It was tempting to go on from there to an attempt at an analysis of poetic and artistic creation in general. The realm of imagination was evidently a “sanctuary” made during the painful transition from the pleasure principle to the reality principle in order to provide a substitute for the gratification of instincts which had to be given up in real life. The artist, like the neurotic, had withdrawn from an unsatisfying reality into this world of imagination, but, unlike the neurotic, he knew how to find a way back from it and once more to get a firm foothold in reality. His creations, works of art, were the imaginary gratifications of unconscious wishes, just as dreams are; and like them, they were in the nature of compromises, since they too were obliged to avoid any open conflict with the forces of repression. But they differed from the asocial, narcissistic products of dreaming in that they were calculated to arouse interest in other people and were able to evoke and to gratify the same unconscious wishes in them too. Besides this, they have made use of the perceptual pleasure of formal beauty as what I have called an “incitement-premium.” What psychoanalysis was able to do was to take the inter-relations between the impressions of the artist’s life, his chance experiences and his works, and from them to construct his constitution and the impulses at work in it—that is to say, that part of him which he shared with all men. With this aim in view, for instance, I made Leonardo da Vinci the subject of a study which is based upon a single memory of childhood related by him and which aims chiefly at explaining his picture of “St. Anne with the Virgin and Child.” It does not appear that the enjoyment of a work of art is spoiled by the knowledge gained from such an analysis. The layman may perhaps expect too much from analysis in this field, for it must be admitted that it throws no light upon the two problems which probably interest him the most. It can do nothing towards elucidating the nature of the artistic gift, nor can it explain the means by which the artist works—artistic technique. I was able to show from a short story by W. Jensen called _Gradiva_, which has no particular merit in itself, that invented dreams can be interpreted in the same way as real ones and that the unconscious mechanisms familiar to us in the “dream-work” are thus also operative in the processes of imaginative writing.