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In the following presentation I wish to call attention to the special role that conflicts over sibling rivalry played as a lifelong motivating factor in the psyche of Goethe and as a central theme in his masterwork Faust. It goes without saying that a universal genius like Goethe, with the incredible richness of both his personality and his multifaceted creativity, would defy adequate explanation even by the most thorough research and the most sensitive psychoanalytic understanding. Eissler emphasizes this point in the introduction to his own monumental study of Goethe (1963), a work that actually makes giant strides toward that ideal.
Similarly, a work like Faust, the writing of which spanned the major portion of the poet's existence, is intensely autobiographical, as was everything Goethe wrote. The final version contained so much of the accumulated philosophy and wisdom of his long and fruitful life that it obviously could not be reduced to a single theme. Yet, the greatest and most complicated of men can be driven in the unconscious by strikingly few crucial issues, and I believe the sibling rivalry problem to be one such decisive issue in Goethe.
The sibling rivalry issue is of course a major psychic determinant in the life of any child, even in the life of only children, who usually anticipate the day when they will be replaced and often ask their