Goethe and Psychoanalysis

Abstract

Relative to psychoanalysis, Goethe is straightforwardly divisible into partes tres: for he proto-psychoanalyzed several of his contemporaries, including himself; he has been analyzed and misanalyzed repeatedly; and he has metapsychologically influenced the Freudian tribe and certainly ought to have. Freud, in fact, has been our Caesar in this, for he wrote two quite short pieces on Goethe rather neatly confirming these divisions. In the first, he begins a pleasant ramble by citing the following line from the first pages of Goethe’s Dichtung und Wahrheit: “If we try to recollect what happened to us in the earliest years of childhood, we often find that we confuse what we have heard from others with what is really a possession of our own derived from what we ourselves have witnessed” (Freud, 1953f, 17, p. 147).

Originally read at a joint symposium sponsored by the Boston Colloquium for the Philosophy of Science and the Departments of Germanic Languages and History of Science at Harvard University, 3–4 December 1982.