Prologue

All exercises in the realm of psychoanalytic biography can have one of two purposes. They may either focus on creative individuals in order to illuminate the creative process, or they may focus on genetic, dynamic, and contextual factors in order to facilitate comprehension of particular creative individuals. In the most outstanding works of this genre, these two orientations are combined in reciprocally illuminating ways. The psychoanalytic biographer's own creative amalgamation of nature and nurture, his willingness to construe creativity as the outcome of an interaction between innate predisposition and historical circumstances, is in some ways analogous to the psychoanalyst's clinical work. It is the psychoanalytic biographer's creative achievement, we might say, to keep us “on the ground” in ascertaining the endlessly complex relationship between certain general constituents of the creative process and the peculiarities of creative individuals in whom the process is exemplified.

These provisos are particularly germane in approaching Goethe, whose profound poetic sensibilities are complemented by the profoundly biographical import of his poetic creations. Goethe's immense stature in the Western literary tradition is sufficient reason to make him the subject of an issue of Psychoanalytic Inquiry. For psychoanalysts, Goethe holds special appeal. Freud, as Leon Wurmser points out in the introductory chapter, was not only steeped in a Goethean heritage, but undertook to address in psychoanalytic therapy some of the very questions that preoccupied Goethe. Freud, according to Wurmser, not only embraced Goethe's fundamentally Aristotelian estimation of the relationship between “analysis” and “synthesis,” but elaborated a theory of therapy that had, at its core, a Goethean notion of “metamorphosis”—an implicitly teleological view of the growth-process as one aiming for the