Thomas Mann's engagement with psychoanalysis and Freud is an interesting sidebar in the story of the interrelationship of artistic creativity and analysis. In his struggle to assimilate and accommodate to psychoanalysis as he understood it, Mann raises the threat of the reductionism of the analytic enterprise to the artist. Mann and Freud, in their correspondence and personal contacts, engaged in a temperate, but serious agonistic contest focusing on Freud's concern that his work be seen as science not philosophy, and that psychoanalysis was a de novo creation, and Mann's interest in situating Freud in the line of his Romantic heroes, such as Goethe, Schoepenhauer, and Nietzsche. Their agon was also colored by the barbarous cultural context of Europe in the 1930s.
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