“First I want to get my own ideas into shape…”

First I want to get my own ideas into shape, then I shall make a thorough study of the literature on the subject, and finally make such insertions or revisions as my reading will give rise to. So long as I have not finished my own work I cannot read, and it is only in writing that I can fill in all the details.

The literature which I am now reading is reducing me to idiocy. Reading is a terrible infliction imposed upon all who write. In the process everything of one’s own drains away. I often cannot remember what I have that is new, and yet it is all new. The reading stretches ahead interminably, so far as I can see at present.

—Sigmund Freud