This is a monumental study, so richly stimulating that it cannot be given justice in a review. To begin with, it is a psychoanalytic study of Goethe, based on an astounding knowledge of the large and small incidents in his life, as well as of the widest Goethe “Forschungen,” and reads like an exciting adventure story of the labyrinthine mazes of the Goethe phenomenon. Goethe becomes the example of the thesis that the genius “needs the impact of the unconscious,” and that the artist needs to “preserve the reactibility of nearly all archaic layers, not only the childhood imaginative life, but also the pregenital source of libido.” He views Goethe as “perhaps one of those highly talented schizophrenics who after an acute phase develop into a fairly equilibrated state