ORIGINS OF PSYCHOANALYSIS” in the title of this article alludes to a larger two-part thesis, for which this essay analyzes only a single example: First, namely, the depth psychology of the twentieth century (I think here primarily of Freud) developed as a systematic scientific discourse from the imagistic language of European Romanticism (hence the ease with which Benjamin can offer a psychoanalytic reading of “Die wunderlichen Nachbarskinder”); and second, Goethe as the key figure who mediates the transition from the more diffuse and rational discourse of Sensibility to the more precise imagery of Romanticism, especially in Die Leiden des jungen Werther. This essay focuses specifically on his role in the reception of Rousseau, an obvious topic from the earliest days of comparative literary study. Rousseau did so much to stake out the concerns, ideology and aesthetics of European Romanticism that Goethe had to acknowledge his debt to the Frenchman, whose devotion to nature he helped to popularize in Germany. Although Rousseau's influence on Goethe has been surveyed and a few connections explored in detail, it has been less common to take careful account of Goethe's ambivalence toward his predecessor. This essay is a case-study in that ambivalence. It began some twenty-five years ago in an attempt to understand the parallels connecting Werther and Die Wahlverwandtschaften as Goethe's extended confrontation with Rousseau's epistolary novel Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse (1761), an effort which raised in turn the question of what drove Goethe back to the novel in 1808, so many years after Werther and after Rousseau's death (1778).