Goethe’s Faust is a mythic projection of a man torn between Western dualisms, arising from the mind/body split, that have both philosophical and psychological dimensions. Mephistopheles, who functions in the text as Faust’s double in many ways, represents the side of these dualisms that is more associated with the body. Just before the poodle that has followed Faust home turns into Mephistopheles, Faust is in his study trying to decide what there was in the beginning – the Word, Mind, Power or the Deed. This hesitation suggests an inability on Faust’s part to unite the mind and the body, the contemplative life and the engaged life, theory and praxis. (The Word is used in the Bible to refer to God’s means of creating the world. The apostles who wrote some of the books in the New Testament were influenced by the neo-Platonism of their time, and this influence informed their use of ‘the Word” as a signifier. Both traditions, Platonism and Christianity, have kept the mind/body split alive in Western culture, although there have been forms of Christianity that encouraged engagement rather than withdrawal. Faust’s hesitation between the Word and the Deed prefigures modern existentialism. One of the most characteristic themes of existentialism was the profound contempt for theory without praxis, or the Word without the Deed.) While Faust is torn between the dichotomies his culture has reproduced in his mind, Mephistopheles looms up. It is significant that Mephistopheles urges worldliness upon Faust. The timing suggests the emergence of Faust’s repressed non-intellectual side.

Earlier in the same day in which Mephistopheles appeared, Faust left his study to go out into the countryside with Wagner. He burst out to Wagner in a moment of rueful self-insight:

Two souls, alas, dwell within my breast,
each seeks to rule without the other.
The one with robust love’s desires,
clings to the world with all its might,
the other fiercely rises from the dust,
to reach sublime ancestral regions. (69)

At this moment, Faust has emerged from the space of his dusty study, which starves his senses and cramps his body, into the contrasting space of nature, which has always been associated with the body. The contrasting external spaces correspond to the opposing inner spaces in Faust’s psyche, revealed by the eloquent speech above. One side of Faust has strongly Platonist overtones. Plato taught that the way to transcendent wisdom was renunciation of our sensory connections to the external world. He believed that information from the senses interfered with the knowledge residing in the soul. Our souls came from a transcendent world of Forms which are the perfect model for everything in our imperfect world, Plato believed. Therefore, to get back in touch with the forms, he concluded that it was necessary to ignore the physical world (which he considered the world of appearances). Platonic thought is not the only source of dualisms in Western culture, but in the interest of space this paper will treat Plato’s philosophy, including the Christianized version of it, as a paradigm for all the dualisms arising from the mind/body (or soul/body) split. A working list of those dualisms are as follows: masculine/feminine, theory/praxis, transcendence/immanence, culture/nature, eternal/temporal, abstract/concrete, and afterlife/life. Some of them are outside the scope of this paper. The dualisms, which are relevant to the current focus, will be expanded upon as they come up in relation to particular passages in the text. Their inextricable links to psychology will also be explored, on the assumption that philosophy and psychology are not mutually exclusive but mutually illuminating. In Faust, philosophy and psychology are never separated. On the contrary, the borders between them are blurred.

One place in which such a blurring is evident is the scene that takes place between Faust and Mephistopheles after Mephistopheles returns to Faust’s study the next day. He encourages Faust to listen to his chorus of spirits’ call to pleasure and action (100,101). Significantly, the song that the chorus of spirits sings alludes to the myth of the demiurges. This myth expresses a conflict, which is one of the consequences of the dualisms listed above. The myth of the demiurges tells the story of a perfect world, which was destroyed. The demiurges were to help rebuild it from the formless chaos, but they could never make it as good as the original. No matter how many times they tried, they were doomed to frustration. The myth is closely related to Plato’s idea of the forms. The message of this kind of idealism is a message of despair, because it teaches that all our desires are doomed to be frustrated in this life by the imperfect material world. The best we can do, therefore, is turn away from the world and contemplate an abstract, transcendent reaalm (if not the forms or God, then science or alchemy, mysticism or some other substitute). The despair engendered by this kind of dualism is exactly the kind of despair that Faust suffers from. Mephistopheles is the result of Faust’s despair. Mephistopheles’ association with the words Mother Night, Chaos and Nothingness (86,87), which are the names associated with the original world of the myth after it was destroyed, thus links him further to the unprivileged side of Plato’s dichotomies.

Another place that illustrates points of overlap of Faust’s philosophical and psychological dilemmas is the Earth Spirit scene. In this scene, Faust first contemplates the sign of the macrocosm in the pages of his book. He feels elated by the consciousness of the spiritual world which this sign helps him experience. “Am I a God? The light pervades me so!” (31) He then switches abruptly to metaphors of an infant wishing to be suckled by a mother.

