Artist and Psychoanalyst

In 1918 Hermann Hesse (1877-1962) wrote an essay, remarkable both for its time and in itself, on the relationship between the creative work of the artist and the then very new analytic depth psychology. “Künstler und Psychoanalyse,” the full text of which is here translated for the first time, was written when Hesse was 41 years old, before the publication of his best novels. Demian had not yet appeared, Siddhartha and Der Steppenwolf had not yet been written, and it was not to be until 1946 that Das Glasperlenspiel (published under the English title, Magister Ludi) would win him the Nobel Prize for literature.

Hesse's acquaintance with psychoanalysis stemmed not only from fairly extensive reading in its literature but, as the remarks in his essay clearly indicate, from personal experience. The poet was apparently suffering from symptoms of a compulsion neurosis, when a personal emotional crisis brought him to consult a psychoanalyst in Switzerland in 1916.* Whatever the nature of the treatment—which seems to have been rather unorthodox—it shortly bore artistic fruit in the intensely self-analytic Demian, while the present article offers another, nonfictional commentary on that period.

Hesse's essay is a greeting to the psychoanalyst from the German romantic spirit, a greeting which demonstrates little of the ambivalence toward the science which other writers have at times expressed. Like Thomas Mann, he profited from finding in psychoanalysis what he regarded as a living philosophy of inward phantasy, an insight into the