Alexander Mathäs, Narcissism and Paranoia in the Age of Goethe. Newark: U of Delaware P, 2008. 255 pp

Summary

The author of this work, with its ambitious title, did not have a clear concept of the audience he intended to reach. There is much that smacks of a survey for undergraduates. Good are the clear, readable style, the straightforward textual analysis of fairly familiar texts, and a concern to make scholarship relevant. There are no intense jargon-driven theoretical passages. All the German quotations are competently translated within the text. The introductory chapter includes an outline of the following eight chapters and attempts to give a guiding overview. One senses the experienced teacher who wants to make even daunting problems accessible to interested non-specialists.

While many will welcome this book for such reasons, those expecting greater profundity or even state-of-the-art discussions may put the book down with a sense of frustration. Some of the pedagogy should have been trimmed by an editor's pen, as when the authors’ dates or the dates of publication of works are repeated (e.g. we get the 1797 date of Der blonde Eckbert on pages 37, 166, and 167; Schiller's dates are on pages 35 and 73). The historical context, however, remains a vague background. There is only fleeting reference to the French Revolution, nothing on the crises of the Holy Roman Empire, and there is no explanation of the rather antiquated use of the “age of Goethe” as a historical period. The problems with Mathäs's approach to historical problems and to the difficulties of establishing causal connections become evident early when he writes:

It is no coincidence that the narcissistic paradigm emerged during the emancipation of the German middle classes, because it expresses the bourgeois psyche's internal economy…. In other words, narcissism is a concept that is conditioned by the ascent of the German middle class. (17)

The problem of how the “internal economy” connects with the external economy remains vague, despite the importance of the problem for the history of capitalism. The “narcissistic paradigm” here has little to do with the reception of Ovid's highly influential version of the story or with psychoanalytic methods, which latter Mathäs eschews for their lack of historical specificity. Narcissism is baldly defined as “the creation of an idealized image of the self and the desire to merge with this image” (13).