["...I could not imagine myself without it". Wolfgang Hildesheimer and psychoanalysis]

The analysis Hildesheimer underwent in Jerusalem in 1940 when he was 23 years old came to be considered by him as sort of a "training analysis" which provided him with crucial insights into the nature of the human mind and especially into creative phenomena and processes of aesthetic transformation. This analysis can be regarded as a central source of motives and experiences for Hildesheimer's oeuvre, touched on repeatedly in diverse contexts, most clearly in the monologues of Tynset (1965) and Masante (1973) and in the long biographical essays of Mozart (1977) and Marbot (1981), but also in his production as a graphic artist.