3 - Psychological Approaches

Summary

THE EARLIEST CRITICAL responses to Werther, as we have seen, tend to define its hero psychologically. Many factors continue to encourage this approach. Goethe himself invites it by asserting in his autobiography that Werther describes a sick delusion (HA 9, 583) and by reporting on the therapeutic effect that the story's composition had on his own youthful preoccupation with suicide. Later, in 1824, he confessed to Eckermann that he hesitated to look at the book again, fearful that he would be forced to revisit the pathological condition from which it sprang (Eckermann 1824, 28–29 [January 2]); and his poem “An Werther” (To Werther), composed that same year, indicates how the feelings associated with the novel had persisted throughout his life (HA 1, 380–81). But Werther itself, not just the author's memory of its genesis, also asks us to look at the book as a psychological portrait. As Karl Viëtor claims, “Among European novels Werther is the first in which an inward life, a spiritual process and nothing else, is represented, and hence it is the first psychological novel” (1949, 31; see also Siebers 1993, 16; Wellbery 1994, 180). It contains, according to Max Diez's quantitative analysis of its metaphors, an overwhelming preponderance of “psycho-physical” images (1936, 1006), and its one-sided epistolary form structurally supports Werther's inclination to focus on his emotional state. The novel is a kind of “psychological monodrama” (M. Herrmann 1904: vi) in which everything, except perhaps the accounts of Werther's last few days, has been sifted through his subjectivity.