Goethe's Path to Creativity

A Psycho-Biography of the Eminent Politician, Scientist and Poet

Rainer Matthias Holm-Hadulla

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429860997
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychologie
• Subtopic: Schöpferische Fähigkeiten in der Psychologie

Goethe's Path to Creativity provides a comprehensive psycho-biography of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, a giant of modern German and European literary, political, and scientific history. The book brings this influential work by Rainer Matthias Holm-Hadulla to the English language for the first time in a newly elaborated edition.

Goethe's path to creativity was difficult and beset by a multitude of crises, beginning with his birth, which was so difficult that he was initially not thought to have survived it, and ending with an infatuation that left him, at the age of 74, toying with the same kind of suicidal thoughts he had entertained as a 20-year-old. Throughout his long life, he suffered bitter disappointments and was subject to severe mood swings. Despite being a gifted child, a widely recognized poet, and an influential scientist and politician, he spent his entire life loving and suffering; nonetheless, he had the exceptional ability to endure emotional pain and to transform his sufferings creatively. The way in which he mined his passions for creative impulses continues to inspire modern readers. Readers can apply the lessons they have learned from his life and use Goethe's strategies for their own creative art of living.

Goethe's Path to Creativity: A Psycho-Biography of the Eminent Politician, Scientist and Poet will be of great interest to all engaged in the fields of creativity, literature, psychoanalysis, psychology, psychotherapy, and personal growth.

Part I

Goethe’s life and work

Chapter 1

Childhood and youth

Frankfurt, 1749–1765

Now through my navel-string

I suck nourishment from the world.

And splendid all around is Nature,

holding me to her bosom.

Johann Wolfgang, the first-born son of Catharina Elisabeth and Johann Caspar Goethe, came into the world at noon on 28 August 1749. The conditions under which he was born seemed favorable, as Goethe was later to record in his memoirs: “The aspect of the stars was propitious: the sun stood in the sign of the Virgin, and had culminated for the day; Jupiter and Venus looked [at each other] with a friendly eye” (Smith, vol. 1, p. 1). But the birth was very difficult, and it was initially thought that the infant had not survived. Echoes of this threat of death will be found throughout Goethe’s life and work.

Goethe’s mother, Catharina Elisabeth, came from a wealthy family of scholars and jurists. Her father, Johann Wolfgang Textor, had been the mayor of Frankfurt, the highest municipal office in Frankfurt, since 1747. Catharina was the oldest of four siblings and had a relatively unconventional upbringing. Looking back on her childhood, she wrote that she thanked God “that, even in youth, [her] soul had never been corseted and that it had been allowed to grow and flourish to its heart’s content and to spread its branches wide, not like the trees in a dull ornamental garden, which are pruned and mutilated into unnatural shapes” (Koester 1923, p. 78: DS).

Although lacking in education, she was rich in worldly wisdom, as is evident in the letters she wrote to Duchess Anna Amalia. At the time of Goethe’s birth, she had just turned 18 years old and was “as yet almost a child”, as Goethe wrote in his autobiography, Poetry and Truth (Smith, vol. 1, p. 200). She was healthy and experienced no problems during her pregnancy. Goethe’s father did not see any reason for concern, and both he and his wife looked forward to the birth of their offspring. Goethe’s father was financially comfortable, thanks to his own father’s success as a merchant, enough so that he could dedicate himself to the life of an independent scholar and study those things that interested him.

Johann Wolfgang’s birth was beset by many complications: his mother was in labor for three days, and the family could not help but remember the tragedy of his grandmother’s first three children, who were all stillborn. After many different attempts to revive the child, his grandmother was finally able to announce to her daughter-in-law that he was alive.

We know today from research in the fields of neurobiology and psychology that experiences during birth and even prenatal sensations can leave behind unconscious traces in the “embodied mind”. Even when there are no complications, both mother and child undergo many hours of stress during childbirth. The newborn experiences overwhelming fear and a sense of impending doom, which are stored in its unconscious mind. Nevertheless, the child copes with this mortal fear, which it is freed from by its first cry, in much the same way as the mother is relieved of her physical pain by her feeling of joy at the birth of her child.

Goethe places great significance on his birth experience in his autobiography, Poetry and Truth; he returned to the themes of birth and personal growth accompanied by pain and the threat of death again and again throughout his life. He conceived of his own self-actualization as a continuous process of “dying and becoming”, i.e. a continuous process of creation and destruction. Being aware of this conception allows us to understand the lines of verse that he included in a letter to Auguste zu Stolberg, in which he states that he had been given everything entirely, “all joys, the infinite ones,/all pains, the infinite ones, entirely” (HA 1, p. 142: HH). For Goethe, joy and despair were often conjoined: at the time he wrote these lines, his living situation would have been the envy of many, but he had also just received news of his sister’s death.

