A Psychological Analysis and Archetypal Interpretation
Goethe’s *Faust*
Part One — Introduction and the Prologue to *Faust* (1)
Aydin Areta

Goethe’s great tragedy *Faust* is the story of a physician, lawyer, philosopher, astronomer and scholar who, although he has spent his whole life pursuing knowledge and is loved by people for the services he has rendered, nevertheless feels profoundly that his life has been wasted and that he has failed to discover the meaning of life.

Goethe, who like the protagonist of his own work was a polymath—a geologist, botanist, philosopher, man of letters, poet and politician—recounts in this work an extraordinary journey of the soul. Dr Faust, seeking to experience everything that rationality and scholarship have failed to teach him, enters into a pact with a devil named Mephistopheles so that he may live the unlived dimensions of his being.

Goethe held a view often described as Romantic Idealism: the belief that the human being must bring the philosophical, scientific and intuitive dimensions of existence into unity in order to live life in all of its dimensions. Goethe’s admiration for Iranian culture and thought also arose from his perception of such a capacity within Iranian thought. In one of his final works, the *West–Eastern Divan*, he speaks of his dream of uniting East and West—a place where the East of the soul is no longer separated from the West of reason.

In this one-hour talk, given at a session reviewing Marshall Berman’s *All That Is Solid Melts into Air* and its first chapter on Goethe’s tragedy of Faust and its meaning for modernity and modern human beings, I analyse *Faust* from psychological and archetypal perspectives and show how this great tragedy can be read as the story of a heroic journey and of human individuation.