CREATIVE WRITERS AND DAY DREAMING -- FREUD--Criticism & Theory

CREATIVE WRITERS AND DAY DREAMING

FREUD

Sigmund Freud is one of the ‘seminal minds of modern era. He is recognized as the founder of psycho-analysis. Most human mental activity, according to Freud, is unconscious and the primary source of psychic energy –LIBIDO—is sexual. Freud divides the human mind into 3 zones:

1.      The ID--unconscious.

2.      The Ego—conscious personality

3.      The Super EGO—conscience.

Dreams and neurotic symptoms are the result of drives rising from the ID, being repressed by the EGO and the super Ego and finding expression in displaced forms.

            Freud begins the essay by asking: “What is the source from which the creative writer draws his materials?

ÜFor this even the creative writer cannot give a satisfactory reply.

Ü  His attempt is always to lessen the distance between him and the common run of humanity.

Ü He assures us that “every man is at heart and that the last poet will not perish till the last man dies”.

            The first traces of imaginative activity, we can trace in the child’s play. Every child at play behaves like a creative writer in that he creates a world of his own and re-arranges the things f the world in a way that pleases him. He takes that world seriously but in spite of all the emotions he fills his world with, he distinguishes it quite well from reality. He links it to reality; this linking is all that differentiates his ‘play’ from ‘fantasying’.

            The creative writer does the same as a child at play. He creates a world of fantasy, which he takes seriously—that is which he invests with emotions—while separating it from reality [this point is important—S. Sree Kumar] 

Ü Language has preserved this relationship between children’s play and poetic creation. The German language gives the name ‘spiel’ (play) to some form of imaginative writing.

Ü [ Lustspiel = pleasure play=comedy; Trauerspiel=mourning play=tragedy]. The unreality of the writer’s imaginative world has very important consequences for the technique of his art. Many things unpleasant in reality can be enjoyed in fantasy.

            As people grow up they cease to play. Actually we can never give up anything. We only exchange one thing for another. So instead of playing he fantasies. He builds castles in the air and creates ‘day dreams’.

♣  The child does not conceal his ply. The adult, on the contrary, is ashamed of his fantasies and hides them from others. Motives differ in both. In the child play is determined by his wish to be big and grown up. But the adult cannot play but to act in the real world. So, some of his wishes have to be concealed. He is ashamed of these wishes as being childish and impermissible.

            Freud then analyses the characteristics of fantasying. A happy person never fantasises. Fantasy is the fulfilment of a wish; a correction of unsatisfying reality. These motivating wishes vary according to the sex, character and circumstances.

1.      Ambitious wishes—they elevate the personality. In young men egoistic and ambitious wishes come to the foe alongside of erotic wishes.

2.      Erotic wishes—in young women erotic wishes dominate. Their ambitious wishes are absorbed by erotic wishes.

Fantasies are not stereo-typed. They fit themselves into the subject’s shifting impressions of life and receive from every fresh active impression, what might be called ‘a date mark’. Past, present and future are strung together on the thread of the wish that runs through them.

To make this point clear, Freud gives us the example of the poor orphan boy who goes to a prospective employer. He has a day dream. He dreams of getting the job and favour of his boss, marries the daughter of the house and becomes a director of the business. In this fantasy, the dreams have regained what he possessed in his happy childhood. Here the wish makes use of an occasion in the present to construct, on the pattern of the past, a picture of the future. If fantasies become over luxuriant and over powerful, they may lead to neurosis or psychosis.

           

♣  Freud then compares the creative writer with the day dreamer. He takes only those writers who originate their own material; and not those who take over ready-made materials—ancient authors of epics.

♣  The heroes in their stories are invulnerable; here we can recognise His Majesty, the Ego –the hero alike of every day dream and every story. All the women fall in love invariably with the hero.

♣  In contrast to real life characters are sharply divided into good or bad. The good ones are the helpers; the bad ones enemies or rivals of the ego which has become the hero of the story.

            There is a strong connection between the writer and his works. A strong experience in the present awakens in the creative writer a memory of an earlier experience from which proceeds a wish which finds its fulfilment in the creative work. A piece of creative writing, like a day dream, is a continuation of and a substitute for the play of childhood.

            However, the day dreamer is ashamed of his fantasies. He conceals them. Even if he communicates them it would give us no pleasure. But when a creative writer presents his day dreams, we experience a great pleasure. The essential ‘ars poetica’ lies in overcoming the feeling of repulsion in us. This repulsion is connected with the barriers that rise between each single ego and the others.

            Two methods are used by the writer.

1.      He softens the character of his egoistic day dreams by altering and disguising it.

2.      He bribes us by the aesthetic yield of pleasure which he offers in the presentation of his fantasies.

 Our actual enjoyment of an imaginative work proceeds from liberation of tensions in our minds. Thereby the writer enables us to enjoy our own day dreams without self-reproach or shame.

Though Freud and his friends are accused of a demeaning, reductive attitude to art, it is naïve to wish away the formative influence he wields in the development of modern literature.

           

Dr. S.Sree Kumar