Auden's elegy for Freud uses a phrase that has passed into the language. Freud, he says, 'is no more a person / now but a whole climate of opinion'. By November 1939, the influence of the founder of psychoanalysis seemed to pervade the artistic and intellectual cultures of theWest - even the literary culture of England, a country that talks a lot about the weather. In Auden's own work, however, Freud's centrality was not quite so assured; his significance was sometimes equal to, at other times actually less than, that of figures such as Georg Groddeck and Homer Lane. He would have found out about Freud, probably, in connection with his father's medical practice. According to Humphrey Carpenter, Dr Auden was 'paying a lot of attention' to Freud in 1925 (Carpenter, p. 40). Auden's introduction to the ideas of Groddeck and Lane, however, was effected by John Layard, who was living in Berlin when Auden made his first visit there in 1928. Although he was later to refer rather cruelly to 'loony Layard', this name-calling owed less to Auden's opinion of Layard's ideas than to his shock at being asked to finish the job when Layard bungled a suicide attempt. This troubled figure was an enthusiastic disciple of Lane, whose papers he collected and collated for what became Lane's only published work, Talks to Parents and Teachers (1928). His extra significance for Auden consisted in his simultaneous and complementary investments in both psychology and anthropology. Layard had travelled to Malekula in the New Hebrides in 1914-15 with W. H. R. Rivers, whose book Conflict and Dream (1923) was to supply Auden with material for 'Paid on Both Sides'. Layard's own papers on the 'Flying Tricksters of Malekula' would inform the composition of The Orators. From the start of his career as a writer, Auden became used to thinking about psychological models in relation to the customs and rituals of an entire society, rather than exclusively with reference to the personal history of the individual.