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The purpose of this paper is to highlight the role of the humanities in the undergraduate preparation of psychoanalysts. An overwhelming focus on the theory and techniques of human behavior can not compensate for the reading and analysis of the classics. By understanding how people have experienced and interpreted themselves through the centuries, the understanding of ourselves and of the human condition can only be enriched and deepened.
“Everybody thinks that I stand by the scientific character of my work and that my principal scope lies in curing mental maladies. This is a terrible error that has prevailed for years and that I have been unable to set right. I am a scientist by necessity and not by vocation. I am really by nature an artist….” Freud continued on in this interview with Giovanni Papini (1969): “My books in fact more resemble works of imagination than treatises on pathology…. I have been able to win my destiny in an indirect way, and have attained my dream: to remain a man of letters, though still in appearance a doctor. In all great men of science there is a leaven of fantasy, but no one proposes like me to translate the inspirations offered by the currents of modern literature into scientific theories. In psychoanalysis you may find fused together, although changed into scientific jargon, the three greatest literary schools of the nineteenth century: Heine, Zola, and Mallarme are united in me under the patronage of my old master, Goethe.” It is common knowledge that Freud read the classics and used them in his theories, and that he even taught himself Spanish to read Cervantes's Don Quixote. Freud's mind moved back and forth between