1 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (1966;
also presumably require a recognition of how unconscious processes and affects may influence scientific research.2
Within the new fields of the human sciences – or the Geisteswissenschaften, as they came to be known in the German-speaking world during the second half of the nineteenth century – the question of the “scien- tific” character of knowledge took on an increased importance as the century drew to a close. The pressure placed upon the very concept of
Wissenschaft is registered in how the function of this term changed in the
second half of the nineteenth century, when academic disciplines under- went the processes of demarcation and professionalization that led to the establishment of modern research universities as we know them today.
In the early stages of the nineteenth century in Germany, Wissenschaft could refer to any body of knowledge that elaborated a systematic meth- odology and could be taught as an academic discipline, independently of any materialist or empirical basis.3 This situation was in part attrib-
utable to Kant’s insistence, in his Metaphysical Foundations of Natural
Science (Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Naturwissenschaft, 1786) that Wissenschaft is defined by its systematic character, and that knowledge
can only be wissenschaftlich in the strictest sense of that term when it is true logically or apodictically rather than empirically.4 While this maneu-
ver effectively equated Wissenschaft with what Kant took to be the aims of philosophy, he was also at pains to draw clear limits concerning the types of knowledge claims that humans could conceivably make about external nature an sich or “in itself.” In particular, Kant argued, in the second part of the Critique of Judgment (Kritik der Urteilskraft, 1790), that when humans perceive a teleology or design at work in natural organ- isms, such judgments are reflective (belonging to the structure and ten- dencies of human subjectivity) rather than determinate (belonging to empirical nature in itself). Yet despite Kant’s attempt carefully to circum- scribe the type and extent of such knowledge claims, especially those
2 For a more recent discussion of these issues, see: Bruce Mazlish, The Uncertain
Sciences, 2nd edn. (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2007), 10–36; Roger Smith, Being
Human: Historical Knowledge and the Creation of Human Nature (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2007), 79–82.
3 On this subject, see H. Hühn, S. Meier-Oeser, and H. Pulte, “Wissenschaft,” Historisches
Wörterbuch der Philosophie, 12 vols., ed. Joachim Ritter et al. (Basel: Schwabe, 1971–2004), vol. XII, 902–47; here 915–16.
4 Kant writes: “Eine jede Lehre, wenn sie ein System, d.i. ein nach Prinzipien geordnetes
Ganze der Erkenntnis sein soll, heißt Wissenschaft … Eigentliche Wissenschaft kann nur diejenige genannt werden, deren Gewißheit apodiktisch ist; Erkenntnis, die bloß empirische Gewißheit enthalten kann, ist ein nur uneigentlich so genanntes Wissen.” Immanuel Kant, Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Naturwissenschaft (1786), Werke in sechs
Bänden, ed. Wilhelm Weischedel (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1983), vol. V, 12–13.
concerning a teleology or “mind” apparently at work in nature, his philo- sophical definition of Wissenschaft nevertheless gave rise to a whole series of speculative Wissenschaften propagated by his German idealist succes- sors. Overstepping the limits of reason set out by Kant, these thinkers posited the existence of spiritual or mind-like structures that unfold in nature, running the gamut from Fichte’s Wissenschaftlehre to the vitalist
Naturphilosophie of Schelling and his successors like Carl Gustav Carus.5
By the second half of the nineteenth century, this situation was beginn ing to change, most notably in the attempts made by some natural scienti sts to differentiate their own field of enquiry – die
Naturwissenschaften – from the human sciences or Geisteswissenschaften,
as well as from the legacies of German idealism and vitalism in gen- eral.6 A case in point is a public lecture delivered by the renowned
German physicist and physiologist Hermann von Helmholtz (1821–94) at the University of Heidelberg in 1862, entitled “On the Relation of the Natural Sciences to Science in General” (Über das Verhältniss der
Naturwissenschaften zur Gesamtheit der Wissenschaft). Helmholtz begins
his lecture by declaring that the age of the Renaissance man – in which, for example, Johannes Kepler (1571–1630) could simultaneously hold professorships in mathematics and morals – is over. Due to the increased level of specialization and detail achieved in the various disciplines of both the natural and the human sciences, it is no longer possible, declared Helmholtz, to offer grand syntheses which would combine the human and natural sciences into a unified body of knowledge.7
The chief target in Helmholtz’s sights was what he called the “Icarus flight of speculation” (Icarus Flug der Spekulation) to be found in German idealism – first and foremost in the thought of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831).8 By arguing that both nature and human life are the 5 See Robert J. Richards, The Romantic Conception of Life: Science and Philosophy in the Age
of Goethe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 11, 67, 72–4, 137–39.
