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To write a commentary about a literary reading of Freud's case studies invites a reconsideration of his greatness as a man of letters. Freud's works represent the confluence of literature and psychoanalysis, art and hermeneutics, that reveals and interprets the human psyche. The literary scholar Harold Bloom (1994) places Freud among those authors whose universality makes them canonical, those “authoritative in our culture” who have an inescapable influence on the writing of future generations (p. 1). Bloom underscores the role of literature as precursor to psychoanalysis. He places Shakespeare at the center of his Western canon because he “originates the depiction of self-change on the basis of self-overhearing, … [the] most remarkable of all literary innovations” (p. 46). He considers this innovation prophetic of the psychoanalytic method, in which patients achieve self-knowledge as they “overhear themselves in the context of their transference to their analysts” (p. 47). Bloom is dismissive of Freud's theoretical discoveries—he quips that “all of Freud that matters most is there in Shakespeare already” (p. 24)—yet he grants Freud's “greatness as a writer” and considers it “his actual achievement” (p. 349). Freud, avid reader of Shakespeare and ancient texts, identifies and explicates the root of conflict in desire expressed so eloquently by the poets. Freud received the Goethe prize for literature from the German government in 1930.
Literature was one of Freud's acknowledged sources, but his writing style was unique. Patrick Mahony (1987), a literary scholar and analyst