creative writing and daydreaming by sigmund freud

Freud on Creative Writing and Daydreaming

By maria popova.

Predictably, Freud begins by tracing the subject matter to its roots in childhood, stressing, as Anaïs Nin eloquently did — herself trained in psychoanalysis — the importance of emotional investment in creative writing :

Should we not look for the first traces of imaginative activity as early as in childhood? The child’s best-loved and most intense occupation is with his play or games. Might we not say that every child at play behaves like a creative writer, in that he creates a world of his own, or, rather, rearranges the things of his world in a new way which pleases him? It would be wrong to think he does not take that world seriously; on the contrary, he takes his play very seriously and he expends large amounts of emotion on it. The opposite of play is not what is serious but what is real. In spite of all the emotion with which he cathects his world of play, the child distinguishes it quite well from reality; and he likes to link his imagined objects and situations to the tangible and visible things of the real world. This linking is all that differentiates the child’s ‘play’ from ‘phantasying.’ The creative writer does the same as the child at play. He creates a world of phantasy which he takes very seriously — that is, which he invests with large amounts of emotion — while separating it sharply from reality.

He then considers, as Henry Miller did in his famous creative routine three decades later, the time scales of the creative process:

The relation of phantasy to time is in general very important. We may say that it hovers, as it ware, between three times — the three moments of time which our ideation involves. Mental work is linked to some current impression, some provoking occasion in the present which has been able to arouse one of the subject’s major wishes. From here it harks back to a memory of an earlier experience (usually an infantile one) in which this wish was fulfilled; and now it creates a situation relating to the future which represents the fulfillment of the wish. What it thus creates is a day-dream or phantasy, which carries about it traces of its origin from the occasion which provoked it and from the memory. Thus, past, present and future are strung together, as it were, on the thread of the wish that runs through them.

He synthesizes the parallel between creative writing and play:

A piece of creative writing, like a day-dream, is a continuation of, and a substitute for, what was once the play of childhood.

He goes on to explore the secretive nature of our daydreams, suggesting that an element of shame keeps us from sharing them with others — perhaps what Jack Kerouac meant when he listed the unspeakable visions of the individual as one of his iconic beliefs and techniques for prose — and considers how the creative writer transcends that to achieve pleasure in the disclosure of these fantasies:

How the writer accomplishes this is his innermost secret; the essential ars poetica lies in the technique of overcoming the feeling of repulsion in us which is undoubtedly connected with the barriers that rise between each single ego and the others. We can guess two of the methods used by this technique. The writer softens the character of his egoistic day-dreams by altering and disguising it, and he bribes us by the purely formal — that is, aesthetic — yield of pleasure which he offers us in the presentation of his phantasies. We give the name of an incentive bonus , or a fore-pleasure , to a yield of pleasure such as this, which is offered to us so as to make possible the release of still greater pleasure arising from deeper psychical sources. In my opinion, all the aesthetic pleasure which a creative writer affords us has the character of a fore-pleasure of this kind, and our actual enjoyment of an imaginative work proceeds from a liberation of tensions in our minds. It may even be that not a little of this effect is due to the writer’s enabling us thenceforward to enjoy our own day-dreams without self-reproach or shame.

For more famous insights on writing, see Kurt Vonnegut’s 8 rules for a great story , David Ogilvy’s 10 no-bullshit tips , Henry Miller’s eleven commandments , Jack Kerouac’s 30 beliefs and techniques , John Steinbeck’s six pointers , and Susan Sontag’s synthesized learnings .

— Published October 15, 2012 — https://www.themarginalian.org/2012/10/15/freud-creative-writers-and-day-dreaming/ —

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Daydreaming, Phantasy and the Artist's Process: A Response to "Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming

• Patricia Townsend
• Johns Hopkins University Press
• Volume 78, Number 4, Winter 2021
• pp. 659-683
• 10.1353/aim.2021.0033
• View Citation

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“The Creative Writer and Daydreaming” Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Essay summary: “the creative writer and daydreaming”.

