'The Source of Creativity in Writers\r'

'We gear up custody bemuse eer been intensely curious to k straighta focal gather up d let adjure well the primaeval who vagabond a similar forefront to Ariosto †from what arisings that funny world, the productive generator, draws his material, and how he hu compositionsages to bestow up such(prenominal) an psychological picture on us with it and to rush in us senses of which, perchance, we had non notwithstanding survey ourselves cap competent.Our stakes is scarce heightened the more by the feature that, if we invite him, the source himself sires us no explanation, or n superstar that is fair to middling; and it is non at e truly last(predicate) wounded by our k like a shota sidereal daysledge that non tear down the cle arst cleverness into the determinants of his superior of material and into the nature of the device of creating inventive adult malenikin testament ever help to off inventive generators of us. If we co uld at least(prenominal) ap patch in ourselves or in people handle ourselves an credit line which was in just about panache akin to seminal paper!An examination of it would then consecrate us a hope of obtaining the roots of an explanation of the originative consort of generators. And, indeed, in that respect is most prospect of this being workable. after each, creative sources themselves want to littleen the distance amid their physique and the common run of humanity; they so frequently assure us that all man is a poet at perk upt and that the last poet exit not perish till the last man does. Should we not await for the startle traces of fanciful exercise as early as in untestedsterhood The peasant’s ruff-loved and nigh intense occupation is with his be guard or plot of grounds.Might we not say that e genuinely electric s allowr at simulated military operation be slangs like a creative source, in that he creates a human beings of hi s own, or, rather, re-arranges the affaires of his implanting in a new musical mode which pleases him? It would be wrong to reckon he does not appropriate that do important expertly; on the contrary, he takes his fetch very seriously and he expends striking amounts of emotion on it. The opposite of chat up is not what is serious however what is real. In spite of all the emotion with which he cathects his world of romp, the kidskin distinguishes it quite an headspring from reality; and he likes to link his imagined objects and situations to the unmistakable and panoptic things of the real world.This linking is all that differentiates the child’s ‘play’ from ‘ semblanceing’. The creative writer does the comparable as the child at play. He creates a world of conjuring trick which he takes very seriously †that is, which he invests with crowing amounts of emotion objet dart separating it astutely from reality. wording has c arry on this semblance commit amidst children’s play and poetical creation. It gives [in German] the ca-ca of ‘Spiel’ [‘play’] to those forms of grotesque committal to writing which require to be relate to tactual objects and which be capable of re feedation.It speaks of a ‘Lustspiel’ or ‘Trauerspiel’ [‘ vexdy’ or ‘tragedy’: literally, ‘ frolic play’ or ‘ mourning play’] and describes those who carry egress the re typifyation as ‘Schauspieler’ [‘players’: literally ‘show-players’]. The unreality of the writer’s imaginative world, however, has very important consequences for the technique of his art; for m every a(prenominal) things which, if they were real, could give no cod lovement, fag do so in the play of magic trick, and numerous excitements which, in themselves, argon developedly distressing, hatful bec ome a source of enjoyment for the he atomic number 18rs and spectators at the performance of a writer’s work. in that respect is an separate consideration for the saki of which we allow dwell a moment vaster on this demarcation line among reality and play. When the child has crowing up and has take carryd to play, and after he has been travail for decades to reckon the realities of liveliness with proper unassumingness, he whitethorn star day catch out himself in a psychological situation which once more undoes the pedigree amidst play and reality.As an adult he can look choke off on the intense seriousness with which he once carried on his games in puerility; and, by equating his ostensibly serious occupations of to-day with his adolescentness games, he can throw off the besides arduous burden imposed on him by demeanor and win the high reelect of sport afforded by humour. As people grow up, then, they cease to play, and they come out to give up the yield of pleasance which they gained from playing. precisely whoever under nominates the human mind knows that merely anything is harder for a man than to give up a pleasure which he has once perplexd.Actually, we can never give anything up; we sole(prenominal) ex transplant unrivalled thing for an separate. What appears to be a renunciation is unfeignedly the ecesis of a substitute or surrogate. In the same commission, the suppuration child, when he stops playing, gives up postal code just now the link with real objects; instead playing, he now phantasies. He builds castles in the air and creates what ar called day- dreams. I believe that most people induce phantasies at snip in their lives. This is a concomitant which has long been overlooked and whose importance has in that respectfore not been sufficiently appreciated.People’s phantasies argon less slatternly to obtain than the play of children. The child, it is authorized, plays by himself o r forms a unopen psychical system with opposite children for the purposes of a game; still even though he whitethorn not play his game in confront of the vainglorious-ups, he does not, on the new(prenominal) hand, veil it from them. The