This speech was originally presented at the celebration of Freud's eightieth birthday in 1936. Mann stressed the close relation between creative writing and (analytic) science, referring to the 'pre-freudian' analytic perceptions and premonitions in Nietzsche, Novalis, Kierkegaard, and Schopenhauer. The bond between creative writing and science lies in love of truth and in understanding disease as an instrument of knowledge. Life, to the writer and to the analyst, is a succession, a moving in others' steps, an identification. One searches the past for patterns that provide the strength and skill to take a future step: life and living are a kind of reanimation of which myth and history provide many examples. Mann wondered, in fact, whether his talk on Freud and the Future might not better have been called Freud and the Myth.