In this essay, Freud explicitly examines the relationship between literary analysis and psychoanalysis. The essay begins with the memorable and oft-quoted line: “We may perhaps say that every child at play behaves like a writer” (25). He then adds that “the opposite of play is not seriousness–it is reality” (26). Freud continues by explaining that rather than forgoing the pleasure we once took in playing in adolescence, humans replace play with fantasy. People’s fantasies are less easily observable than children’s play, and adults are generally ashamed of these secret desires.

In his psychoanalytic practice, Freud has learned that healthy and neurotic people both fantasize, but happy people do not, only dissatisfied ones, as “every fantasy [is] wish fulfillment, correcting the unhappy reality” (28). Fantasies are either ambitious or erotic. Fantasies also inhabit three time periods: the present impression, which has aroused the desire; the past memory of an earlier experience; and the future fulfillment of this desire. For instance, an orphaned youth might fantasize about gaining employment and marrying into a wealthy family to repossess themselves of a happy childhood. Fantasies proliferate prior to a lapse into neurosis or psychosis.

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Creative Writers and Day Dreaming Kindle Edition

“ creative writers and day dreaming ” was originally delivered by sigmund freud as an informal talk, before an audience of ninety in a room at the viennese publisher hugo heller , on december 6, 1907. an accurate summary of the talk appeared the following day in the viennese daily “ die zeit ”., the speech, on the relationship between unconscious fantasy and creative art, is a truly remarkable piece of work, given the fact that it was delivered seven years after the publication of his “ interpretation of dreams ”., in his talk, freud traced the similarities between children's play and creative writing. like creative writers, children at play create worlds of their own. however, freud points out that although our experience of mind wandering is a component of everyday life, our ability to accurately represent our experience can somehow be inadequate., freud makes clear that the ability to articulate inner mental phenomena, through the medium of the written word, belongs to a creative elite who have the dexterity to channel it., freud 's argument, that artists can revisit childhood memories, daydreams and play activities became widely influential to the modernists movement. daydreaming and fantasy were explored as a novel literary technique by many writers., diverse introspective practices, ranging from free association, stream of consciousness, and self-generated thought methods, allowed many blocked writers to re-emerge from their introversion and return to public life., sigmund freud is well known for his contributions to the study of daydreams, fantasy, and other mind wandering phenomena. original title of his the talk is “ der dichter und das phantasieren ” in german..

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Creative Writing and Daydreaming by Sigmund Freud

He suggests that the superficial pleasure of the work releases to deeper psychic pleasure and thereby liberate tensions. Thus, reading a text is known the psyche of the author.

Human beings have innumerable wishes and desires that can't be expressed freely due to social boundary, morality and other restrictions. The desires remain suppressed in our unconscious level of mind. Somehow, we try to express those desires and, according to Freud, there are three ways to do so- Sex, tongue slips and writing . Artists take help of writing to express his repressed desires of their childhood. He fantasizes and creates daydreams in place of playing games of their childhood. Through writing, the author expresses his desires. He remembers his golden past and wants to express the experience of the past in the present but can't do so. Therefore, he fantasizes and manifests his wishes in the form of art.

During childhood, a child plays with the mother's body but later on he identifies himself with fatherly figure, who comes in between mother and child , and the bodily unity with the mother is broken but the desire to play with mother's body remains throughout his life. Children forget their imagination by indulging themselves in games. The writer has nostalgic towards the blissful past and the same romantic nostalgia becomes immense energy for creativity. So, there is some sort of similarity between children and writers. Both use their emotion and imagination seriously in game and writing.

According to Freud, wishes or desires are divided in to two parts as: Ambition : Ambition, which is found only in male not in female, is to uplift the personality. Erotic Wish: This wish is noticed in both- male and female. Freud focuses Id that enforces erotic wish in a person. Id is an irrational and immoral force located at the unconscious level of human mind. It guides sexual desire. However, Idic factor is controlled by a stricter factor, which carries the principal of morality, value and humanitarian, called Superego. Superego does not let id express those desires. There is the conflict between Id and superego. But Ego, that works with the reality principle stands as a mediator between id and superego. When unfulfilled desires are suppressed and pushed back in our unconscious, they manifest in the form of dream, tongue slips and literature. It is ego that helps the writers to express the repressed desires in a socially accepted form, not directly but in disguised form.