6 See, in this connection, Alwin Diemer, “Die Begründung des Wissenschaftscharakters
der Wissenschaft im 19. Jahrhundert,” Beiträge zur Entwicklung der Wissenschaftstheorie
im 19. Jahrhundert, ed. A. Diemer (Meisenheim am Glan: Verlag Anton Hain, 1968), 3–62; Alwin Diemer, “Die Differenzierung der Wissenschaften in die Natur- und die Geisteswissenschaften,” Beiträge zur Entwicklung der Wissenschaftstheorie im 19.
Jahrhundert, 174–221; H. Hühn, S. Meier-Oeser, and H. Pulte, “Wissenschaft,” 916.
7 Hermann von Helmholtz, “On the Relation of the Natural Sciences to Science in
General,” Science and Culture: Popular and Philosophical Essays, ed. David Cahan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 76–95; here 78. “Über das Verhältniss der Naturwissenschaften zur Gesamtheit der Wissenschaft,” Vorträge und Reden, vol. I, 4th edn. (Braunschweig: Vieweg, 1896), 159–85; here 162.
8 Helmholtz, “On the Relation of the Natural Sciences to Science in General,” 80; “Über
das Verhältniss der Naturwissenschaften zur Gesamtheit der Wissenschaft,” 165 (trans- lation altered).
result of a single creative spirit, Hegel had, thought Helmholtz, falsely assumed an identity between human thought and external nature that could allegedly be established without recourse to empirical experience. While Hegel’s thesis concerning the identity of thought and external reality seemed to receive confirmation from Geisteswissenschaften such as history, theology, and law, the real test of his identity hypothesis lay not in these fields, but in what Helmholtz called the “facts of nature” (Thatsachen der Natur). Yet it was precisely natural scientists who, accord- ing to Helmholtz, regarded Hegel’s identity hypothesis as “absolutely senseless” (absolut sinnlos) and who accordingly sought to free themselves from all philosophical influences and presuppositions, basing their claims purely on inductions that could be concretized into strict laws, and then tested against empirical reality. It was in this way that a sharply defined opposition (scharfer Gegensatz) between the natural and human sciences came into being, an opposition which, argued Helmholtz, often saw the human sciences being denied any scientific status at all.9
Helmholtz elaborates upon this opposition by ascribing different methodological procedures to the natural and human sciences. While the natural sciences are based upon rigorous processes of induction that emerge from the “conscious and logical activity of the mind” (bewusste
logische Tätigkeit unseres Geistes), the human sciences are more inclined to
rely on “judgments based upon psychological tact” (Urtheilen nach psy-
chologischem Tactgefühl) and on processes of “artistic, not strictly logical
induction” (künstlerische, nicht eigentlich logische Induction). This does not, however, rule out that possibility that, in some limited instances, dis- coveries in the natural sciences may rely on what Helmholtz refers to as the “instinctive intuition” (instinktive Anschauung) that characterizes the human sciences. It was, after all, an artist (Künstler) by the name of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe who had, according to Helmholtz, initiated the scientific discipline of comparative anatomy through his botanical and zoological researches.10
Helmholtz’s reference to Goethe as someone who relied upon instinct- ive intuition rather than conscious logic belongs to a dominant tradition of writing about Goethe – beginning with Friedrich Schiller and con- tinuing through figures such as Friedrich Nietzsche, Wilhelm Dilthey, and Georg Simmel, into the work of Freud – which sees him as the
9 Helmholtz, “On the Relation of the Natural Sciences to Science in General,” 79–80;
“Über das Verhältniss der Naturwissenschaften zur Gesamtheit der Wissenschaft,” 163–5 (translation altered).
