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Freud's characterologic ambivalence, manifest in his personal life and in the dualism of his theories, was reflected in his divided attitude toward artists as both discoverers and rivals. The root lay in his childhood attitude toward his older nephew, John, who "got there first" to both woman's love and psychological truths. Since dream theory and poetic devices are parallel, dream analysis reveals in the unconscious the structure of language. The Schreber case provides an instance of Freud's linguistic approach, showing all the principal forms of paranoia to be generated linguistically. Freud's literary approach followed three stages. In the first, exemplified by his examination of Jensen's Gradiva, the text is taken to confirm clinical hypotheses. In the second, as in "The Theme of the Three Caskets," complex examination of the text with extraliterary comparisons provides a more sophisticated methodology. In the third phase, from 1919 to 1938, Freud shows a general disinterest in the study of fiction. In the essay on Dostoevsky, he returned to a clinical approach, perhaps even hostile because of the similarity of his own feelings to Dostoevsky's identification with and ambivalence toward the father. These three major examples are reviewed in detail.