Michel Schneider’s work illustrates the links between the thinking of a psychoanalyst and that of the writer he also was. His way of thinking about and living with literary creation complemented his personal experience of analysis. The elaborative action involved in the development of thought in tales and literary texts is analogous and parallel to part of psychoanalytical work. The importance of the play of affect-laden ideation is as great in one as in the other. The difference is linked to the fact that in the analytical situation the transference is a living experience with a person, whereas readers compose the character of “their” writer who offers them the intermediary of his or her fantasies to provoke their own. The psychoanalyst supports the development of the patient’s own forgotten or repressed fantasies. The literary text can be seen as a medium in the service of self-analysis.