Sapphic Bittersweet

The Sapphic bittersweet — γλυκύπικρον Ἔρως — is for Snell the philological signature of the discovery of the soul. Sappho’s coinage names what the Homeric psychology cannot name: the simultaneous experience of contradictory affects, the present moment as itself the seat of discord rather than the alternation of distinct states across time. In the epic, opposed feelings are sequential: first joy, then grief; first courage from the thumos, then its withdrawal. In Sappho the contradiction is held within one act of feeling.

Snell writes that “the epic does not yet feature such emotional discord or tension, because conditions of that sort do not exist in the area of physical operations, in whose image Homer portrays the mental processes. Sappho, with her bold neologism ‘bitter-sweet,’ discovers the area of the soul and defines it as fundamentally distinct from the body” (Snell 1953, pp. 59–60). Anacreon’s parallel formulation — I love and love not; I rave, nor do I rave — names the same discovery in a different register: the lover affirms and negates the same predicate, an impossibility under the older organ-organ logic of psychic agency.

For the depth tradition this is load-bearing. Sappho’s word is the earliest unambiguous documentary trace of what Jung will later call the tension of opposites — the recognition that psychic life is not the alternation of discrete forces but the holding of contradiction itself. The bittersweet is, in classical-philological terms, the philological birth-record of the interior. The history of the European soul begins, on Snell’s reading, with a six-syllable Aeolic compound naming the impossible.

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Primary sources

snell-discovery-of-the-mind (Snell 1953, p. 60)