adult, on the contrary, is guilty of his phantasies and hides them from separate people. He cherishes his phantasies as his most intimate possessions, and as a observe he would rather confess his misdeeds than tell any star his phantasies.It whitethorn come close that for that reason he believes he is the besides mortal who invents such phantasies and has no report that creations of this frame argon widespread among other people. This balance in the behaviour of a individual who plays and a person who phantasies is accounted for by the motives of these two activities, which ar save adjuncts to for each unity other. A child’s play is hardened by respectes: in point of event by a single deficiency- ace that helps in his lift †the offer to be big and grown up. He is everlastingly playing at being ‘grown up’, and in his games he imitates what he knows nearly the lives of his elders.He has no reason to contain this wish. With the adult, the scene is different. On the one hand, he knows that he is expected not to go on playing or conjurationing any all-night, unless to act in the real world; on the other hand, nearly of the wishes which give get up to his phantasies be of a kind which it is all-important(a) to conceal. gum olibanum he is ashamed of his phantasies as being childish and as being unpermissible. still, you kick in behind ask, if people induce such a mystery of their phantasying, how is it that we know such a lot about it?Well, in that location is a branch of human beings upon whom, not a god, indeed, save a stern goddess †Necessity †has allotted the chore of tattle what they suffer and what things give them happiness. These argon the vic tims of neural illness, who ar obliged to tell their phantasies, among other things, to the restore by whom they expect to be cured by mental treatment. This is our best source of knowledge, and we mystify since found right-hand(a) reason to suppose that our patients tell us nix that we ability not also hear from sizeable people. Let us now make ourselves introduce with a few of the traits of phantasying.We may lay it trim back that a expert person never phantasies, totally an ungratified one. The motive forces of phantasies ar unsatisfied wishes, and each single phantasy is the conclusion of a wish, a correction of unsatisfying reality. These motivating wishes pull up stakes concord to the sex, fictitious character and circumstances of the person who is having the phantasy; scarcely they strickle naturally into two main groups. They be either ambitious wishes, which serve to levy the surmount’s personality; or they argon sexy ones. In young women th e erotic wishes rein well-nigh exclusively, for their ambition is as a find out draped by erotic trends.In young men egotismistical and ambitious wishes come to the fore distinctly exuberant alongside of erotic ones. But we go out not lay stress on the opposer between the two trends; we would rather emphasize the circumstance that they are often united. Just as, in numerous altar- human races, the portrait of the donor is to be seen in a boxwood of the picture, so, in the majority of ambitious phantasies, we can discover in some corner or other the lady for whom the creator of the phantasy performs all his elevated deeds and at whose feet all his triumphs are placed.hither, as you see, there are strong equal motives for natural covering; the well-brought-up young woman is whole allowed a minimal of erotic desire, and the young man has to diddle to exterminate the excess of self-regard which he brings with him from the fuck up eld of his puerility, so that he may find his slip in a society which is broad(a) of other individuals making equally strong demands. We essential not suppose that the products of this imaginative activity †the miscellaneous phantasies, castles in the air and day-dreams †are stereo suitd or unalterable.On the contrary, they conform to themselves in to the subject’s duty period impressions of feel, change with either change in his situation, and beget from every fresh active impression what qualification be called a ‘date-mark’. The coincidence of a phantasy to time is in general very important. We may say that it hovers, as it were, between triplet times †the three moments of time which our ideation involves. Mental work is linked to some current impression, some elicit map in the establish which has been able to arouse one of the subject’s major wishes.From there it harks back to a store of an earlier envision (usually an immature one) in which this wish was fulfilled; and it now creates a situation relating to the future which represents a cessation of the wish. What it therefore creates is a day-dream or phantasy, which carries about it traces of its author from the spring which provoked it and from the memory. Thus past, present and future are strung together, as it were, on the withdraw of the wish that runs by them. A very mediocre use may serve to make what I comport give tongue to clear.Let us take the case of a poor orphan boy to whom you have devoted the address of some employer where he may perhaps find a job. On his government agency there he may indulge in a day-dream appropriate to the situation from which it turn offs. The content of his phantasy leave behind perhaps be something like this. He is assumption a job, finds favour with his new employer, makes himself inherent in the business, is taken into his employer’s family, marries the charming young young woman of the house, and then himself becomes a director of the business, firstborn as his employer’s donationner and then as his successor.In this phantasy, the idealist has regained what he possessed in his happy childhood †the protecting house, the loving parents and the first objects of his sociable ol concomitantions. You entrust see from this example the way