European Journal for Biblio/Poetry Therapy

In this contribution, I aim to interpret the famous scene in Homer's Odyssey (Book 8) in which the epic hero is confronted with a story of his own life at the court of the Phaeacians, as a primal scene of bibliotherapy.Building on earlier interpretations of the scene by Hannah Arendt and Adriana Cavarero, I will discuss Odysseus's response to the stories that are sung to him in relation to concept of pharmacological thinking proposed by the French philosopher Bernard Stiegler.According to Stiegler, pharmacology is a way of thinking that considers the simultaneously positive and negative effects of a phenomenon.In our specific case, literature can be both a medicine and a poison for the mind.