Analysis, Synthesis, Krisis: Methods of Reading in Freud, Jung, and Homer

My concern is with a basic experience of human life: coming face to face with something that seems to have a meaning, but not yet knowing what that meaning is — and seeking to interpret it. What is the work of interpretation? And how is interpretation, more than reading or reception, also the generation and creation of meaning? 

My dissertation, “Analysis and Synthesis,” recognizes, in the human confrontation with meaning, two diametrically opposed methods or modes of interpretation. “Analysis” (from the ancient Greek verb analuō, “break up, undo, take apart”) dissolves structures of meaning, separating the whole into its parts. “Synthesis” (from the ancient Greek verb suntithēmi, “put together”) harmonizes and integrates fragmentary or incomplete structures of thought into a unity. These two modes of interpretation appear to contradict one another; yet, as I argue, together they constitute a necessary and generative dialogue at the heart of human creativity. 

I pursue my investigation through two avenues: the psychoanalysis of dreams and Homeric poetics, with special attention to the Odyssey.

My dissertation opens with one of the founding conflicts in the early history of psychoanalysis: the break between Sigmund Freud and C. G. Jung over the question of interpretation. Recasting their debate, I argue that these two thinkers did and did not know they were enacting — through their diverging theories and their fracturing personal relationship — the primary opposition between analysis and synthesis. Reading published works alongside private letters, I trace the development of their opposition, with the dream as the central arena of conflict. Freud’s revolutionary method of “analysis” requires the interpreter to split the dream, like a pathological symptom, into pieces: its original connections, all that unifies it as a coherent and intelligible narrative, must be rigorously ignored as false and misleading illusion. In deliberate contrast to Freud, Jung develops a “synthetic” method: the dream must be heard and held in mind as a whole, while the interpreter strives to reconstitute its remembered fragments as a unified and emotionally compelling drama. Exploring the assumptions (and fantasies) about unity, fragmentation, authorship, and subjectivity, that ground these opposing methods, I capture the fundamental contrast between Freud’s analysis and Jung’s synthesis. At the same time, I reveal how each method depends on or assumes the other, and how each is the implicit and necessary counterpart of the other. 

Turning to Homer, I shift the focus from modern interpretation to ancient poetics: from reading to writing, from criticism to creation. Here I explore analysis and synthesis as modes of oral composition. While the synthetic art of this poetry is obvious — the very name Homer (Homeros) means literally “he who fits together” — I show that an unrecognized but essential analytic art is its constant counterpoint. Homeric poetry designates this analytic method with the verb krinō (“to separate”), the root of our word “criticism.” My discussion culminates with an extended reading of Penelope as a figure for the critic and the poet.

I conclude by bringing together the methods of Freud, Jung, and Homer. Comparing three dreams or images of “reading a book” (one from each author), I suggest that in each author’s image of “reading,” we see the concrete enactment of their interpretive method — and their creative method. Freud analyzes; Jung synthesizes; and in a famous story, repeated three times in the Odyssey, Penelope both synthesizes and analyzes: weaving and unweaving her great “text.”

Across this thesis, I explore how the art of reading — by analysis, synthesis, or krisis (criticism) — shapes the art of writing, and vice versa.