At the beginning of his study on Jensen’s Gradiva, Freud seems delighted to find in an imaginary work a type of knowledge ‘of which our philosophy has not yet let us dream’:
But creative writers are valuable allies and their evidence is to be prized highly, for they are apt to know a whole host of things between heaven and earth of which our philosophy has not yet let us dream. In their knowledge of the mind they are far in advance of us everyday people, for they draw upon sources which we have not yet opened up for science.
(Freud, 1907 [1906], p. 8)
In striking contrast with the admiration he expressed for the fiction of the creative writer, Freud made no secret of his scepticism and even his hostility towards the concept of the philosopher. In a lecture given before the Wiener Medizinishes Doktorenkollegium, Freud reassured his colleagues that his notion of the unconscious will not ‘land us in the depths of philosophical obscurities’ since the psychoanalytic ‘unconscious is not quite the same as that of philosophers and, moreover, the majority of philosophers will hear nothing of ‘unconscious mental processes’’ (Freud, 1905 [1904], p. 266).