How The Interpretation of Dreams drew on Faust, First Part
A documented line of influence: Sigmund Freud demonstrably engaged Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s work. The commentary below is Gröblé’s, verbatim from each work’s page.
The source
Faust, First Part
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe · 1808
RomanticismThe influenced
The Interpretation of Dreams
Sigmund Freud · 1900
ModernRelevance
6/10
On The Interpretation of Dreams’s page
- The Interpretation of Dreams leans on Goethe's Faust harder than on any other literary work — Freud quotes it some thirteen times to characterize the dream-work
- He drew most from Mephistopheles, borrowing the devil's lines to describe how dreams cloak their wishes in disguise
- Read Faust first and you'll hear Freud's own voice forming — the play supplied the language he needed for the unconscious
On Faust, First Part’s page
- Goethe's Faust became Freud's go-to source for naming the unnamable — he quotes it more than any other work in The Interpretation of Dreams
- Most of those quotations come from Mephistopheles' mouth, the voice Freud reached for when describing how dreams disguise their meaning
- A scholarly study traces "Die Traumdeutung" itself back to Faust — the play is woven through Freud's account of the dream-work