Goethe’s creativity helped him to find solace in his relationships with other people and in his zeal for nature and culture. For example, after experiencing a crushing romantic disappointment, he composed the poem quoted at the beginning of this chapter while on a hastily arranged journey to Switzerland. In this poem, he draws “sustenance from the world” and feels as if he is being held “to Nature’s breast”, as if born anew. His writing allowed him to overcome crises and to create himself anew again and again. But we can also see in his work, from Werther to Faust, that this creative act of self-creation was accompanied by anxiety, despondence, and painful feelings of inferiority. In Faust I, he says:

Alas! Our deeds as much as our passions

Hamper the course of our lives. […]

What gave life to us, the glorious feelings,

Congeal in the earthly turmoil. […]

Sorrow nests right away into the heart,

There it causes secret pain […]

I am not like the gods! Too deeply it is felt:

I am like the worm that rifles through the dust […]

(Vs. 632–653: HH)

These verses are similar to rhymes the 17-year-old Goethe shared with his sister, in which he confessed the deep despair he felt during the crises of his student years. An incessant struggle for the vitality of the self could be considered one of the guiding motifs throughout Goethe’s life, but he also conceived of individuation in a general sense as a process of changing and dying; for this reason, self-actualization and a creative life cannot occur without pain and danger. These ideas led Goethe to choose the following motto for Poetry and Truth: “He who is not flayed does not learn” (qtd. in Wiethölter, p. 75).

Even after little Johann Wolfgang survived his difficult birth, his family continued to worry about him. He seems to have reacted to the dangers of his first few weeks of life with intense emotions and active attempts to cope mentally. Bettina von Arnim described

[how] in his ninth week he had already had troubled dreams; when grandmother, grandfather, and mother and father, and nurse, had stood around his cradle, and listened, what violent movements showed themselves in his mien, and upon wakening, changing to a most afflicting cry, — often, too, shrieking so violently, that he lost his breath, and his parents feared for his life; — then they procured a bell. When they observed that he became restless in his slumber, they rung and rattled violently, that, upon waking, he might immediately forget his dreams.

(Arnim 1861, p. 311)

Although Bettina’s description is not a completely reliable source, it is not inconceivable that little Johann Wolfgang was plagued by fears and anxieties that he, like any other child, attempted to assuage by means of intense psychological activity. Thanks to neurobiology, it is now possible to confirm this psychoanalytical supposition. During their first few months of life, babies are already starting to actively process internal and external stimuli, which allows them to reach a level of emotional stability.

Goethe’s relationship with his mother, even after their shared experience of his difficult birth and first few months of life, was not completely free of frustrations and threats. Catharina Elisabeth became pregnant again only six months after his birth, and when he was 15 months old, she devoted herself completely to the care of his newborn sister, Cornelia. It is likely that Goethe’s father and grandmother assisted him in his attempts to cope with the relative loss of his mother; nonetheless, this loss left scars in the form of separation anxiety and creative attempts at coping. It is possible that this early separation from his mother, although not a complete separation, caused him pain while also fostering his imagination.

Johann Wolfgang was also prone to disturbances in his later development. Bettina von Arnim recorded that he was easily overexcited and tended to react with anger. If something was damaged or was not in its usual place, he was prone to respond with an angry outburst. Even as an old man, he had difficulty dealing with anything that disrupted his usual routine, such as illness in those around him. He also avoided coming into contact with sick people and even the dead. He did not attend the funerals of either of his closest friends, the poet Schiller and the Grand-Duke Karl August, and he could not bring himself to see his wife, Christiane, during her final illness. For all of his avoidance of defectiveness, illness, and death in real life, Goethe dealt with these topics repeatedly in his writing, which became his approach to coping with any issues that he found difficult in real life.

Even as a child, his response to an unpleasant experience might be an angry outburst, but it might also be an attempt to understand the chaos of his emotions to use his creativity to transform them, in which he was aided by his ability to transform negative experiences into a reality that he found more acceptable. His mother, Catharina Elisabeth, described how he listened carefully to the fairytales she read to him:

There I sat, and there he soon devoured me with his great black eyes; and when the fate of any favorite did not turn out exactly according to his notion, I saw how the passionate veins swelled upon his forehead, and how he choked his tears. He often caught me up, and said, before I had taken the turn in my tale: “Mother, the princess won’t marry the nasty tailor, even if he does slay the giant, will she?” When I made a stop, and put off the catastrophe to the next evening, I might be sure that, during that time, he had put everything in good order; and so my imagination, when it could reach no further, was often supplied by his.

(Arnim 1861, pp. 313–314)

Goethe’s mother

Catharina Elisabeth loved her son dearly and called him her “little pet” (Hätschelhans), even as a grown man. Nevertheless, there was always a certain distance between mother and son. Goethe wrote the following observation on one of the manuscript pages of Poetry and Truth:

Children’s moral character does not develop out of their relationship to their parents. The distance between them is much too great; gratitude, affection, love, and respect prevent these young and needy creatures from expressing themselves in their own ways. Every act of resistance is a crime. Privation and punishment quickly teach the child to turn away from the parent and towards itself, and because the child’s wishes seem very reasonable, it will soon be clever and manipulative.

(HA 9, p. 844: DS)

After the death of her husband in 1782, Catharina was to live another 26 years, during which she followed her son’s development with lively interest. It does not seem to have pained her, though, that Goethe only visited her a total of four times after moving to Weimar in 1775. She never complained, and at the age of 55, she even wrote to her son:

My life is flowing peacefully along like a clear stream … my body is at rest, but my thoughts are all activity. I am able to spend the whole day alone ...