Goethe and psychoanalysis

Joseph Margolis

University of South Carolina

pp. 83-100

in: Frederick Amrine, Francis J. Zucker, Harvey Wheeler (eds), Goethe and the sciences, Berlin, Springer, 1987

Abstract

Relative to psychoanalysis, Goethe is straightforwardly divisible into partes tres: for he proto-psychoanalyzed several of his contemporaries, including himself; he has been analyzed and misanalyzed repeatedly; and he has metapsychologically influenced the Freudian tribe and certainly ought to have. Freud, in fact, has been our Caesar in this, for he wrote two quite short pieces on Goethe rather neatly confirming these divisions. In the first, he begins a pleasant ramble by citing the following line from the first pages of Goethe's Dichtung und Wahrheit: "If we try to recollect what happened to us in the earliest years of childhood, we often find that we confuse what we have heard from others with what is really a possession of our own derived from what we ourselves have witnessed" (Freud, 1953f, 17, p. 147).

Cited authors

Goethe Johann Wolfgang

Freud Sigmund