Every year the belief — or rather superstition — that psychoanalysis is an affair for doctors, that it is a kind of psychiatric treatment which should be used for the patients’ best, is growing in strength. I consider it a necessary duty to fight against this erroneous belief by lecturing and writing, for if this opinion becomes prevalent — and unfortunately there are many people who defend this position — the world would be deprived of the most precious thing Freud gave it. The study of the unconscious — which is a possible translation of the term psychoanalysis — is an affair of all mankind and its use in medicine is only a small fraction of all that this study consists of. In order to make this clear I chose the four pieces of literature mentioned in the announcement — the Ring of the Nibelungs, Peer Gynt, Faust, and Struwwelpeter — as material for my talks, and in order not to make people think that I was dabbling in aesthetics I called these pieces textbooks. Yet this does not mean that I intend to give a course in psychoanalysis, with the help of these textbooks. Psychoanalysis cannot be taught, for the simple reason that it is innate in all of us, that it is a human ability like seeing or hearing. I rather feel like a bookseller who is asked for his advice about what books to read in order to be informed on this or that subject, a question which is indeed often put to me, because of the interest in psychoanalysis. And I must say that none of the current textbooks will inform you as easily, simply and thoroughly about the nature of psychoanalysis as will these four works of literature.
Georg Groddeck; ‘Der Ring’ (The Ring), Psychoanalytische Schriften zur Literatur und Kunst p. 135.
authentic analysis 