There are three phases upon which an artist undergoes while creating a work of art, they are: A. Condensation B. Latent C. Substitution E. Symbolic/ image stage manifest

The first two are the psychological stages that are invisible located in mind but the third one is expressed in language.

Author's mind possesses many desires so he selects the wanted desires but leaves out the unwanted desires. Those selected desires are combined in to single desire, and such process is called condensation. In substitution, those erotic and socially unaccepted desires are substituted by non-erotic ideas and are changed in to socially accepted one. In the symbolic stage, author takes help of symbols of pond, cave, ring and such other circular and concave symbols refer to ' vegina' whereas convex and vertical symbolizes like hill, stick, tree, finger etc, refer to ' Phallus'. While reading a text, the readers identify themselves with the writers and get the aesthetic pleasure.

In releasing unfulfilled desires, the poet uses' censors' but the meaning can be accomplished through analysis. He says, this reading is allegorical. The day dreaming and creative works both transforms the mental contents in to something where the latter is more creative and interesting.

Freud also talks of two kinds of dreams: latent and manifest. Latent dream can only be thought of in our mental imagination, which cannot be seen but manifest dream is the revelation of the disguised one, which we perceive.

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Callard F, Staines K, Wilkes J, editors. The Restless Compendium: Interdisciplinary Investigations of Rest and Its Opposites. Basingstoke (UK): Palgrave Macmillan; 2016. doi: 10.1007/978-3-319-45264-7_4

The Restless Compendium: Interdisciplinary Investigations of Rest and Its Opposites.

Chapter 4 writing and daydreaming.

Hazel Morrison .

Affiliations

This chapter was conceived during an interdisciplinary psychological experiment, in which geographer Hazel Morrison asked participants to record and describe in face-to-face interviews their everyday experiences of mind wandering. Questions abound concerning the legitimacy of interviewee narratives when describing subjective experience, and the limits of language in achieving ‘authentic’ description. These concerns increase when looking at mind-wandering experiences, because of the absence of meta-cognition during periods of self-generated thought. Here, Hazel explores the tensions at play in twentieth-century discourses around the self, fantasy and expression.

The experience of mind wandering – which tends, now, to be placed by the discipline of psychology under the umbrella term ‘self-generated thought’, along with associated states such as daydream, fantasy and reverie – is recognized as a ubiquitous component of everyday life. 1 ‘[I]n day-dreaming’, wrote Jerome Singer, ‘all of us are in a sense authorities because of the very private nature of our experiences’. 2 Yet when looking to the history of psychological research that underpins contemporary understandings of mind wandering, ‘all of us’, that is, the generic you and I who experience our minds wandering every day, are notably absent. This isn’t to say that the voices, experiences and narratives of everyday people are entirely obscured. Rather the reliability – or, one might say, the authority – of the subjective viewpoint is repeatedly denigrated. 3

This, argue Schooler and Schreiber, is because although our experience of mind wandering is in itself undeniable, our ability to accurately represent our experience is frequently inadequate. 4 A momentary loss of ‘meta-cognition’, or self-reflexive awareness of our mental state, is commonly recognized to characterize the transition to the mind wandering state. 5 And if we are unable to recognize our minds having wandered, the validity of our accounts of these fugitive mental processes must be questionable. There are historical precedents to this problematic. The psychologist William James, for example, famously compared the attempt to capture such fleeting subjectivity as that of grasping ‘a spinning top to catch its motion, or trying to turn up the gas quickly enough to see how the darkness looks’. 6

I agree that the aforementioned denigration of the authority of subjective experience may be traced to this long-standing issue of meta-cognition, and its absence during periods of mind wandering. However, James recognized a second impediment to introspection, which, until recently, has received little attention within mainstream psychology. This he identified as the limitation of language, claiming an ‘absence of a special vocabulary for subjective facts’, which hindered the study of all ‘but the very coarsest of them’. 7 More than a century on, Callard, Smallwood and Margulies, in a commentary on scientific investigations of the mind at ‘rest’, recognize a similar problematic. A ‘historical bias’, they write, ‘toward explicating external processing has meant the psychological vocabulary for describing internally generated mental content is relatively stunted.’ 8 Nonetheless, they suggest there exist pockets of literature, now ‘largely unknown or disregarded in cognitive psychology’ which once used heterogeneous methods to study and elicit states of ‘daydream, fantasy, mind wandering and dissociation’. 9

