Narcissism and Paranoia in the Age of Goethe

Abstract

Reviewed by: Narcissism and Paranoia in the Age of Goethe Ann Schmiesing Narcissism and Paranoia in the Age of Goethe. By Alexander Mathäs. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2008. 255 pages. $56.50. In this excellent book, Alexander Mathäs examines narcissism as a paradigm of bourgeois aesthetics in the Age of Goethe. His insightful readings of Moritz, Goethe, Schiller, Lavater, Leisewitz, Tieck, Kleist, Hoffmann, and others probe tensions in the expectations of individual self-fulfillment that accompanied the ascent of the middle class in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Germany. Mathäs views narcissism "as an aesthetic model for literature of this time because it is capable of capturing the contradictions of bourgeois identity politics: the desire for self-recognition and a yearning for an elusive ideal Self" (22). Instead of examining these contradictions primarily through a psychoanalytical lens, Mathäs "considers Freud's and Lacan's ego philosophies as deeply anchored in all those cultural and social practices from which the concepts of the bourgeois individual emerged" (17). His work is thus not conceived as an application of twentieth-century theories to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century texts; although he frequently refers to Freud, Lacan, Kohut, and others, he does so primarily to show how modern notions of identity and selfhood are socio-historically conditioned by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century conceptions of the self—conceptions shaped by the contradictory values emerging from bourgeois emancipation. This approach yields theoretically informed, but not straitjacketed, analyses, and it is one of the many strengths of the book. Mathäs's emphasis on an historical perspective distinguishes his work from other studies of narcissism in literature, including Lynne Layton and Barbara Schapiro's edited essay collection Narcissism and the Text (1986), Jeffrey Berman's Narcissism and the Novel (1990), and Jeffrey Adams and Eric Williams's edited essay collection Mimetic Desire: Essays on Narcissism in German Literature from Romanticism to Post [End Page 607] Modernism (1995). Whereas these works open with overviews of twentieth-century theories of self-formation that are applied to literary texts in subsequent chapters, Mathäs's introductory chapter "Aesthetic Narcissism and the Bourgeois Self" sets forth key themes and contradictions in late eighteenth-century literary conceptions of selfhood through readings of Herder's poem "Selbst: Ein Fragment" and Goethe's poems "Maifest" and "Prometheus." In contrast to other studies of narcissism in literature, moreover, Mathäs gives greater consideration to the gendered aspects of the narcissistic paradigm in the Age of Goethe and to the historical processes accompanying bourgeois emancipation. His study thus neither duplicates nor is at odds with the many superb essays in Adams and Williams's Mimetic Desire, but complements them through his own distinct approach. This approach unfolds over nine chapters, including the introductory chapter and a conclusion. Mathäs first considers the vacillation between self-expansion and self-limitation in Anton Reiser with reference to Moritz's Quietist upbringing and his essays on pedagogy, language, and aesthetics; he also juxtaposes the yearning for individual autonomy with late eighteenth-century theories of the externally contingent aspects of the human disposition. As Mathäs shows, the interconnectedness of self-expansion and self-dissolution in Anton Reiser anticipates Freudian notions of the link between narcissism and megalomania. Mathäs next examines the influence of the medical sciences on Schiller's early philosophical and anthropological conceptions of body/mind unity, foregrounding the manner in which Schiller portrays the division of human existence in Die Räuber against an ideal unity. He addresses metadiscourses of body and mind, truth and deception, and natural and arbitrary signification by examining Schiller's personification of "the bourgeois subject's internal competition with the self as a conflict between an undifferentiated idealism (Karl) and rationalist materialism (Franz)" (81). With reference to secondary literature by Susanne Zantop, Todd Kontje, Albrecht Koschorke, and others, Mathäs turns in chapter four to constructions of a male national identity in Storm and Stress dramas such as Götz von Berlichingen, Julius von Tarent, and Die Zwillinge. Here the desire for a complete, unified Self is inscribed in the body/nation analogy: the German body becomes a spatial metaphor representing the yearnings of a politically...