Where shall I clasp you, infinity of Nature?
You breasts, where? You wellsprings of all life?
Heaven and earth depend on you –
Toward you my parched soul is straining.
You flow, you nourish, yet I crave in vain. (31)

At this point, he turns to the sign of the Earth Spirit and calls her up. The language he uses suggests that he is in the throes of a psychological compulsion, because he is acting against his will and knows it, but he can’t help it. “I know my heart is at your bidding! You must! You must, and if I die for it!” As soon as the Earth Spirit appears, however, he averts his face and says, “Terrifying vision!” The Earth Spirit replies, “…you have long been sucking at my sphere…” Faust responds, “No! I can’t endure you!” In this passage, nature, the body, sensory pleasure, immanence, etc. are associated with the mother – or at least, a part of the mother which is an object of desire – the breast. Faust’s craving for a satisfaction, which would be like the satisfaction of an infant suckling a breast, and his opposing feeling of repulsion for the Earth Spirt when her presence threatens to become to engulfing, strongly suggest the relationship of a small boy to his mother. In object relations theory, one of the important tasks of a small child is to achieve a sense of individuation from the mother, yet still retain a capacity for connection to her, too. If all goes well, the child should feel free to leave the mother and experiment with independence, but should also feel free to return to her safety without feeling the threat of engulfment. According to Nancy Chodorow, this process goes awry in Western culture. Young children usually experience distortions of this process. For boys, a return to the early bond with the mother becomes especially threatening. They learn that they must identify with a masculine role, but there is usually not an adult male role model present often enough to make their transition to a masculine identification easy. The only concrete role model is usually the mother or a mother-figure. The restimulation of an intense bond with the mother would make it even harder than it already is for boys to form a strong and stable masculine identification. They must therefore repress the side of themselves that identifies with the mother. With no concrete male role model present often enough, they must identify with masculinity as an abstract principle.

Masculinity thus becomes an ideal to be achieved over opposition to the material world of home life. The young boy experiences a split between two worlds. One world is abstract, superior (to him), and unattainable; the other world is concrete, necessary and demeaning. One world becomes associated with the masculine side of Western dualisms (the mind, the abstract, transcendence, culture); the other side becomes associated with the feminine side (the body, the concrete, immanence, nature). The pre-oedipal bond with the mother and the longing to return to it, however, never go away. The memories and desires just become repressed and take on a powerful life of their own.

These repressed memories and desires form a substrate that underlies Faust’s questing and frustration. The language of suckling, thirst and drinking surfaces again and again whenever Faust is experiencing a conflict between his two sides and their attendant philosophical quandary. For example, he asks Wagner at one point, “Is parchment then the sacred fount from which a draft will quench our thirst forever?” (37) This occurs in the context of an argument between Wagner and Faust about whether the contemplative life of devotion to an abstract and timeless realm (the books of the ages) is the best kind of life. “Oh, my, but art is long and our life is fleeting,” Wagner says, quoting a standard rationalist line for that time. (37) The line invokes the more lasting status of the products of the mind compared to the fleeting moments of everyday life. The idea is that, once again, it is better to transcend the world of the body – of physical action and sensory pleasure, and of immanence and nature and death. It fits the pattern (that Faust showed earlier with the Earth Spirit) for Faust to react with a sublimated wish to return to the satisfaction of the pre-oedipal bond with the mother.

This sublimated wish also appears in another scene, when Faust is alone in his study reminiscing about his crystal goblet, remembering how he used to “drain the chalice in a single draft” (47). The goblet used to give him intense oral satisfaction. The sight of it brings back memories of childhood. He feels so much despair that he fills it with poison. Death would end his conflicts and would engulf him in a tomb, which is often associated with the womb in psychoanalytic literature, because both tombs and wombs are enclosures in which the body is part of a larger corporeal space and in which there are no desires which are not satisfied. In the case of the embryo, all desires are satisfied by the placenta. In the case of a corpse, there are no desires to trouble it. Just as Faust raises the goblet to his lips, a choir of angels and a choir of women begin singing. They sing of Christ’s resurrection, reminding Faust of Easter (Easter is associated with fertility and spring. It is also associated with Christ’s resurrection. It is the tomb and the womb again.) Faust’s memory reconstructs happy collages of his childhood.

This song proclaimed the happy games of children,
unbounded rapture of a festival of Spring;
I remember – and a childlike feeling
constrains me from the last and gravest step.
O sounds of Heaven, do not fade away –
the tears well up, the earth has me again! (49)

Feelings of elation and despair oscillate and coalesce at points in this passage, as do feelings of transcendence and immanence. At one point, it seems as if the memories of childhood are united with a transcendent world of angels who sing along with the women. Faust experiences a fragile moment of integration and equilibrium. He is able to feel the pleasure of a child who is enjoying nature and is immersed in a happy flow of everyday life, and the angels are singing from the transcendent realm of heaven as if they approve. Women (mothers) sing in harmony with them. The moment does not last, however, because Faust becomes threatened once again by the feeling of engulfment by the earth. His pre-oedipal memories, pleasurable though they were, called up his oedipal conflict. His childhood fear of being excluded from the masculine world returned. The two worlds of heaven and earth, a transcendent realm and an immanent realm parallel with the two worlds of the mother’s house and the father’s vague work world (never seen by the child), abruptly become split off from each other. The “sounds of Heaven” become associated exclusively with the masculine realm. No longer are they harmonious with Easter, with spring, with nature, with fertility, with the body of the mother. No longer are women’s (mothers’) voices a part of the sounds of heaven.

Compared to scenes of intense conflict and despair such as the above, the appearance of Mephistopheles can appear almost like a solution to Faust’s psychological and philosophical dilemma. What he represents (the personification of Faust’s repressed feminine side in a form that Faust can handle better than the Earth Spirit) is not really a solution, however, because his influence over Faust only reverses the hierarchy of Western dualisms. It does not integrate or deconstruct them. The rest of the first book of Faust traces out the consequences of Faust’s inability to integrate or harmonize his two sides, and the costs to civilization of keeping those two sides apart and oppositional.