In this paper I have tried to demonstrate (but not account for) the intricacies of the creation by Freud of a paper that had a special personal meaning. "The Moses of Michelangelo" was the product of the imaginative processes of a genius. Freud was first fascinated with the statue, then fascinated with his own fascination. Over 13 years, he spent many, many hours standing before the statue, brooding about its meaning. The final work of art—and that is what the paper turned out to be—came as a result of insights that were simultaneously derived from unresolved conflicts out of Freud's infantile past, unresolved conflicts in his contemporary external world, and unresolved conflicts of a transference nature toward his own creation, psychoanalysis. The paper represented an actualization of a complex synthesis Freud made: it was at once a work of art which could be shared

with others, an intimate (and highly "mutative") interpretation made to himself, and a joke that he enjoyed privately.