The music teacher
Because the music teacher, Kretzschmar, has a severe stutter and speech impediment, he becomes a symbol for Adrian's own feelings of inability. Adrian also wants to communicate with language but struggles. Yet, what Kretzschmar is able to teach about music is that music has emotional significance that is more immediate than language which must be first translated into language and then back into thought by a listener or reader. The poet translator is a related symbol, pointing to the difficulty of translating meaning through language.
The religion teacher
Music is not Adrian's sole interest, though. He mainly oscillates between continental philosophy, religion, and music, where religion and philosophy are seen as two sides of the same coin. Perhaps one might say that if Adrian could communicate more freely through language, then his philosophies would be remarkable, but he cannot. Instead of teaching just what philosophy is, the religion teacher, Schlepfus, teaches about the game of reality. It may seem surprising or irrelevant, but the influence of the religious teacher's teachings about alchemy, witchcraft, and magic are particularly helpful to Leverkühn with understanding the schizophrenic genius of his intellect.
The anima, or femme fatale
Anyone who has ever encountered a depressed super-genius will not be surprised whatsoever by the symbolism that unfolds in Leipzig. He thinks he is going to his room to rest, but instead he finds a "home" and "rest" more powerful than that. He finds himself led into a brothel where he meets a young woman who simultaneously perplexes and astounds him. Before long, he has courted the beautiful prostitute and has accepted the fate of death and madness for his decision. In the privacy of their one-night wedding chamber, the young woman reveals she has syphilis. Symbolically, this is a depiction of an anima projection onto a femme fatale. He loves her because she represents a kind of sorrow and loneliness that he identifies with. There is an emotional conundrum about his self-worth because she sleeps with many patrons, and when she promises to deliver an illness that leads to death, Adrian is hooked. He would love to die for this painful love. This is the nucleus of his life, the central image of his depression, his quest for meaning, and his ennui.
The encounter with Satan
It seems that left-handed living like wandering the earth as a vagrant and falling in love with prostitutes has its downsides. Technically he is having syphilitic delusions, but as we already learned from his youthful experiments in religious philosophy, Adrian believes that whatever the mind experiences is real, because the interplay of demonic and spiritual forces is often subconscious. He treats his encounters with Satan as valid experiences. When he finally explains the mystic power of his consciousness, the confession baffles and offends his audience. He claims he is a worker of hellish forces, possessed by the devil himself. Clearly, this is a statement of his schizophrenic genius. In Jungian language, he is attempting to articulate that he lives in companionship with his shadow.
The nephew
The nephew scene comes before the final descent into madness. Adrian is contacted by some family after so long that he has forgotten he even has a family to return to. He must now visit and take care of his nephew who needs adult support and supervision. The nephew is only five. Adrian realizes that the hope of youth and family are genuinely restorative experiences, and for a moment, he wonders if he has found some meaning in life. Then, the boy dies, and the man becomes convinced that Satan killed the boy to punish Adrian experiencing love. The symbolism is a depiction of the simultaneous experiences of human fate and schizophrenic genius, where every circumstance is internalized so deeply that the man communicates the emotional quality of circumstance literally. Everyone knows what it feels like to wonder if bad things happen for reasons of divine judgment, but Adrian is so vividly aware of his unconscious that he becomes literally convinced that Satan, a symbol for God's own wrath and judgment, is scrutinizing the man to ensure that he never gets to feel loved.
