After a couple of decades of studying Goethe (I am a latecomer in this respect), I find that as a person he is still very mysterious to me. There are things about him that puzzle and, indeed, bother me. Why, for instance, after their epistolary exchange while he was a student in Leipzig, did he correspond so infrequently with his sister after her marriage, when she was in Emmendingen and so clearly suffered from depression? Perhaps my interest in Goethe as a person is misplaced, though the range of his oeuvre almost demands a closer look at him as an individual. Generally it seems best to be guided by an attempt to distinguish contemporary notions from what might have been the case in the eighteenth century.

So many things have become naturalized since Goethe's time, both in the realm of material life and in ways of viewing the world, that it is impossible to see him as he was. Even certain facts—e.g., his habit of “dropping” people who were the subjects of his early enthusiasms—should not be given much weight. They may simply reflect the general callousness of youth, or they may indicate that friendships among unrelated bourgeois individuals were a new phenomenon in the eighteenth century. Such hesitations have not deterred Rainer M. Holm-Hadulla, a psychiatrist at the University of Heidelberg who is also a “Kreativitätsforscher.” (Besides authoring Kreativität: Konzept und Lebensstil [2007], he also holds the interesting post of director of the “Psychotherapeutische Beratungsstelle des Studentenwerks” in Heidelberg.) It cannot be denied that Goethe himself supplied plenty of justification for looking at his work through the prism of personality, but one's interest in Holm-Hadulla's analysis will depend on one's tolerance for a conceptual approach that freely employs such terms as “Selbstwertgefühl,” “Gesundheitsphilosophie,” “kreative Bewältingungsbemühungen,” “lebenslange Suchbewegung,” ad infinitum. The first chapter seemed promising, with its discussion of Goethe's birth woes and his lifetime preoccupation with mothers and children (from the Urfaust to the “Mothers” in Faust II), particularly the nourishing mother who is also destructive. For the early years, however, Holm-Hadulla relies heavily on the account in Dichtung und Wahrheit; he also does not consider that Goethe, in his literary work or his letters, may simply have been trying on poetic personalities rather than attempting to bring “chaotische Erregungen und diffuse mentale Prozesse durch Erzählungen in kohärente Strukturen” (122).