11/11/2025
Η συμμετοχή του Εργαστηρίου Συστημικής Σκέψης & Εκπαίδευσης στο EFTA RELATES Congrees in Lyon (27-30 August 2025)
"Inspired by Ancient Lyric Poetry and "Palinody"
for Confluences and Controversies to Emerge in Systemic Therapy"
Panagiotis Chrysos, Efstratia Karagianni,
Eleni Kitraki, Aikaterini Ladianou , Marianna Tragoudara & Paraskevi Venieraki
In an attempt to approach contemporary psychotherapeutic dilemmas, we will draw inspiration from ancient Greek lyric poetry and more specifically from the ancient lyric poet Stesichorus.
Stesichorus was born in Calabria in the 6th century BC and was celebrated for his mastery of lyric poetry. Lyric poetry, which blossomed between 650 and 450 BC, offered something entirely new. Until then, epic poetry had looked back to a distant, mythical past of gods and heroes, praising timeless acts and unshakable values in an elaborate language. Lyric, by contrast, turned to the present, highlighting the changeable nature of human life and expressing it with a striking simplicity and immediacy of voice.
Stesichorus was the first to use the technique of palinode in his poems. In ancient Greek, the word palinōidía — from palin, “again,” and ōidē, “song” — described the deliberate annulment of the content of a previous song with a new one.
The most famous palinode is attributed to Stesichorus himself. In his first version of a poem about Helen of Troy, he repeated the epic, stereotypical tale: that Helen left her husband, Menelaos, sailed to Troy with another man, Paris, and by her beauty and betrayal cause the Trojan War. In his first poem Stesichorus insulted Helen badly, blaming Helen for all the suffering of the Greeks in the Trojan War.
According to the myth, and as Helen was the daughter of the god Zeus, right after the emotionally intense recitation of the poem, Stesichorus was punished by Zeus and lost his sight. Soon after this had happened, remorses came to him. “Who am I, the worthless who cursed Helen, the daughter of Zeus, this wonderful woman, the most precious creature that nature gave birth to, the most innocent person?” He begged her for forgiveness: “Forgive me, great goddess! It was a moment of human weakness.”
In response, Stesichorus composed a second ode, a second lyric poem: the Palinode. This time, he declared that Helen had never gone to Troy at all — she had remained safely in Egypt, while only a phantom, a likeness of her, went to Troy. In this new telling, Helen’s innocence was restored. Along with the new song came a new vision: his sight was miraculously returned.
This myth has multiple levels of reading, where they coexist:
• The repeated stereotype of Helen as the cause of the war that traps perception, creating a kind of blindness that prevents us from seeing the story from other perspectives.
• The hubris towards the gods, the arrogance as a result of moving away from an ethical dimension of existence (ethical blindness).
• The restorative function of palinode that leads to the recovery of vision (ability for alternative options) and to the restoration of the balance of the relational ethics.
Blindness and the recovery of sight operate here both literally and symbolically: revision is an act of a seeing anew. In Stesichorus the palinode is a move from a narrower, more defensive position toward one that embraces complexity, ambiguity and a richer field of meaning.
Unfortunately, 2.500 years after Stesichorus, the term palinode in all the languages in which it is used has degenerated and has come to simple mean “Say and Unsay” and to be synonymous with insecurity, distrust, uncertainty, indecision, retreat and confusion.
This observed contradiction between the restorative function of palinode in the 7th century BC, which was associated with ambiguity and complexity, and its negative connotation today that refers to insecurity and distrust, is what can prove to be infinitely helpful for us therapists and the therapeutic dilemmas we face in everyday clinical practice. As one scholar has noted, Stesichorus’ Palinode itself was never a simple correction: it sustained competing truths side by side, showing how ambiguity could be not destructive but generative.
Speaking about the field of systemic therapy, the palinode of Stesichorus can easily lead our thinking to postmodern approaches, to the co-construction of reality, to the "polyphonic self" and the various narrative techniques. This ancient poetic device offers a familiar dynamic in another register. People come to therapy with their “first song”: the dominant narrative that explains their lives, their relationships and their identity. It can be coherent, persuasive — but also blinding. Therapeutic process can offer the conditions for a palinode to occur: the emergence of a second song that does not erase the first but sets it alongside it, opening space for something new to be seen. Therapeutic process, like a palinode, can introduce instability into that narrative. It does not erase the first song; rather, it sets it alongside a second one, allowing both to be heard, and making space for shifts in vision — sometimes subtle, sometimes profound.
The key element in Stesichorus’ palinode - which in our opinion needs to be the key element of the psychotherapeutic process as well - is the necessity of the restoration of the balance of the relational ethics. What seems to ensure the new vision for our patients in the context of therapy is not the use of some imaginative narrative techniques, but the commitment of the therapeutic process to an ethical orientation. In other words, we do not invoke Stesichorus' palinode today as a new therapeutic technique, but as a point of confluence between postmodern approaches and the first cybernetic order approach of Boszormenyi Nagy.
The relational ethics, a core concept in Boszormenyi Nagy's theory, does not refer to a set of moral rules or criteria for distinguishing the good from the bad. Relational ethics is about the balanced distribution of justice among individuals, the long-term maintenance of a dynamic equilibrium among the members of a family, through which the basic needs of each member are understood and respected by all members. Under this perspective, therapeutic process must adopt an ethical orientation and must be guided by the commitment to defending the interests of all those who may be affected by therapy. Therapy therefore should take place in a relational context - regardless of “who is the client?” is or “what is his / her request?”. Hence the term "contextual therapy" that Nagy chooses for his approach.