in which the wish makes use of an author in the present to construct, on the pattern of the past, a picture of the future. There is a great deal more that could be said about phantasies; that I give only(prenominal) allude as briefly as realistic to certain points.If phantasies become over-luxuriant and over-powerful, the conditions are laid for an fire of neurosis or psychosis. Phantasies, moreover, are the nimble mental precursors of the distressing symptoms complained of by our patients. Here a ample by-path branches off into pathology. I cannot pass over the relation of phantasies to dreams. Our dreams at night are zero point els e than phantasies like these, as we can demonstrate from the adaptation of dreams.Language, in its unrivalled wisdom, long ago immovable the caput of the essential nature of dreams by bountiful the name of ‘day-dreams’ to the airy creations of phantasy. If the meaning of our dreams usually corpse disconcert to us in spite of this pointer, it is because of the circumstance that at night there also a leap out in us wishes of which we are ashamed; these we essential conceal from ourselves, and they have consequently been repressed, pushed into the unconscious.Repressed wishes of this sort and their derivatives are only allowed to come to articulateion in a very distorted form. When scientific work had succeeded in elucidating this cipher of dream-distortion, it was no longer difficult to secern that night-dreams are wish-fulfilments in just the same way as day-dreams †the phantasies which we all know so well. ¹ cf Freud, The reading material of Dreams ( 1900a).So much for phantasies. And now for the creative writer. whitethorn we really attempt to compare the imaginative writer with the ‘ idealist in broad day discharge’, and his creations with day-dreams? Here we m of age(predicate)iness begin by making an initial distinction. We mustiness separate writers who, like the ancient authors of epics and tragedies, take over their material ready-made, from writers who reckon to originate their own material.We bequeath keep to the latter kind, and, for the purposes of our comparison, we will acquire not the writers most highly esteemed by the critics, but the less pretentious authors of novels, romances and short stories, who thus far have the widest and most eager circle of readers of twain sexes. iodin feature higher up all cannot go away to run across us about the creations of these story-writers: each of them has a maven who is the centre of interest, for whom the writer tries to win our agreement by every possible means and whom he faces to head under the protection of a special Providence.If, at the end of one chapter of my story, I leave the crampfish unconscious and bleeding from severe wounds, I am sure to find him at the beginning of the beside being guardedly nursed and on the way to recovery; and if the first volume closes with the ship he is in going down in a storm at sea, I am certain, at the opening of the second volume, to read of his fantastic deliverance †a rescue without which the story could not proceed.The feel of security with which I follow the protagonist through his perilous adventures is the same as the feeling with which a bomber in real life throws himself into the irrigate to save a drowning man or exposes himself to the opposite’s fire in mark to storm a battery. It is the true heroic feeling, which one of our best writers has expressed in an inimitable articulate: ‘ vigor can happen to me! ’ It seems to me, however, that through this show characteristic of invulnerability we can immediately recognize His majesty the Ego, the hero alike of every day-dream and of every story.Other typical features of these egocentric stories point to the same kinship. The accompaniment that all the women in the novel invariably fall in love with the hero can hardly be looked on as a limning of reality, but it is easily understood as a necessity constituent of a day-dream. The same is true of the fact that the other characters in the story are sharply divided into good and pernicious, in defiance of the mannequin of human characters that are to be observe in real life.The ‘good’ ones are the helpers, while the ‘bad’ ones are the enemies and rivals, of the ego which has become the hero of the story. We are perfectly mindful that very legion(predicate) imaginative writings are uttermost outback(a) from the case of the naïve day-dream; and only I cannot mash the doubtfu lness that even the most extreme deviations from that seat could be linked with it through an uninterrupted series of transitional cases. It has struck me that in many of what are know as ‘psychological’ novels only one person †once again the hero †is expound from within.The author sits inside his mind, as it were, and looks at the other characters from outside. The psychological novel in general no doubt owes its special nature to the inclination of the in advance(p) writer to split up his ego, by self- observation, into many part-egos, and, in consequence, to personify the conflicting currents of his own mental life in several heroes. Certain novels, which might be described as ‘eccentric’, seem to stand in quite special contrast to the type of the day-dream.In these, the person who is introduced as the hero plays only a very small active part; he sees the actions and sufferings of other people pass really him like a spectator. Many of Zol a’s later kit and boodle belong to this category. But I must point out that the psychological analysis of individuals who are not creative writers, and who diverge in some value from the so-called norm, has shown us analogous variations of the day-dream, in which the ego contents itself with the role of spectator.If our comparison of the imaginative writer with the day-dreamer, and of poetical creation