10 Helmholtz, “On the Relation of the Natural Sciences to Science in General,”176, 171–2,
175; “Das Verhältniss der Naturwissenschaften zur Gesamtheit der Wissenschaft,” 88, 85–6, 88 (translation altered).
great German example of unconscious artistic productivity and intui- tive aesthetic sense.11 In fact, not unlike the category of the “human”
in Foucault’s analysis of the human sciences, Goethe has played a role as both subject and object in the history of nineteenth-century German science: as subject he is seen as the last of the Renaissance men, whose essentially artistic and intuitive theory of color was also a radically flawed attempt to supplant Newton’s Opticks; while as object, he is the preter- natural genius, whose creativity is not explicable in terms of the empir- ical natural sciences, thereby demonstrating their very limits.12
At the heart of this image of Goethe – as at the heart of the human sciences themselves, if we follow Foucault’s analysis – stands the uncon- scious, and, to be more precise, Goethe’s historical relation to psychoa- nalysis. This topic is most directly considered by Freud himself, in an address written on the occasion of his receiving the Goethe Prize in 1930. This address, in which Goethe once again appears as both subject and object of the scientific discipline in question, outlines Goethe’s dual relation to psychoanalysis, in that Freud makes the following two impor- tant claims: first, Goethe is said to have used with his friends a talking cure that in some respects resembled psychoanalysis, or in other words, he is seen to have been a proto-psychoanalyst; and second, Goethe’s personality and works are seen as providing an ideal object for psycho- analysis, making him an exemplary neurotic and therefore an ideal ana- lysand.13 As Paul Bishop also notes in his contribution to this volume, a
third claim regarding Goethe is made by Freud in his “Autobiographical Study” (“Selbstdarstellung”) of 1925. Here Goethe is said to have influenced the history of psychoanalysis, chiefly though the inspiration that Freud derived from the essay on “Die Natur” that he mistakenly
11 See Nietzsche’s discussion of Goethe in his Götzen-Dämmerung, §49, Werke in drei
Bänden, ed. Karl Schlechta (Munich: Hanser, 1954), vol. II, 1024–25. See also Wilhelm Dilthey, Das Erlebnis und die Dichtung, 4th edn. (1906; Stuttgart: Teubner, 1957); Georg Simmel, Goethe (Leipzig: Klinkhardt und Biermann, 1916).
12 In this connection, see Angus Nicholls, “The Subject-Object of Wissenschaft: On Wilhelm
Dilthey’s Goethebilder,” Colloquia Germanica 39, no. 1 (2006): 69–86.
13 Sigmund Freud, “Address Delivered in the Goethe House at Frankfurt,” The Standard
Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. James Strachey
and Anna Freud et al., 24 vols. (London: The Hogarth Press, 1953–74), vol. XXI, 208–2; (hereafter cited as SE followed by volume and page numbers). “Ansprache im Frankfurter Goethe-Haus,” Gesammelte Werke in achtzehn Bänden mit einem Nachtragsband, ed. Anna Freud et al., 18 vols. (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 1986–99), vol. XIV, 547–50; (here- after cited as GW followed by volume and page numbers). On Freud’s ideas regarding Goethe as an analysand, see also: Freud, “A Childhood Recollection from Dichtung und
Wahrheit,” SE, XVII, 147–56; “Eine Kindheitserinnerung aus Dichtung und Wahrheit,” GW, XII, 15–26. Goethe’s sparkling career as an analysand reached its heights in Kurt
Eissler’s monumental two-volume psychoanalysis of Goethe: Goethe: A Psychoanalytic
attributed to Goethe.14 Continuing in a similar vein, a recent study has
even announced that Goethe, especially in his first novel Die Leiden des
jungen Werthers (The Sorrows of Young Werther, 1774) as well as in his great
drama Faust, helped to create a “culture of the unconscious” by depict- ing the fates of narcissistic individuals within the context of modernity.15
It is on the basis of such claims that Goethe has come to occupy a central position in what might polemically be called the “historical mythology” concerning the origins of psychoanalysis. This mythology still requires a thoroughgoing critique, to which this chapter might be seen as being a preliminary contribution, while also functioning as kind of supplement to Paul Bishop’s contribution to this volume.
