Jeffrey Sacks

Paul Ricoeur, early in his career philosophically examines “the fallibility of man” and “symbols of evil.” These studies correspond to core questions within Freud’s pioneering interdisciplinary opus. An overlap in themes provokes Ricoeur’s life-long study of Freud’s opus through a broad philosophical/linguistic methodology. More specifically, his interdisciplinary process offers opportunities to examine traditional models of understanding narratives within the Freudian theory of the human and it’s derivative clinical implications. His innovative lens generates new temporary possibilities, such as the evolution from analysis to synthesis. This shift moves the locus of understanding and interpretation from the discovery of a Freudian universal known by a knower towards a co-created discovery of the multiple unknown which offers the creative, ever-changing linguistic derived multiple meaning co-created narrative called synthesis. This paper explores 1) the evolution of a new Ricoeurian narrative element called synthesis (2) their variances and influences upon contemporary psychoanalytic process and (3) its subsequent impact upon clinicians.

This essay traces the historicity of a single non-European literary critical idiom by addressing the modes in which “founding” and “subsequent” texts in literature and in criticism both form and interrupt the possibility of speaking of literature as an object. Focusing upon selected writings of Butros al-Bustani and Muhammad al-Muwaylihi , this essay considers the separations that attend the institutionalization of Arabic literary studies—between the old and the new, the modern and the classical, the secular and the religious, and more—and that give literature to appear as an object of study even as they compel what is more idiomatic in literature to withdraw and disappear