On Freud - Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming

On Freud's "Creative Writers and Day-dreaming"

Introduction

Ethel Spector Person

First presented in 1907 to an audience of some ninety intellectuals, Freud's paper "Creative Writers and Day-dreaming," as Marcos Aguinis tells us, established fantasy as "the fourth stroke of genius that he [Freud] inflicted on the stuffy academics of the time," the first three being "his studies of dreams, parapraxes, and jokes." The paper is bifurcated in that it stands at or near the headwater of two great streams of inquiry in psychoanalysis: fantasy and applied analysis. On the one hand, it explores the origins of day-dreaming and its relationship to the play of children; on the other, it is Freud's most straightforward exploration of the creative process. However, the paper conveys something more about fantasy than about creative writers. As Freud himself says, "Although I have put the creative writer first in the title of my paper, I have told you far less about him than about phantasies" (1908, 152).

Freud starts his paper by searching for some factor that links Everyman to the creative writer. He suggests that "every child at play behaves like a creative writer, in that he creates a world of his own" (143). Both the child at play and the creative writer are engaged in fantasizing, an exertion of the imaginative capacity. Both take their respective activities very seriously, and both are able to distinguish the product of their imaginative lives from reality. The difference between them is only that in play the child links "his imagined objects and situations to the tangible and visible things of the real world" (144), so that, for example, imaginatively zooming along in an auto-mobile, he makes use of a chair as his pretend car.

However, in the course of his development, the child eventually ceases to play, substituting fantasy - daydreams or castles in the air - in its place. As Freud puts it, "We can never give anything up; we only exchange one thing for another" (145). Fantasy supplies some of the pleasures lost in the renunciation of play - and sometimes humor does too. Unlike children, who are open about their play, the adult, out of shame, keeps his fantasies to himself. What we know of fantasies we know because our patients have revealed it to us.

From his experience with patients, Freud concludes "that a happy person never phantasies, only an unsatisfied one. The motive forces of phantasies are unsatisfied wishes, and every single phantasy is the fulfilment of a wish, a correction of unsatisfying reality" (146). As to the content of fantasy, he proposes that in women erotic wishes predominate and in men a combination of egoistic and ambitious wishes alongside erotic ones. Freud gives a wonderful example - a derivative of a family romance, really, but one that is not so labeled. A poor orphan boy has been given the address of a potential employer. On his way there, he indulges in a daydream: he will be given the job, and his new employer will come to like him. He will become indispensable to the business, and his employer will take him into his own family, whereupon the young man will marry his employer's daughter and become a director of the business, first as a partner of his (new) father-in-law and then as his successor. (Of course, we all know by now that Freud missed the mark in his generalizations about the content of gender-dichotomous fantasies. But take particular note in Mois й s Lemlij's chapter of a rendition of the fantasy as it might surface in the mind of a Peruvian orphan boy; one instantly becomes aware of a cultural component in the narrative content of some daydreams.)

As Freud points out, in the orphan fantasy, the daydreamer regains the happiness he was presumed to have possessed in early childhood; thus the daydream "makes use of an occasion in the present to construct, on the pat-tern of the past, a picture of the future" (148). Freud notes that the relation-ship of fantasy to time is very important. A fantasy is triggered by a current occasion, which harks back to the memory of an experience when the wish was fulfilled. At the same time, it "creates a situation relating to the future which represents a fulfilment of the wish" (147). Here Freud presents a model whereby fantasies are not only substitutive but also provide a potentially adaptive schema for a real-life future (a position that Robert Emde explicates in his chapter).

Freud alludes to the role of fantasy in neurosis and psychosis and discusses its relationship to dreams. He asserts that language declares the kinship between night dreams and daydreams. The meaning of dreams is obscure to us because the manifest content proffers imaginary gratification based on wishes of which we are ashamed and which in consequence have been repressed. Night dreams and daydreams are wish fulfillments "in just the same way" (149). This insight foreshadows a shift in Freud's thinking - explored in his later works - toward the nature and source of unconscious fantasies.

Turning to the creative writer, Freud chooses to focus on a popular romantic kind of novelist. Although the novel is far removed from day-dreams, Freud believes that sometimes one can track the transitions between daydreams and artistic products. The novelistic protagonist appears as an invulnerable hero - a variety of His Majesty the Ego - just as does the protagonist of the daydream. So, too, the sequencing of the genesis of a novel is similar to the formation of a fantasy. In the creative writer, Freud says, "A strong experience in the present awakens... a memory of an earlier experience (usually belonging to his childhood) from which there now proceeds a wish which finds its fulfilment in the creative work. The work itself exhibits elements of the recent provoking occasion as well as of the old memory" (151). Freud also launches a psychoanalytic inquiry into aesthetics, raising the question of what there is in a novel that elicits pleasure in the reader. As an aside, Freud makes a statement profoundly significant for subsequent psychoanalytic theories regarding culture: "It is extremely probable that myths ...are distorted vestiges of the wishful phantasies of whole nations, the secular dreams of youthful humanity" (152).

"Creative Writers and Day-dreaming" is one of Freud's early papers, written at a time when his ideas had yet to be fully realized - for example, the structural theory had not yet been explicated; nonetheless, this densely written paper is remarkable for the wealth of insights it contains