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Faust's opening lines in Goethe's drama express his disillusion that, after his lifelong attempts to fathom the meaning of life, he is as far from his goal as ever. Sartorius takes these lines as the starting-point for a paper in which he explores the psychology of the Faustian complex and its relevance for present-day western man and for analysts in particular.
Faust's problem is partly that of the intellectual who has lost touch with experience, but it is also more than that. Faust is in the grip of an inflation which deludes him into believing that he can master the secrets of the universe by an act of will. Western civilisation owes much to intellectual and technological perseverance, but Sartorius points to the risk of excess in this attitude, showing how dangerously far we have swung towards developing ‘an ego that fancies itself more and more godlike’, resulting in ‘the technocrat who believes he controls the world’.
Like Paracelsus, his prototype according to Jung, Faust suffered from an internal split against which his élan vital or ‘daemonic energy’ is a defence. Such a split tends to give rise to grand metaphysical structures, including psychological systems which omnipotently purport to make sense of the apparent non-sense of the unconscious. In our inner dividedness, Sartorius observes, we psychologists are tempted to take refuge in a vision of the human psyche which is integrated and imbued with meaning. Jungians may be peculiarly susceptible to this form of inflation inasmuch as the archetype of the self can suggest an ideal of perfection to be striven for.
The turning-point for Faust comes when his despair leads him to the verge of suicide, for this point also marks the surrender of his delusion of power. The recognition that he cannot at will lay hold on the secrets of life opens the way for a new reality, that of revelation, the essence of which is that it is unexpected, neither sought nor desired. But the unexpected in Goethe's drama turns out to be