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The life circumstances of Goethe's childhood are considered in their effective contribution to the extraordinary flowering of his genius and to the unusual scope and quality of his life. The supremely unambivalent nature of the parents' relation to their son is seen to have determined their skilful protection of the child from infantile traumata, while the father's ability to modulate to the developmental needs of his son for solicitude and discipline may have been crucial for the proper co-operation between ego and superego in the adult Goethe's creativity. The conflicts between father and son were on the basis of strong object love, and served as optimal stimuli for masculine behaviour. External events which are described may also have delayed the onset of internalization and thus reduced the intensification of reaction formation and in other ways prevented the child's fixation to particular forms of psychopathology.
There was diversification of personality amongst his immediate family circle, with a consensus of willingness to be at the disposal of his emerging creativity. While artistic creation requires a certain degree of ambivalence in the creator, Goethe always returned, even from fugue states, to a basic positive contact with the world, perhaps not unrelated to his mother's positive and total acceptance of him. It is tentatively suggested that while some constitutions with inherent genius endowment require for later maximum realization conditions that severely frustrate infantile wishes and that these circumstances may lead to the production of specialized genius, others mature under circumstances providing abundant gratifications; and these are more universally creative, as Goethe.
Goethe's life was unusually rich in intense conflicts, but the reality factors in his life were structured in such a way as to facilitate his dealings with conflict-arousing stimuli, and to develop resources to meet them. Conflict and creativity were allies in the artistic o