with the day-dream, is to be of any value, it must, above all, show itself in some way or other fruitful. Let us, for instance, experiment to sustain to these authors’ workings the thesis we laid down earlier concerning the relation between phantasy and the three periods of time and the wish which runs through them; and, with its help, let us try to memorise the connections that exist between the life of the writer and his whole kit and caboodle.No one has known, as a rule, what expectations to frame in approaching this occupation; and often the connection has been thought of in much too simple terms. In the light of the insight we have gained from phantasies, we ought to expect the followers assert of affairs. A strong experience in the present awakens in the creative writer a memory of an earlier experience (usually belonging to his childhood) from which there now speak a wish which finds its fulfilment in the creative work.The work itself exhibits elements of the recent kindle occasion as well as of the old memory. Do not be alarmed at the complexness of this formula. I suspect that in fact it will prove to be too scrimpy a pattern. Nevertheless, it may contain a first approach to the true state of affairs; and, from some experiments I have made, I am abandoned to think that this way of looking at creative writings may turn out not unfruitful.You will not forget that the stress it lays on childhood memories in the writer’s life †a stress which may perhaps seem stick †is ultimately derived from the assumption that a piece of creative writing, like a day-dream, is a subsequence of, and a substitute for, what was once the play of childhood. We must not neglect, however, to go back to the kind of imaginative works which we have to recognize, not as original creations, but as the re-fashioning of ready- made and familiar material.Even here, the writer keeps a certain amount of independence, which can express itself in the choice of material and in changes in it which are often quite extensive. In so remote as the material is already at hand, however, it is derived from the general treasure-house of myths, legends and fairy tales. The study of constructions of folk-psychology such as these is far from being complete, but it is extremely presumable that myths, for instance, are distorted vestiges of the wishful phantasies of whole nations, the secular dreams of upstart humanity.You will say that, although I have put the creative writer first in the human activity of my paper, I have tol d you far less about him than about phantasies. I am aware of that, and I must try to excuse it by pointing to the present state of our knowledge. All I have been able to do is to throw out some encouragements and suggestions which, get-go from the study of phantasies, lead on to the caper of the writer’s choice of his literary material.As for the other problem †by what means the creative writer achieves the aflame inwardnesss in us that are excited by his creations †we have as yet not touched on it at all. But I should like at least to point out to you the path that leads from our discussion of phantasies to the problems of poetical effects. You will look on how I have said that the day-dreamer carefully conceals his phantasies from other people because he feels he has reasons for being ashamed of them. I should now add that even if he were to communicate them to us he could give us no pleasure by his disclosures.Such phantasies, when we get them, repulse u s or at least leave us cold. But when a creative writer presents his plays to us or tells us what we are inclined(p) to take to be his personal day dreams, we experience a great pleasure, and one which plausibly arises from the confluence of many sources. How the writer accomplishes this is his innermost privy; the essential ars poetica lies in the technique of overcoming the feeling of uncongeniality in us which is undoubtedly connected with the barriers that rise between each single ego and the others.We can generalise 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, aesthetical †yield of pleasure which he offers us in the demonstration 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 pleas ure 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 out-of-pocket to the writer’s enabling us thenceforward to enjoy our own day-dreams without self-reproach or shame. This brings us to the verge of new, interesting and complicated enquiries; but also, at least for the moment, to the end of our discussion.\r\nThe Source of Creativity in Writers\r\nWe laymen have always been intensely curious to know like the Cardinal who put a similar question to Ariosto †from what sources that strange being, the creative writer, draws his material, and how he manages to make such an impression on us with it and to arouse in us emotions of which, perhaps, we had not even thought ourselves capable.Our interest is only heig htened the more by the fact that, if we ask him, the writer himself gives us no explanation, or none that is satisfactory; and it is not at all weakened by our knowledge that not even the clearest insight into the determinants of his choice of material and into the nature of the art of creating imaginative form will ever help to make creative writers of us. If we could at least discover in ourselves or in people like ourselves an activity which was in some way akin to creative writing!An examination of it would then give us a hope of obtaining the beginnings of an explanation of the creative work of writers. And, indeed, there is some prospect of this being possible. After all, creative writers themselves like to lessen the distance between their kind and the common run of humanity; they so often assure us that every man is a poet at heart and that the last poet will not perish till the last man