...that we have nothing but his works, will we not recognize in them a river of fire? —Jacques Lacan1 In “Der Dichter und das Phantasieren” (Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming, 1907), one of the few talks Sigmund Freud ever gave to a literary audience, the psychoanalyst explored the nature of literary imagination and aesthetic pleasure.2 It took Freud only about twenty minutes to get his message across to the ninety or so listeners present, in terms the local press the day after reported to have been “subtle and at times clairvoyant”: the poet resembling a selfish fantasist and creative writing analogous to the act of daydreaming, literature’s power lies above all in its ability to allow adult readers an orderly, yet shameless and pleasurable, experience of otherwise repressed wishes and memories of childhood play.3 Freud had begun developing this thesis earlier and would remain interested in it well after his 1907 talk, for his assessment of the function of literature formed part of his more general conviction that modern culture is the product of a renunciation of deep-seated psychological drives.4 This assertion and the heuristic tools psychoanalysis offered to unearth such drives attracted a wide variety of modernist authors and artists to Freud. Along with Adolf Josef Storfer, to whom we will return, Heller is largely forgotten in the histories of both modernism and psychoanalysis.9 In the first decades of the twentieth century, however, Heller was known throughout the German-speaking art and literary world. Running a shop which had opened in 1905 on the Bauernmarkt in Vienna and which distributed books and periodicals on art, literature, and culture intended for children, women, and men, Heller catered mostly to bibliophiles and graphic art buffs through his journal Neue Blätter für Literatur und Kunst (later named Wiener Kunst-und Buchschau), which set out to fight against “kitsch in art and literature, against clichés and mass production.” 11 To distinguish his establishment from the roughly 2,000 bookshops in Austria around the turn of the century, Heller set up many initiatives.12 In the summer of 1906, Heller reached out to the Viennese intellectual and literary crowd with a survey asking to recommend ten good books, the responses to which were published in 1907 in a volume introduced by Hugo von Hofmannsthal.13 The thirty-two respondents included Hermann Bahr, spokesman of the avant-garde Young Vienna group, Schnitzler, Rilke, Stefan Zweig, Hermann Hesse, and physicist Ernst Mach, among others.