Content area
Full Text
Goethe's Allegories of Identity
No one reads German literature like Jane K. Brown, and it is a real pleasure to read the great works of Goethe along with her. Brown, who has written several distinguished books and many articles on Goethe, mounts a complex and intriguing argument that, while tracing literary influence in unexpected ways, also dwells on a number of interpretive problems, finding consistencies and coherence in some very unusual places. Her broad vision of literary inheritance yields patterns of rewriting from Rousseau to Goethe to the Romantics, and, in a less specific way, to Freud. At issue is the representation of subjectivity and what came to be labeled as "the unconscious." To offer a crude oversimplification: Goethe took from Rousseau, developed his own version of interiority, and ultimately gave to depth psychology and Freud's psychoanalysis. Brown's argument rests on the much more nuanced observation that "the discourse of modern psychology owes much to a literary language of depth psychology that Goethe developed in his response to Rousseau" (6).
The book itself examines Rousseau as the "consummate writer of...