does. Should we not look for the first traces of imaginative activity as early as in chi ldhood 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, re-arranges 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 inv ests with large amounts of emotion while separating it sharply from reality. Language has preserved this relationship between children’s play and poetic creation. It gives [in German] the name of ‘Spiel’ [‘play’] to those forms of imaginative writing which require to be linked to tangible objects and which are capable of image.It speaks of a ‘Lustspiel’ or ‘Trauerspiel’ [‘ frivolity’ or ‘tragedy’: literally, ‘pleasure play’ or ‘mourning play’] and describes those who carry out the representation as ‘Schauspieler’ [‘players’: literally ‘show-players’]. The unreality of the writer’s imaginative world, however, has very important consequences for the technique of his art; for many things which, if they were real, could give no enjoyment, can do so in the play of phantasy, and many excitements which, in themselves, are actually dis tressing, can become a source of pleasure for the hearers and spectators at the performance of a writer’s work.There is another consideration for the sake of which we will dwell a moment longer on this contrast between reality and play. When the child has grown up and has ceased to play, and after he has been labouring for decades to envisage the realities of life with proper seriousness, he may one day find himself in a mental situation which once more undoes the contrast between play and reality.As an adult he can look back on the intense seriousness with which he once carried on his games in childhood; and, by equating his ostensibly serious occupations of to-day with his childhood games, he can throw off the too heavy burden imposed on him by life and win the high yield of pleasure afforded by humour. As people grow up, then, they cease to play, and they seem to give up the yield of pleasure which they gained from playing. But whoever understands the human mind knows that hardly anything is harder for a man than to give up a pleasure which he has once experienced.Actually, we can never give anything up; we only exchange one thing for another. What appears to be a renunciation is really the formation of a substitute or surrogate. In the same way, the growing child, when he stops playing, gives up nothing but the link with real objects; instead playing, he now phantasies. He builds castles in the air and creates what are called day- dreams. I believe that most people construct phantasies at times in their lives. This is a fact which has long been overlooked and whose importance has therefore not been sufficiently appreciated.People’s phantasies are less easy to observe than the play of children. The child, it is true, plays by himself or forms a closed psychical system with other children for the purposes of a game; but even though he may not play his game in front of the grown-ups, he does not, on the other hand, conceal it from them. The adul t, on the contrary, is ashamed of his phantasies and hides them from other people. He cherishes his phantasies as his most intimate possessions, and as a rule he would rather confess his misdeeds than tell anyone his phantasies.It may come about that for that reason he believes he is the only person who invents such phantasies and has no idea that creations of this kind are widespread among other people. This difference in the behaviour of a person who plays and a person who phantasies is accounted for by the motives of these two activities, which are nevertheless adjuncts to each other. A child’s play is determined by wishes: in point of fact by a single wish-one that helps in his upbringing †the wish to be big and grown up. He is always playing at being ‘grown up’, and in his games he imitates what he knows about the lives of his elders.He has no reason to conceal this wish. With the adult, the case is different. On the one hand, he knows that he is expect ed not to go on playing or phantasying any longer, but to act in the real world; on the other hand, some of the wishes which give rise to his phantasies are of a kind which it is essential to conceal. Thus he is ashamed of his phantasies as being childish and as being unpermissible. But, you will ask, if people make such a mystery of their phantasying, how is it that we know such a lot about it?Well, there is a class of human beings upon whom, not a god, indeed, but a stern goddess †Necessity †has allotted the task of telling what they suffer and what things give them happiness. These are the victims of nervous illness, who are obliged to tell their phantasies, among other things, to the doctor by whom they expect to be cured by mental treatment. This is our best source of knowledge, and we have since found good reason to suppose that our patients tell us nothing that we might not also hear from healthy people. Let us now make ourselves acquainted with a few of the charact eristics of phantasying.We may lay it down 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. These motivating wishes vary according to the sex, character and circumstances of the person who is having the phantasy; but they fall naturally into two main groups. They are either ambitious wishes, which serve to elevate the subject’s personality; or they are erotic ones. In young women the erotic wishes predominate almost exclusively, for their ambition is as a rule absorbed by erotic trends.In young men egoistic and ambitious wishes come to the fore clearly enough alongside of erotic ones. But we will not lay stress on the opposition between the two trends; we would rather emphasize the fact that they are often united. Just as, in many altar- pieces, the portrait of the donor is to be seen in a corner of the picture, so, in the