Goethe’s Allegories of Identity by Jane Brown (review)

Goethe’s Allegories of Identity contributes to our understanding of the history of the modern subject as it develops from Rousseau to twentieth-century depth psychology and psychoanalysis. In a compelling narrative of texts, concepts, and their transmission, Brown argues that Goethe played a crucial role in the emergence of notions of interiority and the subconscious in direct response to Rousseau and in anticipation of psychoanalysis—a role that literary scholars have thus far failed to acknowledge.

Brown’s aim is not to provide a monolithic intellectual history, but rather to emphasize Goethe’s unique contribution—at times direct, at others indirect—to the semantic conditions that made possible the emergence of depth psychology. “If Rousseau was the first to think the thoughts later conceptualized by Freud,” Brown explains, “it was Goethe’s achievement to find a new language independent of the conscious and (as Freud taught) censoring self for representing and exploring the first traces of the unconscious identified by Rousseau in his Confessions and Reveries” (7). This “new language” refers not only to the specific terminology Goethe would introduce, but, more importantly, to the allegorical methodology Goethe would develop in response to Rousseau’s “mimetic imperative” (31–32). Brown’s striking thesis is that Goethe’s experiments with allegory, by figuring psychological processes non-representationally and in their concealment, paved the way for the modern discourse of interiority and the unconscious.

A renowned scholar of Goethe’s oeuvre, Brown unfolds her argument in a series of astute analyses of Goethe’s texts, both well-known and obscure, spanning from Werther to the scientific writings of the 1790s to Faust II. Exhibiting these works against a Rousseauian backdrop, she makes a strong case for the continuity of Goethe’s thought and method across the many genres and stages of his writing. The volume consists of three thematically organized parts of several chapters each, which move from an exposition of Goethe’s relation to Rousseau in part 1, to a comprehensive analysis of Goethe’s experiments with allegory in part 2, to a more provisional exploration of the connections between Goethe’s writings and psychoanalytic theory in part 3.

The first part establishes the centrality of Rousseau to Goethe’s thought via an inventive juxtaposition of texts from both authors. Brown interprets Werther and Die Wahlverwandtschaften as responses to Rousseau’s Julie, while Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre and Faust are read as replies to Emile. These pairings reveal how, throughout his corpus, Goethe would return time and again to Rousseau, in admiration and in an attempt to reconcile certain paradoxical tensions Goethe saw in Rousseau’s conception of the self. Rousseau’s writings offered a stirring vision—of the individual torn between self-transparency and self-opacity, between interiorized intention and exteriorized action—that was blind to its own paradoxes. Brown shows how Goethe attempts to remedy Rousseau’s shortcomings by offering variations on and revisions of the Rousseauian source material. Goethe’s writing, Brown argues, must be understood as an attempt to advance beyond a problem with self-representation he had discovered in Rousseau.

Part 2 delineates three stages in Goethe’s lifelong struggle to satisfactorily express unconscious processes: the initial theatrical stage of “projective allegory” in which the self is projected outward as a surface-effect (as seen in the dramatic works Iphigenia, Tasso, and Egmont); the intermediary scientific-epistemological stage of “experimental allegory” in which the self is grasped intuitively in experience (exemplified in the Farbenlehre, “Der Versuch als Vermittler von Objekt und Subjekt”); and the final stage of “narrative allegory,” which unifies the two earlier stages, in which the self emerges in the (simultaneously conscious and unconscious) process of observational self-reference (seen best in Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre and brought to full completion in Faust II). On this reading, Goethe, not fully satisfied with his theatrical and scientific attempts to put the unrepresentable dimension of the self into actions and words, is compelled to return to the writing of Wilhelm Meister after a hiatus of...