To bring some of these methods to greater visibility, this chapter looks back to the period 1908–23, a period during which daydream and fantasy were experimentally explored through diverse introspective practices, ranging from the free association methods of psychoanalysis to stream of consciousness literary techniques. Reading Sigmund Freud’s famous essay ‘Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming’ (1908), in relation both to his daughter Anna Freud’s essay ‘The Relation of Beating-Phantasies to a Day-Dream’ (1923) and to Virginia Woolf’s short story ‘The Mark on the Wall’ (1919), this chapter explores the place of writing within complexes of daydream and fantasy. These interconnected texts make clear the complexities of articulating inner, mental phenomena through the medium of the written word. In so doing, they offer additional paths through which we might understand why the subjective viewpoint has often been denigrated or downplayed within the history of daydreaming and mind wandering research. i

• Multiplicity of the Self and the Fragility of Self-Representation

Sigmund Freud’s essay ‘Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming’ (1908) is known for its long-standing contribution to studies of daydream and fantasy, phenomena now frequently brought into confluence with mind wandering. 10 Freud recognized imaginative activities such as daydreaming, ‘phantasy’ and building ‘castles in the air’ as normal human behaviour. Yet despite the ubiquitous nature of daydreaming, he understood it to necessitate concealment. 11

Why? Freud identified socially unacceptable egoistic and erotic wishes as significant motive forces that furnish the contents of fantasy and daydream. Freud wrote of the ‘well-brought-up young woman’ being ‘allowed a minimum of erotic desire’, and of the young man who must learn to subdue an ‘excess of self-regard’ to gain acceptance in society. At the extreme, to allow one’s daydreams to become ‘over-luxuriant’ and overpowerful was seen to risk the onset of ‘neurosis or psychosis’. 12

Only the creative writer, argued Freud, was uniquely able to articulate ‘his [sic] personal daydreams without self-reproach or shame’. The aesthetic qualities of prose were seen by Freud to ‘soften’, ‘disguise’ and sublimate the egotistical elements of the daydream, allowing author and reader alike covert indulgence in the pleasure of fantasizing. 13 ii

Creativity, Self and Sublimation: ‘The Mark on the Wall’

Virginia Woolf’s short story ‘The Mark on the Wall’ (1919) exemplifies the skill of the creative writer in giving expression to daydream, reverie and fantasy. Like Freud, Woolf recognizes the commonality of the experience of daydreaming: even the most ‘modest mouse-coloured people’, claims the narrator, cherish moments of self-referential imaginative indulgence, despite believing ‘genuinely that they dislike to hear their own praises.’ 14 Moreover, Woolf’s text addresses how, for daydream and fantasy to be freely expressed, the writer must deploy tactics of disguise and deflection.

Woolf’s experimental approach to depicting inner monologue mimics the rhythms and effects of the wandering mind, as her writing gravitates from domestic space towards thoughts of childhood fancy. The sight of burning coals evokes description of a ‘calvacade of red knights … an old fancy, an automatic fancy, made as a child perhaps’. Distracted, her thoughts ‘swarm upon a new object’: a poorly perceived mark, ‘black upon the white wall …’. Rich and humorous, her prose flits from some current impression (a bowl, flower, cigarette smoke) to self-referential thoughts and fantasies. Intermittently her train of thought returns to the mark on the wall: lifting this new object up ‘as ants carry a blade of straw so feverishly’, before leaving it to be picked up later, afresh. 15

While Woolf’s text meanders, and on occasion tumbles, from one thought to the next, a succession of passages offers the opportunity to reflect on the thought processes that permit fantasized, egotistical self-expression. ‘I wish I could hit upon a pleasant track of thought’, states the narrator, ‘a track indirectly reflecting credit upon myself’. These, she continues, ‘are not thoughts directly praising oneself’. Rather, they express indirectly a figure of self, ‘lovingly, stealthily … not openly adoring’. This, declares Woolf’s narrator, ‘is the beauty of them’. 16

