Narcissism and Paranoia in the Age of Goethe

This is the first sustained book-length study that examines how literary narcissism in the Age of Goethe intersects with concepts of creativity, language, gender, and national identity, and how German writers anticipate the formation of the Freudian concepts of narcissism and paranoia. Beginning in the 1770s authors like Goethe, Herder, Schiller, Moritz and others created a highly self-reflective literature. Their poems, dramas, prose works, and theoretical essays provide insights into how these writers attempted to contend with uncertainties connected to the loss of faith in a universal order. The authors use literature to reflect a sense of certainty by creating a stable, idealized, and thus narcissistic self. The author shows that narcissism was particularly attractive to eighteenth-century authors because it could both capture and conceal the contradictions inherent in Enlightenment thinking. The failure to reconcile these contradictions often results in unbearably haunting visions that give way to paranoid delusions.

Alexander Mathas is Associate Professor of German at the University of Oregon.