Reading Goethe at Midlife: Ancient Wisdom, German Classicism, and Jung by Paul Bishop (review)

As the title suggests, this book offers a historical context for the modern psychological concept of “midlife crisis” from three perspectives: an overview of the idea of stages of life, C. G. Jung’s essay “Die Lebenswende” (1931), and Goethe’s “Urworte orphisch.” On the basis of extensive knowledge of all three topics it makes a strong and interesting argument for the poem as a psychological analysis of life stages, without it being necessary to take the term “midlife” too literally. There is no claim that “Urworte orphisch,” written in 1818, is a midlife product or that Goethe’s life and thinking about development did not involve repeated crises and turns. Bishop rather pursues a single literary example of the implications of his important two-volume work on Jung’s roots in German classicism (Analytical Psychology and German Classical Aesthetics: Goethe, Schiller, and Jung [Routledge, 2007]) to demonstrate Goethe’s anticipation of later professional wisdom on the emotional crises that accompany the transition between life stages. Based on a series of lectures delivered for the Zurich Lecture Series in Analytical Psychology in 2010, the book addresses primarily Jungian psychoanalysts. Nevertheless, it should interest Goethe scholars for its extended commentary on “Urworte orphisch” and for its provocative achronological structure that treats Goethe and Jung as a pair of stars in mutual orbit around each other.

The book falls into two symmetrical parts, with the first two chapters focused on analytical psychology, the second two on Goethe. Chapter 1 surveys in largely, though not entirely, chronological order, the notion of stages of life from antiquity to Hermann Hesse, then surveys the concept “midlife crisis,” a term that emerged as a psychological category only in 1965. Bishop claims neither completeness for his surveys nor any particular shape, except for occasional assert ions, with documentation, that Goethe anticipated one or another observation. The second chapter analyzes “Die Lebenswende,” where the analogy of human life to the daily course of the sun grounds the notion of midlife change and embeds the structure of human life in the order of the cosmos. Frequent parallels to Goethe adumbrate more clearly the central theme, and the last two pages on symbol draw Goethe and Jung together clearly. The last two chapters turn explicitly to Goethe, first to his “orphism” and then to “Urworte orphisch.” Chapter 3 begins with an overview of Goethe’s “profound and far-reaching” influence on Jung, which Bishop understands as conceptual, “stylistic,” and “subterranean” (119). He lists five points: (1) the limitation of reason, (2) imagery of light and darkness, (3) focus on the maternal, (4) polarity, and (5) the notion of a midlife crisis (expressed in conversation with Eckermann on March 11, 1828). (I don’t actually see anything stylistic here, but the assertion could certainly be supported by considering the debt Jung’s analogical reasoning owed to Goethe’s morphological thinking.) The remainder of the chapter weaves together classical philosophy, fragments of ancient mystery cults, modern anthropology of religion (for example, Mircea Eliade), and German romantic interest in mystery cults (Creuzer et al.) to define “Goethe’s orphism” with its strong focus on the turn to hope. The last chapter comments in detail on “Urworte orphisch” in terms of its mythological underpinnings and its psychological significance.

Bishop operates within the canon of Jung’s followers and Jung’s own canon—Nietzsche, nineteenth-century philosophy, mythology, anthropology. Similarly the Goethe invoked here is largely Jung’s Goethe, who speaks in aphorisms, essays, gnomic poetry, correspondence, and to Eckermann. There are a few references to Werther, and several to Faust, of course, but to the few parts of Faust that interested Jung: Mephistopheles as a principle of evil, Gretchen as the object of tragedy, the Mothers, bits of the classical Walpurgisnight, and bits of act five. Strikingly absent is Die Wahlverwandtschaften—today, surely, Goethe’s psychological novel par excellence, but perhaps more Freudian than Jungian. The approach also seems characteristically Jungian with its...