In a review of the literature, the author finds that “in all these works there is a curious omission: the absence of any detailed discussion of Jung's relation to Weimar classicism, and specifically to Goethe” (7). He examines particularly Richard Noll's thesis “that analytical psychology was originally founded as a neopagan cult” (6) and that this thesis had its “inaugural moment” in 1916 when Jung addressed the “newly founded Psychological Club” (8) with references to Goethe's poem “The Mysteries” (Die Geheimnisse) from 1816. The book begins here, where the author discovers his own critical moment in a new thesis that despite all the studies and poems on Greco-Roman and Germanic pagan mythologies, “Weimar Classicism was not a cult” (8). Rather it was a corrective grounded in natural philosophy that fed nineteenth-century German depth psychology from Freud and to Jung. But “the burgeoning literature offering Jungian interpretations of Faust” (8) was framed mainly in alchemical terms that confirmed the assumed cult origins of analytical psychology. In this trend the author found solid ground in Jack Herbert's work on “Goethe, Jung and Rilke” (2001:37): “what Faust does is to alchemicize psychology—that is to present psychology in an alchemical guise. Or, in reverse, psychologize alchemy” (9). With Goethe and Jung linked by core concepts of Goethe's science, “polarity and intensification” (Polarität und Steigerung), the author decides to rethink the connection without throwing the child out with the bath. In this study he hopes to “pack away the retort, clear the room of salamanders,” but retain “the vision of totality—central to the work of the adept, embraced by Weimar classicism” (9). His plan is to keep holism, “often regarded today as null and void at the centre of this non-alchemical opus” (9). So here we get a fresh look at how Goethe and Schiller helped shape analytical psychology with attention to universals in the character of the mind.

The author's approach is to locate analytical psychology in the critical discourse found in the autobiographical writings of Weimar classicism. He begins with the “family romances” about fantasized illustrious heritage that Freud and Jung shared with Goethe (12). In “biographical affinities” (19), the author seeks a new meta-language that shows “parallels between Goethe and Jung in terms of the psychological strategies they developed for turning fears and weaknesses to creative account” (24).