ABSTRACT
The year 1907 had been a fruitful one for Sigmund Freud, and its culmination was surely his successful lecture entitled "Der Dichter und das Phantasieren". On the night of 6 December, confident of breaking out of his isolation at last, the 51-year-old Freud made his way from Berggasse 19 to the crowded rooms of the publisher and bookseller Hugo Heller. Heller, a cultivated, restless, and enterprising man and himself a member of the Vienna Psycho-Analytical Society, had sent a questionnaire about their literary preferences to thirty-two well-known people including not only the provocative figure of Freud but also Hermann Bahr, August Forel, Thomas Masaryk, Hermann Hesse, Arthur Schnitzler, and Jakob Wassermann. Subsequently published as a pamphlet with an introduction by Hugo von Hofmannsthal, this questionnaire and Freud's responses give us some idea of his tastes at the time. There is no more appropriate way of ending this chapter than to reflect on the art inherent in Freud's approach to art.
