CREATIVE WRITERS AND DAYDREAMING
SIGMUND FREUD
Sigmund Freud, recognized as the
founder of psycho-analysis, is one of the seminal minds of the modern era. Most
human mental activity, according to Freud, is unconscious. The primary
source of psychic energy –LIBIDO—is sexual. Freud divides the human mind into three
zones:
The three
zones
1. The ID--unconscious.
2. The Ego—conscious personality
3. The Super EGO—conscience.
· Dreams and neurotic symptoms originate
from the ID. The EGO and the super Ego repress them. Hence, they (dreams and
neurotic symptoms) find expression in displaced forms.
[Comments: Displaced forms—art, literature etc. “One sheds
one's sicknesses in books - repeats and presents again one's emotions, to be
master of them”—D.H.Lawrence]
Influence of Freud
The Psychoanalytical theory of Freud has greatly
influenced literature. Yet the relationship is reciprocal, and the effect of
Freud upon literature is not greater than the effect of literature on Freud.
When (on the occasion of the celebration of his seventieth birthday) someone
greeted him as the discoverer of the
unconscious, he corrected the speaker disclaiming the title: The poets and philosophers before me discovered the
unconscious. What I discovered was the scientific method by which the
unconscious can be studied. (Anecdote quoted from Lionel
Trilling’s essay “Freud and Literature”).
Freud begins the essay by asking: “What is the source from
which the creative writer draws his materials?
Ø For this, even the creative writer has
no satisfactory reply. His attempt is always to lessen the distance between him
and the ordinary people. He assures us that “every man is a poet at heart
and that the last poet will not perish till the last man does”.
The
Creative Writer and the Child
We can trace the first hints of imaginative (creative) activity
in a child’s play. The child behaves
like a creative writer, forming a world of his own.
He re-arranges the things of the world in a way that pleases
him. He takes that world seriously and fills it with emotions, but he can
distinguish that world from reality.
The child links the creative world to reality. That linking
differentiates his ‘play’ from ‘fantasying’.
The creative writer does the same as
a child at play. The writer creates a world of fantasy. He takes that world
seriously and invests it with emotions—while separating it from reality.
Language has preserved this
relationship between children’s play and poetic creation. The German language
gives the name ‘spiel’ (play) to some forms of imaginative writing.
[ Lustspiel = pleasure play=comedy;
Trauerspiel=mourning play=tragedy].
The unreality of the writer’s
imaginative world has consequences for the technique of his art. Many things,
unpleasant in reality, can be enjoyed in fantasy.
Adult Fantasies
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’.
[Comments: The
spider man to fight social injustice. ‘Anniyan’ ( a Tamil Film) to fight
corruption in politics].
The child does not conceal his play.
The adult, on the contrary, is ashamed of his fantasies and hides them from
others. Motives differ in both. The
child's wish to be big and grown-up determines his play. But the adult cannot
play but act in the real world. So, he conceals some of his wishes. He is
ashamed of these wishes as being childish and impermissible.
Freud then analyses the
characteristics of fantasying.
A happy person never fantasizes.
Fantasy is the fulfilment of a wish, a
correction of unsatisfying reality. The motivating desires vary according to
sex, character and circumstances.
1. Ambitious wishes—they elevate the
personality. In young men, egoistic and ambitious wishes dominate alongside the
erotic.
2.
Erotic wishes—in young women, these dominate and absorb the ambitious.
Fantasies are not stereotyped or
unalterable.
"On the contrary, they fit
themselves into the subject's shifting impressions of life, change with every
change in his situation, and receive from every fresh active impression what
might be called a 'datemark'." 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 daydream of getting the job and favour of his boss. In the dream, he
marries the daughter (of the boss) and becomes a director of the business. Here,
the wish uses an occasion to construct (based on the past) a picture of the
future. If fantasies become over luxuriant, they may lead to neurosis or
psychosis.
Freud
then compares the creative writer with the daydreamer.
Freud takes only those writers who originate
their material (and not those who take over ready-made
materials—ancient authors of epics).
♣ The heroes
in their stories are invulnerable.
In the heroes, we recognize His Majesty, the
Ego, hero alike in every daydream and story. The women fall in love
invariably with the hero.
♣ In contrast to real life, characters are either
good or bad. The good ones are the helpers. The bad ones are the enemies or
rivals of the Ego.
We know that many writings differ
from the model of the naïve daydream. The psychological novel is an example.
Here, only one person, the hero, is described from "within". The
author sits inside the hero and looks at the other characters "from the
outside". Here, we see the inclination of the modern writer "to split
up his ego into many part-egos and personify the conflicting currents of mental
life in several heroes".
In certain other types of novels,
described as ‘eccentric’, the hero plays only a minor part. He sees the actions
and sufferings of other people pass before him like a spectator. Many of Emily
Zola’s later works fall into this category. Freud says that this divergence
from the normal shows us “analogous variations of the day-dream”, in which “the
ego contents itself with the role of the spectator”.
Creative writing and daydream
There is a strong connection between
the writer and his works. A robust experience in the present awakens in the
creative writer a memory of an earlier one, from which “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”.
A piece of creative writing is like a
daydream. It is a continuation of and a substitute for the play of childhood.
Art of creative writing
However, the daydreamer is ashamed of
his fantasies. He conceals them. Even if he communicates them, it will give us
no pleasure. Such “fantasies repel us and leave us cold”. But when a creative
writer presents his daydreams, we experience great happiness. “The essential
‘ars poetica’ lies in the technique of overcoming the feeling of repulsion”
(created by the barriers between “each single ego” and the others) in us.
The writer uses two techniques to overcome the "feeling
of repulsion."
1. He softens the "character of his egoistic daydreams
by altering and disguising it."
2. He "bribes" us by the aesthetic yield of
pleasure offered in "the presentation of his fantasies".
·
We
can call this “yield of pleasure” “forepleasure”. This “forepleasure” helps us
make possible “the release of still greater pleasure arising from deeper
psychical sources”.
· Actual enjoyment of an imaginative
work “proceeds from the liberation of tensions in our minds”. Thereby the
writer enables us to enjoy our daydreams without self-reproach or shame.
Though critics and thinkers accuse
Freud and his friends of a demeaning, reductive attitude to art, it is naïve to
wish away the formative influence he wields in the development of modern
literature.
[1325 WORDS]
Dr S. SREEKUMAR
Disclaimer
All the essays in this blog are for the undergraduate and postgraduate students of Indian Universities. They do not substitute the originals. The students must necessarily go through the original texts. The writer hopes to help the students from the underdeveloped areas of our country.
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