Goethe, Rousseau, the Novel, and the Origins of Psychoanalysis

JANE K. BROWN Goethe, Rousseau, the Novel, and the Origins of Psychoanalysis Origins of Psychoanalysis" in the title of this article alludes to a larger two-part thesis, for which this essay analyzes only a single example: First, namely, the depth psychology of the twentieth century (I think here primarily of Freud) developed as a systematic scientific discourse from the imagistic language of European Romanticism (hence the ease with which Benjamin can offer a psychoanalytic reading of "Die wunderlichen Nachbarskinder");1 and second, Goethe as the key figure who mediates the transition from the more diffuse and rational discourse of Sensibility to the more precise imagery of Romanticism, especially in Die Leiden des jungen Werther? This essay focuses specifically on his role in the reception of Rousseau, an obvious topic from the earliest days of comparative literary study.3 Rousseau did so much to stake out the concerns, ideology and aesthetics of European Romanticism that Goethe had to acknowledge his debt to the Frenchman, whose devotion to nature he helped to popularize in Germany. Although Rousseau's influence on Goethe has been surveyed and a few connections explored in detail,4 it has been less common to take careful account of Goethe's ambivalence toward his predecessor .5 This essay is a case-study in that ambivalence. It began some twenty-five years ago in an attempt to understand the parallels connecting Werther andDie Wahlverwandtschaften as Goethe's extended confrontation with Rousseau's epistolary novel Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse (I76I), an effort which raised in turn the question of what drove Goethe back to the novel in 1808, so many years after Werther and after Rousseau 's death (1778). The answer, I now believe, lies in the interplay not only between the texts of their novels, but also in that between the texts of their lives, both as written and as lived. This essay tries to bring these different considerations together by extending the intertextual reading of these love novels to the context of Goethe's own love life and of his reading of Rousseau's autobiography. Goethe's Ambivalence toward Rousseau So many elements are common to the lives of the two great Romantics that it is difficult to focus discussions of their relationship. Consider, for example, some of the social and family issues they shared. Born into the Goethe Yearbook XII (2004) 112 Jane K. Brown free citizenry of independent city-states, each maintained this social identity and even local speech habits for his entire life. Although Goethe's circumstances were more privileged, one grandfather belonged to the artisan class that spawned Rousseau, and his father remained marginal to the Frankfurt patriciate despite his marriage into it. Both were educated at home by devoted fathers, Goethe to be sure rather more systematically. Both left their home and (to different degrees) ideal state and returned only ambivalently for visits. Both prepared to become officials (though only Goethe actually did so); both moved in aristocratic circles toward which they had strong reservations and from which they maintained a certain independence. For both there was a significant tension between writing as an art and as a tool to earn a more dependable, if more mundane , income. We know too much and too little about the love lives of each, which in both cases crossed class boundaries upward and downward . Both were famous hypochondriacs.6 And so it goes. While Goethe's life was more comfortable, secure and stable—economically, socially and emotionally—there remain so many connections that one scarcely knows how to distinguish between general cultural patterns, unconscious affinities , and deliberate response. Like many others, Goethe unquestionably modeled some of his actions on ideas or actions of Rousseau and even cast himself explicitly as Rousseau , as Carl Hammer has detailed in Goethe and Rousseau. In Leipzig, for example, Goethe tried to simplify his life and harden himself along the lines prescribed by Emile (Hammer 45); his method of educating Fritz von Stein derived from the same book (123). His Spartan life in his Gartenhaus in the 1780s was modeled on Rousseau's glorification of the simple country retirement injulie, the Rêveries d'un promeneur solitaire (102...