Woolf portrays daydreaming as a mode of thought that allows for the creation of a sense of self invested with depth, colour and romance. Yet the author also recognizes an inherent danger in giving voice to daydream and fantasy. Woolf’s text hints at deep motivations for concealment and sublimation, for like Freud, she writes of the urge to protect the idealized self-image from the gaze of the external world. If this idealized self-image were to be openly recognized, its integrity would become threatened. To have one’s fantasized sense-of-self disappear is, for the narrator, to become ‘only a shell of a person’, as seen by others. Indeed, writes Woolf, ‘what an airless, shallow, bald, prominent world it becomes!’ 17

For the protagonist of the story, the destruction of an inner self-image that exists within the realm of fantasy is a genuine threat. Fear lies with the potential for ‘idolatry’, for a sense of self being ‘made ridiculous, or too unlike the original to be believed in any longer’. In this sense, Woolf’s short story suggests why daydream, fantasy and mind wandering are states of mind that resist introspective redescription: to give self-expression to the wandering mind is to risk damaging the inner self. Writing, I suggest, emerges as a crucial intermediary for Woolf, through which the fantasized self may be given self-expression. 18

• Fragmentation

[I]n the daydream each new addition or repetition of a separate scene afford[s] anew opportunity for pleasurable instinctual gratification. In the written story … the direct pleasure gain is abandoned. 19

Anna Freud – as the quotation above from her essay ‘The Relation of Beating-Phantasies to a Day-Dream’ (1923) indicates – offers another model for the complex relationship between daydreaming, subjectivity and writing. In this essay, she presents the case of a young female patient, characterized by a strong propensity to daydream. The girl, Anna Freud writes, had a history of fantasy thinking in which two polarized thought patterns dominated. By encouraging the girl, during analysis, to express the contents of these daydreams, Anna Freud explores how processes of repression and transformation link the inner daydream to its articulation in the ‘real’ world. 20 In doing so, she postulates more precisely than Sigmund Freud how daydreaming experience is transformed and transfigured once communicated through the written word.

In Anna Freud’s essay, the girl’s early fantasies of beating are shown to have culminated in masturbatory climax. As the girl aged, these fantasies were increasingly repressed as the girl associated them with shame and displeasure. The girl was then reported to have developed seemingly converse daydreams, which she labelled ‘nice stories’. These are understood by Anna Freud as the transformation of the beating fantasy into stories acceptable to the girl’s sense of morality, which yet enable a similar degree of pleasurable gratification.

In both the beating fantasies and ‘nice’ daydreams, Freud relates that the girl ‘did not feel bound to work out a logical sequence of events’ of the kind that would characterize a written narrative. Rather she scanned forward and back to differing phases of the tale; she might ‘interpose a new situation between two already completed and contemporaneous scenes’, to the extent that the ‘frame of her stories was in danger of being shattered’. 21 Each repetition and addition to the daydream was understood to enable renewed opportunity for ‘pleasurable instinctual gratification’. Yet when the daydream became ‘especially obtrusive’, the girl turned to writing, reportedly ‘as a defence against excessive preoccupation with it’. 22

Anna Freud noted a sharp difference between the unbridled, multi-layered sequence of events that made up the daydream, and the structured, novelistic quality of daydreams transformed into a written story. iii No longer a series of overlaid, repetitive episodes, culminating time and again in pleasurable climax, once written down the ‘finished story’ reportedly did ‘not elicit any such excitement’ as during the experiencing of the daydream. Yet this, concluded Anna Freud, put her patient ‘on the road that leads from her fantasy life back to reality’. 23 Like Sigmund Freud, who wrote that even if an individual were to communicate his or her phantasies they would leave the listener cold, Anna Freud recognized the role of language in transforming the affects that accompany the daydream. Outside the psychoanalytic encounter, fantasy thoughts are placed within a more linear, textual framework that flattens the dynamic nature of such thinking. iv

Taking these three texts together, we might relate the suspicion of everyday introspective accounts of mind wandering at least in part to the complex relations tying daydream and fantasy to the written word. Language, embedded within distinct social contexts, is in many ways considered duplicitous in relation to the contents of consciousness. Even if literary techniques, such as Woolf ‘s, attempt to evoke the rhythms and affects characteristic of the wandering mind, writing itself is the site of an opacity that accompanies the unfurling of inner life into the social world. As James noted more than a century ago, the ‘ lack of a word’ imposes limitations on language’s ability to represent inner experience, complicating any straightforward relationship between experience and expression. 24

• Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the Volkswagen Foundation.

