Musil's novel, The Man without Qualities, is described as a "psychoanalytic novel par excellence," and the novelist's thorough study of psychoanalysis is documented by reference to his published legacy. Before Freud conceptualized the problems of humanity within the framework of his scientific psychology of the unconscious, writers had construed these with their own homespun psychology. Since then, there seemed to remain only the alternatives of dilettantism or of manufacturing pathographies à la Freud. Musil chose the third alternative of "forgetting" his own study of Freud, that is, of concealing it in order to realize his projected description of the world in a second, post-Freudian naïveté. His novel raises the question of how one can write and live in two interrelated worlds—the scientifically demystified world and the world as we all experience it.