The Goethean Roots of Depth Psychology

Taking off from Starobinski’s remark that it took Freud to “think” Rousseau’s sentiments, Jane Brown’s book examines a crucial station along the road that leads from Rousseau to Freud: Goethe. Of Rousseau’s influence on Goethe, and Goethe’s influence, in turn, on Freud, there can no doubt. Instead of being a conventional intellectual history dealing in the transmission of concepts, Goethe’s Allegories of Identity is a distinctly literary account of the evolution of depth psychology. Brown shows how Goethe helped forge the language and the representational techniques that made Freud’s architecture of the self possible. In particular, she strives to do justice to the inchoate, fluid character of this newly emerging discourse of psychological depth. She writes, “I seek not to define terms, but in a sense to undefine them, to elicit the polysemy of a discourse not quite sure of its object or, consistently in Goethe, of an object that loses its significance when pinned to a single spot” (8). The book charts the move from an eighteenth-century sentimental self, in conflict perhaps with social roles but generally knowable, to a self conceived as fundamentally inaccessible, disclosed only through various external objectifications and projections. Taken together, Goethe’s works suggest not only a diagnosis of modern malaise, but also hold out the possibility of individual and social adjustment.

Brown begins with two chapters devoted to Goethe’s profound but ambivalent relationship to Rousseau. In Rousseau’s work and life, Goethe finds examples of the unsettled, layered subjectivity that becomes his own lifelong preoccupation. Rousseau, confident in the moral value of deep-seated impulses, strives for a complete transparency of the self, but nevertheless drives to control and rationalize emotion with an almost paranoid fervor (most notably in his pedagogical program in Emile or On Education). Goethe is clearly attracted to the emotional spontaneity he finds in Rousseau, but recognizes the social, ethical, and epistemological problems that arise through Rousseau’s extreme investment in interiority. Thus in both life and art, Goethe repeatedly imitates and rewrites Rousseau. Brown points to how Goethe strikingly stylizes himself in a Rousseauian fashion (for instance, in his somewhat scandalous relationships with women), but also to how he diverges pointedly from Rousseau (for example, in his sense of responsibility toward offspring). She reads two of Goethe’s novels, The Sorrows of Young Werther and Elective Affinities, as successive rewritings of Rousseau’s Julie or the New Heloise, all three of which are two-part works in which passion is negotiated within love triangles. To cite just one example drawn from these multivalent comparisons, Goethe reinterprets Julie in Elective Affinities through key scenes involving water, a recurring psychological motif throughout Goethe’s oeuvre: he transforms the mostly latent water imagery in Rousseau’s work into an objectification of repressed passion, signifying thereby amoral psychological depths. But if Goethe goes further than Rousseau to admit and even validate these roiling, amoral passions, he is also more acutely concerned with their ethical management. Brown develops this point by comparing Rousseau’s Emile, or On Education to Goethe’s bildungs-roman, Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, focusing on the question of individual socialization, and Rousseau’s Reveries to Goethe’s Faust looking especially at the character of the social pact.

The second section of the book explores Goethe’s allegorical techniques in representing interiority, techniques he develops initially in his classical dramas (Egmont, Tasso, Iphigenia in Tauris), extends in Faust in connection with his scientific epistemology, and adapts narratively in his novel Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship. Brown draws her term allegory from a theatrical tradition reaching back to medieval morality plays, in which context it means simply “truth made concretely visible” (9). An example would be when a dramatic figure stands for an abstract virtue or vice. Goethe’s allegorical mode of representation assumes diverse forms—natural phenomena, dreams, myths, operatic-style visions, masques, embedded plays, mirror-reflections, arrays of characters displaying disparate aspects of the protagonist. What sets his modern “allegories of identity...