What I hope to show is that in terms of Goethe’s relation to psy- choanalysis and the history of the unconscious in nineteenth-century German thought, what Freud did not say about Goethe is in fact far more revealing and important than what he did say. When one compares the scientific methodologies of Goethe and Freud, it is often difficult to believe that only forty-five or so years separate the death of Goethe in 1832 from the beginnings of Freud’s earliest activity as a scientist in the mid 1870s. It was during these years that the related group of epistem- ologies known as German idealism, Naturphilosophie, and vitalism were comprehensively displaced by the materialist positivism of Helmholtz, the German physiologist Emil Du Bois-Reymond (1818–96) and Freud’s early instructor in the subject of physiology, Ernst Brücke (1819–92). A possible scientific “bridge” from Goethe to Freud may have been pro- vided by the physiologist Johannes Müller (1801–58),16 who had early
in his career expressed sympathies with Goethe’s approach to science as well as with Schelling’s Naturphilosophie. But this link to Goethe was decisively severed by Helmholtz, Du Bois-Reymond and Brücke, all of whom were students of Müller, but who, especially in the wake of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859), made it their aim to remove all traces of vitalism and Naturphilosophie from the natural sciences. Thus, when Freud attended the public lecture given by Professor Carl Brühl
14 Freud, “An Autobiographical Study,” SE, XX, 8; “Selbstdarstellung,” GW, XIV, 34. See
also, in this connection, Joseph Margolis, “Goethe and Psychoanalysis,” Goethe and the
Sciences: A Reappraisal, ed. Frederick Amrine, Francis J. Zucker and Harvey Wheeler
(Dodrecht: Kluwer, 1987), 83–100.
15 Gerhard Oberlin, Goethe, Schiller und das Unbewusste: Eine literaturpsychologische
Studie (Gießen: Psychosozial Verlag, 2007). Oberlin’s study fluctuates between two approaches: underlining Goethe’s significance in the history of psychology on the one hand, and interpreting certain works by Goethe through a psychoanalytic framework on the other. As such, it does not successfully demonstrate the existence of a clear line of influence from Goethe to Freud with respect to the concept of the unconscious.
in August 1873 – in which the speaker read sections of the pantheistic fragment “Die Natur” written by the Swiss theologian Georg Christoph Tobler but mistakenly attributed to Goethe – he was in all likelihood witnessing one of the last death-throes of Naturphilosophie as a significant theoretical model in German science.17
Goethe’s reputation as a natural scientist was, at least in the mind of the late nineteenth-century scientific public to which Freud belonged, attached to the collection of ideas known as Naturphilosophie by the two key figures of the so-called Berliner physikalische Gesellschaft who led the campaign against vitalism in German science: Helmholtz and Du Bois-Reymond. Significantly, both of these scientists saw Brücke, who was arguably Freud’s most influential teacher in Vienna, as being their “ambassador in the east.”18 Both Helmholtz and Du Bois-Reymond
gave important public lectures in which Goethe’s scientific reputation was unequivocally and damningly associated with a pantheistic under- standing of nature and a teleological theory of morphology, as well as with his purportedly failed critique of Newton in the Theory of Color (Farbenlehre, 1810). All of this meant that, when Freud was developing the theoretical basis of psychoanalysis in the 1880s and 1890s, Goethe’s reputation as a natural scientist was at its very lowest ebb. At the same time, however, Goethe stood at the very core of theoretical justifica- tions of the Geisteswissenschaften as they were elaborated by their chief late nineteenth-century German proponent: Wilhelm Dilthey.19 He was
also, moreover, a key figure at the heart of Germanic cultural identity in general, following the growth of Goethe philology in the 1860s, and the establishment of the German nation in 1871.20 It is perhaps for 17 Goethe’s fragment entitled “Die Natur” can be found in: Goethe, Sämtliche Werke: Briefe,
Tagebücher und Gespräche, 2 parts, 40 vols., ed. Hendrik Birus et al. (Frankfurt am
Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1985–2003) part I, vol. XXV, 11–13. This edition of Goethe’s Sämtliche Werke, otherwise known as the Frankfurter Ausgabe, will hereafter be cited with the letters FA, followed by part, volume and page numbers. For the context of this lecture, see Peter Gay, Freud: A Life for Our Time (New York: Norton, 1998), 24–5.
