his own existence. The most striking image is that of Telemachus waiting on the shore for the return of his father Odysseus. He scans the horizon of the sea, hoping to see his father's victorious and magnificent homecoming. Telemachus is not a prisoner of the past. In a sense, we might say that he is not obsessed with why his father had to leave. It means that the most interesting thing in life is what has yet to happen, not merely what has already happened.

Telemachus is, in fact, a person in crisis. He is the picture of a son living through  crisis, the picture of youth, a symbolic crisis that makes life true life. And crisis is precisely what takes control away from us, sometimes convincing us that we have understood what we have simply misunderstood. This will happen to Telemachus too. He will think, for instance, that freeing his mother and the kingdom, held hostage by the Suitors, is the most important thing for his own freedom. On the one hand he wants to defend his mother, but on the other he is actually defending himself, his own existence, against those who represent everything that stands as an obstacle to happiness and true fulfilment. It is precisely his crisis that leads him to misread his own situation.

In a sense, we see that it is not enough simply to get rid of the enemy in order to truly win. It is not enough to remove an obstacle and conclude that we are finally truly happy. There are moments in our lives when we even unconsciously hope to have an enemy, because his presence protects us from the perception that our life is empty and without meaning. Telemachus will have to learn that the most important thing is not to eliminate the Suitors, but to wait for his father – that is, to arrive at the meaning of his own existence. Only then will his life truly become possible. Odysseus returns and overcomes those who do not honour the Law of the Word or the Law of Hospitality.

Telemachus is a true son because he knows that a son needs a father in order to find his own path, different from his father's own path through life. He is a true son because he interprets his sonship in the light of the ethical task of inheritance: truly making his own what he has received from the generations before him, what his ancestors have handed into his hands. He is not paralysed in a blind conflict with his father, but recognises the symbolic debt that binds him to him. Telemachus is a son who knows how to live in expectation, preparing for his father's coming without melancholy, but with the strength of someone ready for a new journey.

On this new journey, and on the importance of what a son can inherit from his father, we also have the testimony of Massimo Recalcati, the author who has perhaps done more than anyone to illuminate a son's need for his father's presence, and a father's need for his son's. Recalcati reflects that his own father was largely absent, caught up in work rather than in raising his children, and that his years of psychoanalysis freed him from the anguish of searching by leading him to a simple insight: fatherhood is, at its heart, always bound up with absence. To be a child, to be an heir, is therefore always also to be something of an orphan. Yet anyone, and anything, can become a father in this sense – a primary-school teacher, a mother, a piece of music, a work of art, a coach, a film. Like Odysseus, someone can always return from the sea. What we inherit, Recalcati notes, is never simply blood or a fixed identity handed down unchanged: what we truly inherit is always a testimony.

As the psychoanalyst Françoise Dolto explains, every fatherhood, in this sense, is radically adoptive. A testimony can only be recognised in hindsight, looking back; it cannot be planned, guaranteed or reduced to technique. Its power lies precisely in the fact that it appears where we would least expect it. Recalcati recalls his own father walking ahead of him on Sunday mornings, on their way to the greenhouse where he tended sick plants, reciting their Latin names, reading their ailments in their leaves, and preparing remedies to heal them – skills he had taught himself, having taken up, from his own poor father, little more than a certain passion for working the land, and having invented for himself, without any family tradition behind him, the unlikely trade of a florist.

Recalcati says that he too, as a psychiatrist, has always had a passion for what is called differential diagnosis: identifying the particular subjective structure underlying what a person says. He traces that passion back to his childhood memory of his father and the sickness on the leaves of his plants – the true core of what he inherited. Not a kingdom, not illustrious descendants, not genes, not material goods, but the quiet testimony of a single desire. He watched his father bent over his plants, and knew that this was his father's whole life, his work, his joy, his world: relieving the plants of their sickness, restoring them to life, making them strong, saving them from mould, from blight, from unseen colonies of insects. And he wonders what he himself became, if not someone who, in his own way, learned to read pain from the leaves of a plant – and now reads that same pain in human beings, as though they too were leaves.

Sons need to feel irreplaceable, loved. A sense of being singled out ought to accompany every child in his relationship with a father who cares for him. Levinas says that every child is an only and unique child. The robe that Jacob, as a father, prepared for his son Joseph had the distinguishing feature of being irreplaceable, with its unusually long sleeves and its colours. This anomaly is in fact a sign of distinctiveness. Joseph's robe is different, unique, and it is what makes the son a singled-out son.

When a person experiences affection and being singled out in life, he can become a source of richness and a gift to others. That is an immense lesson adults should always keep in mind. The only way a person can truly inherit anything is by making happy those he truly loves. In this way we, in turn, can receive something from our own children. It is children who hand down an inheritance to their fathers, while fathers give their children a promise for life.