Freud adopted the themes and concepts of romantic literature, which had been eliminated by the scientistic experimental psychology of his time, and made them scientific. Several points demonstrated the affinity between literature and psychoanalysis: the interpretation of dreams as model for the interpretation of literature, the dream work as analogue to the work of the writer's imagination, analogies between therapeutic and poetic economics, and the fact that Freud analyzed literary characters on the same level as real persons.