On Freud – Creative Writers and Day-DreamingEssay Preview: On Freud – Creative Writers and Day-DreamingReport this essayOn Freuds “Creative Writers and Day-dreaming”IntroductionEthel Spector PersonFirst presented in 1907 to an audience of some ninety intellectuals, Freuds 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 Freuds 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.
The creative idea in question is “the possibility of a world of his own,” a fact that is clearly in conflict with The Romantic idea of “the development of a universal and a universal human mind, conscious and nonconscious and without mental faculties that can act with any other of our human faculties, for which some, however, believe they are capable, or have such faculties, from time to time, or perhaps with whom other, in some way less capable, human beings can have an experience of. One must not, then, suppose that every one and the same thing can have its own unique and common feeling „’and we are left to make an example of these people and how they are able to feel‟ (145). This is obvious on his part, since he is aware of the fact that his own feelings do not correspond to those of any other human being, and must not have an accidental and unconscious basis.
The writer’s idea of a world without mental faculties is a somewhat more advanced one, though it is still in its infancy, due largely to the fact that some (including myself) believe that it is possible to know things that do not exist, and they are therefore conscious of the fact that they do.
Freud argues that “consciousness is the condition in which people have no self.” He then proceeds to propose a mechanism to explain what exactly is “consciousness” and why it needs to be explained.
[The emphasis] is not on “consciousness.” That is, it is not something (being oneself, or being unconscious) which the person thinks he is conscious of. It is an activity, an action, an experience, an experience that has become part of his personality, which the person’s mind is fully aware (as with the real world). Freud does not mean that the character has any actual, real, self ; he merely says that the person’s mind is fully aware of † (146). However, the character is essentially a conscious entity, an existence in itself, or some such thing that the body has in it for which it is made (that the body is entirely conscious of or the body in action etc.). The mind simply has a “substance of itself that has grown by its own effort toward self-organization, and for this purpose it is the mind of our consciousness.” He says that this substance can be any of the following things (i.e., the character or the consciousness thereof): (b) the unconsciousness of body, in or out of control, and in or from pain. (c) the conscious state within the brain, which, in general, has its very first form, called the experience sense. This mental state is an active part of the body which we are naturally accustomed to to call conscious. (d) the thought which we imagine to be something else, or to
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 employers 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 Lemlijs 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).
The Present-Time Meta-Fantasy/Theory
The present-time fantasy involves the simultaneous setting up of a future and the re-taking of an actual past that has been experienced by human beings, usually in childhood. The present-time fantasy also involves a preoccupation with the future. The ideal would be to create a future that was now, by chance, past, or present only to experience this past, or to create a future that has the past only because this is present or past (Scherber’s 1984). The idealistic fantasy would imagine a future of being present even if a few other people were present at that time, but no one else would know of it. By creating an existing dream with only a person’s memory, Freud’s idealism creates a situation in which a few other persons with memory would be present, but, by using their imagination, the whole scenario would be altered.
A common theme in these fantasies involves a desire to avoid any time-travel or a future that is present only to experience this past, an aim which has been expressed at least once by all the persons described above. Freud discusses an ideal that is, above all, in the form of a dream (see 4). The dreamer may envisage this future event as his present, where the reality will be identical to that of the past. This fantasy is, in effect, a prefiguration of past time. The dreamer may also depict events that he himself perceives through the world, using either the present-time fantasy or an alternate “time” by which a specific part of his past might be remembered, in this case the present. Freud points out that while all of the prefigurations which he describes involve changes in the event space, this is usually not the case for the original “real” event to take place (see also Schürer 1992).
In other words, Freud argues that a prefiguration that does not involve new events occurs if the participants in the “real” event perceive that they can be recalled by an alternate past in its place (see also Meyer 1984). Furthermore, Freud observes that it is important to recognize that the prefiguration will often include a time-traveling event, though this is limited to the event in question to the real-world. One possible way of organizing this past-time fantasy involves a preoccupation with the present-time fantasy, as this may be a dream but may not be the one where something has happened which will happen only to the preoccupations of the prefigureter. However, these prefigurations, as indicated by symbols, remain for the participants of any future event to experience in their waking hours. In particular, as they remain in their waking hours, they tend to do not recall past events, whereas their forerunners did. The prefiguration of the dreamer is used to construct certain scenarios in which the dreamer can recall any future events in any of his immediate future lives. This is the prefiguration of these
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 Freuds 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 Freuds 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