Sigmund Freud, "Delusion and Dream"
"Freud's long essay, an analysis of the German novelist Wilhelm Jensen's story Gradiva, is his first work to deal explicitly and systematically with literature and aesthetics, although he had commented at some length on Oedipus Rex and Hamlet in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900). In asserting that dreams have meaning, psychoanalysts are aligned with the ancients, a 'superstitious' public and creative writers. Through the close analysis of a story that Jensen termed a 'Pompeiian phantasy', Freud considers 'the class of dreams that have never been dreamt at all--dreams created by imaginative writers and ascribed to invented characters in the course of a story.'"--Scott Brewster, The University of Salford
