“He [Telemachus] sat down, and up stood Mentor” (2:225).

This is the first time in Homer’s epos The Odyssey that Mentor, Odysseus’s trusted companion, is mentioned. What was his task?

When Odysseus sailed off,
this was the friend he asked to guard his house
and told the slaves to look to him as master.
Mentor addressed the crowd:
“Now Ithacans! Listen! …” (2:226)

But the Ithacans did not listen – neither to Mentor, nor to Telemachus. In fact, they mocked both the elderly friend and the young son of Odysseus. Seeing the challenges Mentor and Telemachus as well as Odysseus’ wife Penelope later faced in fighting off the ‘suitors’ who had occupied Odysseus’ household, Athena (Minerva), the Goddess of Wisdom, decided to disguise herself as Mentor. She spoke to Telemachus, who felt disheartened and doubted his own capabilities.

Thus spoken to, Telemachus proceeds to face the ‘suitors’ in his father’s house and eventually sets forth on his own ship to seek out his father. He is able to take decisions and assume responsability.

Today, mentoring is a common practice in both academia and business. We tend to associate a social relationship with it in which a more experienced senior colleague shares their wisdom with a less experienced younger one. As part of this set-up, It is usually assumed that knowledge resides within the elder who initiates the apprentice into the craft they wish to master.

The classical orgin of the word and that the name originally belonged to a person is often unknown. Even when the connection to Odysseus’ trusted companion is made, it is usally Mentor who is presented as the one who is respected and knowledgable; capacities he only exhibits in Homer’s Odyssey when impersonated by Athena. Mentor held no authority over the suitors, he did not have enough influence on Telemachus to strengthen his mind, and he was not able to protect Penelope the way Odysseus had envisioned. This is why Athena stepped in. The Goddess disguised herself as Mentor, who thereby became a mere bodily vessel for the wisdom that she had.

What can those of us who practice mentoring or who are approached by colleagues for advice learn from the Odyssey?

It is not the wisdom of the mentor that mentorship is about, even if this is what the mentee assumes. To clarify, I approach the relationship between mentor and mentee by drawing on the relationship between analyst and analysand in Lacanian psychoanalysis. Jacques Lacan, the French psychoanalyst, referred to the analyst’s position (assumed by the analysand) as the one who ‘knows’, as the sujet supposé savoir (the subject supposed to know). But the analyst really serves as a vessel that contains nothing of its own. At first, this relationship presents a mirroring opportunity for the analysand, who idealizes the analyst. Later, once the idealization has given way to actual analytical work, the role of the analyst is to keep the space open for the analysand to develop their own, subjective access to what constitutes their symptom,. That is, their unique way to access their knowledge and their truth.

The same, I argue, holds for the mentoring relationship. While there might be occasions in which knowledge will be ‘handed’ from the mentor to the mentee, who equally believes that the mentor ‘has it’, it is far more important to create a space in which the mentee’s own version of truth and their own access to knowledge can be verbalized.

In a mentoring relationship, then, we need to keep a place open for Athena (Minerva) who is neither Mentor personified, nor an abstract force. Rather, she assumes the guise of each and every one of us in a unique way. To bring her forth on the side of the mentee is the actual task of a mentor.

* all quotes are from Emily Wilson’s translation of Homer. The Odyssey.