18 Margolis, “Goethe and Psychoanalysis,” 91.
19 In his Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften (Introduction to the Human Sciences, 1883)
Dilthey invokes Goethe as a scientific object which shows the limits of a purely empir- ical approach to the sciences. Goethe’s creativity, he argues, can be reduced neither to “structure of his brain” (Bau seines Gehirns) nor to the “characteristics of his body” (Eigenschaften seines Körpers), and this demonstrates the necessity of an alternative form of science dealing not simply with physical bodies or forces, but rather with inner experi- ence (inneres Erlebnis) or Geist. Wilhelm Dilthey, Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften,
Gesammelte Schriften, 26 vols., ed. Karlfried Gründer et al. (Göttingen: Vandenhoek und
Ruprecht, 1959–2005), vol. I, 8–9.
20 See, on this subject, Karl Robert Mandelkow, “Die Anfänge der Goethe Philologie,”
in Goethe in Deutschland: Rezeptionsgeschichte eines Klassikers, 2 vols. (Munich: Beck,
1980–9) vol. I, 157–8. See also Mandelkow’s discussion of Goethe as a cultural symbol for the new German nation, I, 201–4.
this reason that Freud sees Goethe as one of the “great men” (großen
Männer) who often appear in people’s dreams – including Freud’s own,
documented in the Interpretation of Dreams (Die Traumdeutung, 1900) – as father symbols.21
In his “Goethe Prize” address, Freud follows Helmholtz in arguing that Goethe allowed science and art to harmonize with one another.22
Yet on the basis of Freud’s quotations from Goethe’s works, combined with the scientific and historical contexts in which Freud read Goethe, no such harmony between the two cultures exists in Freud’s reception of Goethe. The Goethe invoked by Freud as a forerunner of psychoanalysis was the Goethe of Faust, rather than the Goethe who wrote the essays on scientific method that led to the Theory of Color. This has led Joseph Margolis correctly to conclude that Freud’s allusions to Goethe “utterly fail to come to terms with his [i.e. Goethe’s] conception of science.”23
What, then, are the implications of these factors for an examination of the concept of the unconscious in the works of Goethe? And, perhaps more importantly, does Goethe in fact elaborate a concept of the uncon- scious that is in any way similar to the various notions of the unconscious developed by Freud and his successors?
My attempt to answer these questions will be guided by the follow- ing hypothesis. Since Freud’s attempt to develop a rigorously scientific psychology in the 1880s and 1890s was dominated by the materialist positivism of Brücke, Goethe’s conception of science played little if any direct role in the development of Freud’s early theoretical con- structs. But once the rudiments of Freud’s early theory were in place – say by 1900, after the composition of the “Project for a Scientific Psychology” (Entwurf einer Psychologie, 1895) and the publication of
The Interpretation of Dreams – Goethe begins to be invoked by Freud
as a cultural as opposed to a scientific authority. This means that, when Freud uses quotations from Goethe’s poetic works in order to bolster his own theorization of the unconscious, he normally commits the car- dinal sin of the history of ideas: projecting a contemporary theory back onto an earlier epoch in order to find an historical lineage that leads to