Epilogue

Psychoanalytic investigations of the lives of prominent individuals—psychobiographies—are practically as old as psychoanalysis itself. Freud's classic study of Leonardo da Vinci of 1910 forms the prototype of an entire genre of “pathography” that blossomed in the decades to follow. Yet, such early efforts were both self-limited and self-limiting: they attempted to “reduce” creative achievements to the vicissitudes of psychosexual development, frequently falling prey to what Erikson would term “originology”—the attempt to reduce life to patterns of recurrence without understanding it as the organic compound of individual and social growth.

The essays in this issue of Psychoanalytic Inquiry provide compelling testimony to the fact that recent advances in psychoanalytic theory have brought in their wake corresponding advances in the subtlety, scope, and persuasiveness of psychobiography. One might say that the creativity evinced by a recent generation of psychoanalytic theorists has rendered analysis better able to grasp a maximally creative individual like Goethe. In approaching Goethe's creative output, these studies far transcend the stereotypically “oedipal” approach of the first generation of pathographies. In line with recent theoretical advances, they look to preoedipal mother-infant relationship, early idealizing and mirroring relationships, pathological object relationships, and complex defensive operations in apprehending the products of creative genius.

Goethe has proven an ideal subject for exemplifying the most recent trends in psychobiography. His generous and revelatory correspondence, teamed with his remarkable autobiographical chronicle, Poetry and Truth, testify to his own recognition that creativity is always embedded in life history. This is to say that Goethe's own