The question of how goethe has influenced freud personally has been addressed by most writers on Freud's life and the early history of psychoanalysis. Yet how relevant some of Goethe's central philosophical tenets may have been for the scientific method chosen by Freud for psychoanalysis has, as far as I am aware of, not been raised. I believe that in the current debate about the true nature of psychoanalysis (psychoanalysis as natural science? as hermeneutics? as science of self-reflection? as art? as mythology? as separate field of symbolic forms?) the following considerations may have some value.

“Do not the most beautiful colors of life appear to us only against a dark foil?” Thus begins the seventh book of Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship. And elsewhere Goethe wrote: “A tender poem, like a rainbow, is drawn only on a dark background; therefore the element of depression fits the poetic genius.”1 What is the dark ground