Creative Writing and Daydreaming by Sigmund Freud

The essay “Creative Writers and Daydreaming” suggests Freud's interest in the relationship between the author and his work. He sees a piece of creative writing as a continuation or substitute for the play of childhood. Freud also displays some aspects of his approach to the psychology of the reader.

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.