Goethe's Allegories of Identity

Part III. The Language of Inferiority

Pa r t I I I the Language of Interiority This page intentionally left blank the previous chapter concluded with a glossary of simple psychological terminology as it was becoming conceptualizable in Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre. The remainder of the book turns to structures and terms more obviously associated with modern depth psychology to show Goethe’s approach to the other asymptote of this argument, Freud. again, the issue is not to explain Goethe through Freud or Freud through Goethe, but to show the emergence of ways of talking about identity and the unconscious more familiar to us today in terms of two specific examples, anxiety (Chapter 7) and the uncanny (Chapter 9), and (in Chapter 8) to elaborate one clear example of the translation of the initially rationalist psychological representation of Werther into what we recognize as the depth psychology of the romantic generation, a group that acknowledged the tremendous impact of Goethe’s classicism, his plays and prose of the 1790s, in advance of his broader acceptance beginning only in the middle of the nineteenth century. This page intentionally left blank ...