See Chap. 5 .

Cf. Chap. 7 .

Cf. Chap. 10 .

Cf. Chap. 6 .

Jonathan Smallwood and Jonathan W. Schooler, ‘The Restless Mind’, Psychological Bulletin 132, no. 6 (2006): 947. [ PubMed : 17073528 ]

Jerome L. Singer, The Inner World of Daydreaming (New York: Harper, 1966), 6.

See also Anthony Jack and Andreas Roepstorff, ‘Introspection and Cognitive Brain Mapping: From Stimulus-Response to Script-Report’, Trends in Cognitive Sciences 6, no. 8 (2002): 333–39 [ PubMed : 12140083 ]; Felicity Callard, Jonathan Smallwood, and Daniel S. Margulies, ‘Default Positions: How Neuroscience’s Historical Legacy Has Hampered Investigation of the Resting Mind’, Frontiers in Psychology 3 (2012): 321 [ PMC free article : PMC3437462 ] [ PubMed : 22973252 ].

Jonathan Schooler and Charles A. Schreiber, ‘Experience, Meta-Consciousness, and the Paradox of Introspection’, Journal of Consciousness Studies 11, no. 7–8 (2004): 17–18.

Jerome L. Singer, ‘Daydreaming, Consciousness, and Self-Representations: Empirical Approaches to Theories of William James and Sigmund Freud’, Journal of Applied Psychoanalytic Studies , 5, no. 4 (2003), 464.

William James, The Principles of Psychology. Vol. 1 (New York: Dover, 1950), 244.

Ibid., 195.

Callard, Smallwood, and Margulies, ‘Default Positions’, 3.

Sigmund Freud, ‘Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming’ (1908), in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud , trans. and ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press: The Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1953–74), 9: 144–45.

Ibid., 144–5.

Ibid., 146–7.

Ibid., 152.

Virginia Woolf, The Mark on the Wall (Richmond, Surrey: Hogarth Press, 1919), 4.

Anna Freud, ‘The Relation of Beating-Phantasies to a Day-Dream Freud’ (1923), in Introduction to Psychoanalysis: Lectures for Child Analysts and Teachers, 1922–1935 (London: Hogarth Press and The Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1974), 154–5.

Ibid., 157.

Ibid., 146.

Ibid., 154–5.

James, The Principles of Psychology. Vol. 1, 195–6.

• Further Reading
• Callard, Felicity, Jonathan Smallwood, Johannes Golchert, and Daniel S. Margulies. ‘The Era of the Wandering Mind? Twenty-First Century Research on Self-Generated Mental Activity’. Frontiers in Psychology: Perception Science 4 (2013): 891. [ PMC free article : PMC3866909 ] [ PubMed : 24391606 ]
• Corballis, Michael C. The Wandering Mind: What the Brain Does When You’re Not Looking . Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2015.
• Freud, Sigmund. The Interpretation of Dreams . Translated by Joyce Crick. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.
• Schooler, Jonathan W, Jonathan Smallwood, Kalina Christoff, Todd C. Handy, Erik D. Reichle and Michael A. Sayette. ‘Meta-Awareness, Perceptual Decoupling and the Wandering Mind’. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 15. no. 7 (2011): 319–26. [ PubMed : 21684189 ]
• Woolf, Virginia To the Lighthouse . Edited by David Bradshaw. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.

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• Cite this Page Morrison H. Writing and Daydreaming. In: Callard F, Staines K, Wilkes J, editors. The Restless Compendium: Interdisciplinary Investigations of Rest and Its Opposites. Basingstoke (UK): Palgrave Macmillan; 2016. Chapter 4. doi: 10.1007/978-3-319-45264-7_4
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Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming

Sigmund freud.

First published January 1, 1908

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