In palinode, the relational context emerges through the introduction of the fourth dimension of time, the dimension of a timeless time. Within such a time, different stories that embody different duties and different rights can coexist, can be heard equally and can be placed side by side, so that an ethical balance emerges in the overall narrative.
Returning to the myth of palinode of Stesichorus, we find ourselves in front of two different poetical narratives that are initially distant from each other in time, which eventually meet and coexist in the timeless time of palinode:
• In the first chronologically poem, the poet refers to Helen through her human dimension - she surrenders to her passions and becomes the cause of a destructive war.
• In the second chronologically poem, the poet focuses on the divine nature of Helen – as the daughter of Zeus she can send her ghost to Troy, while she herself goes to Egypt.
In the timeless time of palinode, where one narrative can exist next to another, rights, duties and consequences function as controversies and confluences, as ethical restoration occurs. Stesichorus is entitled to freely express his anger at Helen, ignoring her divine nature, he is blinded by this entrapment, he assumes his responsibility towards gods and himself and he gains new vision as the relations between gods and mortals are restored. In the context of palinode, Stesichorus is simultaneously a patient and a therapist of himself (and of the others).
Today systemic therapist is called upon to work in a particularly complex context. Outside his/her office, "reality" is constantly changing, information is enormous and is transmitted at an incredibly fast pace, technology is developing rapidly and makes it often difficult to distinguish between real and fake, traditional values are weakening, people easily become spatially and emotionally disconnected and concepts such as diversity, inclusion, individualization, digital communication come to the fore. Inside his/her office and in the face of his/her patients, the therapist encounters the constant need of the 'vulnerable' human existence for security, certainty, control and for a sense of continuity and consistency in life. At the same time, he/she may wish to follow postmodern principles, such as: “The therapist - client relationship is based on equality”, “The client is the ‘expert’ in his life, not the therapist. The therapist is the ‘expert’ in the process”, “Language is the means for creating new meanings”.
Within this framework, the therapist often faces therapeutic dilemmas such as: "What is my role in the therapeutic process?" "How powerful or adequate am I therapeutically?" "How deep or how superficial can a treatment go?" "What will the client has gained after the end of the therapeutic process?"
We believe that Stesichorus, with his palinode—speaking both as patient and as therapist of himself—offers a way of working through such dilemmas. In our view, palinode is not simply a retraction, but a relational act: it acknowledges that truth is co-constructed, that meanings can shift, and that responsibility lies in how one relates to others. In this sense, the palinode resonates with the principles of postmodern systemic psychotherapy, where the therapist is a participant in an evolving dialogue. The therapeutic task is to foster a process that is restorative and evolutionary, grounded in relational ethics. The therapist, then, does not erase uncertainty but transforms it—holding it in a way that allows trust and connection to generate a deeper, more durable sense of certainty.
At this point, let us refer to a short case study. George, 40 years old, medical doctor, comes for psychotherapy due to panic attacks, which began after the death of his father and which significantly affect his professional and social life.
In his first stories (first ode), he was a torrent against his father: "I had fears that something would happen to me since I was a child. But that was to be expected with the kind of father I had - a two-faced scum, who was good outside, while inside the house he drank, he beat us all the time and he terrified us. Isn't it logical that my life is ruined because of him?" While in therapy he expressed strong and often contradictory emotions: anger towards his father, despair and at the same time guilt. "In the end I couldn't take it anymore. I left home and never saw him again. I learned that he had died days after his funeral.” Sticking to the dominant image of the evil father and attributing to him all his suffering, he becomes blinded and trapped in an abusive past.
During the course of therapy, questions were raised about the two-faced father, about the other face of the father that appeared outside the home. In his next narratives (second ode), he describes: “He always took me with him to the theater and to concerts. He thought it was important. A couple of times we also traveled together for voluntary actions to provide aid to refugees. Perhaps this experience influenced my decision to become a doctor.” A palinode began to emerge, while George began to move from a narrower, more defensive position toward one that embraces complexity, ambiguity and a richer field of meaning, from which he could not only express the complaints and pain about his father's abusive behavior, but also recognize his father's contribution to the positive elements of his current personal identity.
In the end, George’s case illustrates how the palinode, is not a mere retraction but a relational act: a way of revising one’s story in dialogue with others, without erasing what was said before. In therapy, this movement mirrors the systemic principle that meaning is never fixed, but co-constructed, shaped by the presence of others and by the willingness to stay with complexity. George was able to move beyond a defensive, one-dimensional account of his father and to articulate a narrative that could hold both the pain of abuse and the acknowledgment of care. This is precisely the work of relational ethics: not choosing one version of the story at the expense of the other, but finding a form of truth that is accountable, compassionate, and open-ended. As in Stesichorus’ palinode, the therapeutic process does not deny uncertainty; it transforms it into the ground where trust and resilience can grow. In this sense, the palinode becomes a metaphor for systemic psychotherapy itself—a practice of weaving together contradictions into a richer, more humane vision of identity and relationship. And perhaps this is the enduring lesson: that therapy does not come from silencing one story with another, but from learning to let both speak. To live with such layered truths is not weakness or confusion—it is the beginning of wisdom.
