ABSTRACT
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe worked on Faust for more than 60 years. The tragedy became his "inner fairytale", accompanying him like a favored toy, always the same but always new. For this reason, the play is considered ingenious, or in modern terms, extraordinarily creative, because it portrays an unbelievably rich array of phenomena from life using unique language. For Goethe himself, this "inner fairytale" was a means of understanding and poetically shaping his political, economic, and scientific experiences. It also had a major psychological significance for him. Goethe always drew on his own experiences but seldom stopped there; instead, he took the individual and the practical together with the general and the theoretical, turning their dialectics into universals, especially in Faust II. Goethe describes a psychological dynamic that is characterized in modern psychoanalysis as the interplay between the depressive position and the manic defense. The conflicts between constructive and destructive impulses are condensed in Faust in a unique way.
