david spooner

Brief Foreword
Carl Spitteler`s novel IMAGO was one of the launching-pads for the work of both Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. Both spoke highly of it, along with his two epic poems, "Prometheus and Epimetheus" and "Olympic Spring" (Olympischer Früling), this latter winning him the Nobel Prize in 1919. Indeed Freud acknowledged that he named the first psychoanalytical journal after the novel, Imago.
But a novel of course has a dynamic lacking in the theoretical works on the human psyche, and this is embodied in Spitteler`s title. This refers back to an earlier book of his poems "Schmetterlinge" (Butterflies), which was a portrait of butterflies common in Switzerland. The hero/​anti-hero, Viktor, projects his concept of perfect natural development onto his human `imago,` Theuda Wyss.
The book is set in a small Swiss town at the turn of the nineteenth into the twentieth century, and evokes much of the German-Swiss Spitteler`s frustration as a writer in his relations with the cultural establishment of the day. It also expresses his agony at renouncing his deep love for Ellen Brodbeck as incompatible with his mission to become Switzerland`s leading post-Keller poet.
D.S.
May 2006