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In 1936, when I was born into national socialist Germany, the country no longer had anything worthy of the name psychoanalysis. After the war, in the late forties and early fifties, when my intellectual life began, the name Freud was not among those—Socrates, Plato, Cicero, Vergil, Kant, Schiller and Rilke—mentioned in secondary school. It was L'être et le néant, which I read outside of school, that provided my first introduction. In the early nineteen-fifties, as a fascinated reader of Sartre, I started contemplating psychoanalytic ideas, though hardly aware of it myself at the time, and of course only in a Sartrean context. During my studies at three German universities, I encountered Freud only once, in one single session of a psychology lecture: his Strukturmodell was referred to as a mechanistic raping of the soul, with the footnote that this was a psychological model that highly overestimated sexuality. In my literature studies, Freud was mentioned only briefly, in connection with the Zeitgeist in Fin-de-siècle Vienna. Not one of my university teachers proposed that it might be possible, let alone fruitful, to use psychoanalysis as an instrument of insight in literary studies. But beneath the surface, that Sartrean Freud continued to influence me. I once made a suicide attempt, and I couldn't find the dagger I intended to use—though it lay in full view—until my bout of desperation had passed. In this, I found confirmation within myself of the existence and the power of the unconscious. Another time, in a Kierkegaard seminar, I was frustrated at his overstylization of anxiety and I had already begun looking at his life; coming across the problems involving his marriage engagement, I interpreted his philosophically ontologized fear as stemming from his sexual anxiety. But that was as far as I went.