Reading Goethe’s Faust from the Point of View of Jung’s Analytical Psychology

Presented by J. Gordon Nelson, Ph.D.

It has been said that you cannot really understand Jung without understanding Goethe’s Faust. Jung read Faust deeply and often, quoting it and using it throughout his life. Goethe’s two volume drama written in poetic verse formed the background of Jung’s thought processes, gave content to his personal psychology, and framed the heights and depths of his cultural and intellectual world. Here he had an entry and key to understanding of the transformation of raw collective unconscious dynamics into that of individuation and soul process. To a great extent, Jung took this work as a fountainhead and source of his psychology. Long before Jung had the words and concepts of analytical psychology, and the personal psychological experience of the dynamics of the collective unconscious, he had Goethe’s Faust. Jung found in Faust a paradigm and outline of the individuation process that is as alchemical as it is natural. In this teaching is a moral and ethical experience of great vitality for the psychology and inner life of our modern age.

Part One of Goethe’s drama engages the deeply human problem of love and evil, both divine and carnal. It is a courtship drama and a developmental tragedy as well as an engagement with the shadow par excellence. Part Two of Faust describes the alchemical transformation of man’s earthly prison of leaden drives to an understanding of the transcendent and its effect in real life. Here is a coming to grips with the power drive in that human place where consciousness is neither restricted to personal drives nor found only in collective archetypes but is rather the unity of one’s self with what the poet called “the eternal feminine.”

Jung’s use of Goethe’s Faust throughout his collected works is rampant. We will endeavor to show the connections, contributions and topics that over lap and sustain Jung’s psychological theory and life examples, Goethe’s writing, and the social and philosophical attitudes of the world in which we live. We will also be referring to Edward F. Edinger’s excellent text, Goethe’s Faust: Notes for a Jungian Commentary.

In this seminar we will read both Part One and Part Two of Goethe’s Faust, at a rate of approximately thirty pages per week. We will be using the David Luke translation, Oxford University Press, preferably. Notes on various other translations will be given when you register.

Course Objectives:

• Describe how the theater may be used to describe the contents of the mind.
• Describe the way that two characters may be housed in one personality.
• Describe how the theater may be used to describe the contents of the mind.
• Describe how one’s ability to find value might be challenged by destructive impulses.
• Describe the relationship between the ego and the role of King.
• Give an example of how depression and darkness can lead to an entry and opportunity.
• Give an example of how a great dream may explode physically into human unconscious action.
• Describe how a “little part of me” can generate a psychic content with its own power.
• Give an example of the journey of the psychic energy in the mind and its flowering.
• Describe the self-knowledge generated by traveling to unknown royal spaces.
• Give an example of the addictive quality of Eros in the activities of culture and mind.
• Describe the intellect’s attempt to integrate nature as a conversation.
• Give an example of the suffering of guilt induced by natural processes.
• Give an example of a pattern of power that is enacted after the eruption of Eros.
• Describe the healing consequences of taking back into oneself a formerly projected energy.
• Give an example of inner coniunctio that is sacrificed by the unconscious ego striving.
• Give an example of how the troubled ego gains healing by showing care.
• Describe how a spiritual healing might be unsatisfactory to a physical being.

J. Gordon Nelson, Ph.D., is a Jungian analyst and educational psychologist in Santa Monica. He has taught the complete C. G. Jung Collected Works Reading Program many times, as well as many individual training courses on Jung here, and other professional psychology graduate schools. He is a former president of the C.G. Jung Institute of Los Angeles, and Chair of its Certifying Board for new analysts.