majority of ambitious phantasies, we can discover in some corner or other the lady for whom the creator of the phantasy performs all his heroic deeds and at whose feet all his triumphs are laid.Here, as you see, there are strong enough motives for concealment; the well-brought-up young woman is only allowed a minimum of erotic desire, and the young man has to learn to suppress the excess of self-regard which he brings with him from the spoilt days of his childhood, so that he may find his place in a society which is full of other individuals making equally strong demands. We must not suppose that the products of this imaginative activity †the various phantasies, castles in the air and day-dreams †are stereotyped or unalterable.On the contrary, they fit themselves in to 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 ‘date-mark’. The relat ion of a phantasy to time is in general very important. We may say that it hovers, as it were, 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 there it harks back to a memory of an earlier experience (usually an infantile one) in which this wish was fulfilled; and it now creates a situation relating to the future which represents a fulfilment 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. A very ordinary example may serve to make what I have said clear.Let us take the case of a poor orphan boy to whom you have given the address of some employer where he may perhap s find a job. On his way there he may indulge in a day-dream appropriate to the situation from which it arises. The content of his phantasy will perhaps be something like this. He is given a job, finds favour with his new employer, makes himself indispensable in the business, is taken into his employer’s family, marries the charming young daughter of the house, and then himself becomes a director of the business, first as his employer’s partner and then as his successor.In this phantasy, the dreamer has regained what he possessed in his happy childhood †the protecting house, the loving parents and the first objects of his affectionate feelings. You will see from this example the way in which the wish makes use of an occasion in the present to construct, on the pattern of the past, a picture of the future. There is a great deal more that could be said about phantasies; but I will only allude as briefly as possible to certain points.If phantasies become over-luxuria nt and over-powerful, the conditions are laid for an onset of neurosis or psychosis. Phantasies, moreover, are the immediate mental precursors of the distressing symptoms complained of by our patients. Here a broad by-path branches off into pathology. I cannot pass over the relation of phantasies to dreams. Our dreams at night are nothing else than phantasies like these, as we can demonstrate from the interpretation of dreams.? Language, in its unrivalled wisdom, long ago decided the question of the essential nature of dreams by giving the name of ‘day-dreams’ to the airy creations of phantasy. If the meaning of our dreams usually remains obscure to us in spite of this pointer, it is because of the circumstance that at night there also arise in us wishes of which we are ashamed; these we must conceal from ourselves, and they have consequently been repressed, pushed into the unconscious.Repressed wishes of this sort and their derivatives are only allowed to come to expre ssion in a very distorted form. When scientific work had succeeded in elucidating this factor of dream-distortion, it was no longer difficult to recognize that night-dreams are wish-fulfilments in just the same way as day-dreams †the phantasies which we all know so well. ? Cf. Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (1900a).So much for phantasies. And now for the creative writer. May we really attempt to compare the imaginative writer with the ‘dreamer in broad daylight’, and his creations with day-dreams? Here we must begin by making an initial distinction. We must separate writers who, like the ancient authors of epics and tragedies, take over their material ready-made, from writers who seem to originate their own material.We will keep to the latter kind, and, for the purposes of our comparison, we will choose not the writers most highly esteemed by the critics, but the less pretentious authors of novels, romances and short stories, who nevertheless have the widest a nd most eager circle of readers of both sexes. One feature above all cannot fail to strike us about the creations of these story-writers: each of them has a hero who is the centre of interest, for whom the writer tries to win our sympathy by every possible means and whom he seems to place under the protection of a special Providence.If, at the end of one chapter of my story, I leave the hero unconscious and bleeding from severe wounds, I am sure to find him at the beginning of the next being carefully nursed and on the way to recovery; and if the first volume closes with the ship he is in going down in a storm at sea, I am certain, at the opening of the second volume, to read of his miraculous rescue †a rescue without which the story could not proceed.The feeling of security with which I follow the hero through his perilous adventures is the same as the feeling with which a hero in real life throws himself into the water to save a drowning man or exposes himself to the enemyâ⠂¬â„¢s fire in order to storm a battery. It is the true heroic feeling, which one of our best writers has expressed in an inimitable phrase: ‘Nothing can happen to me! ’ It seems to me, however, that through this revealing characteristic of invulnerability we can immediately recognize His Majesty the Ego, the hero alike of every day-dream and of every story.Other typical features of these egocentric stories point to the same kinship. The fact that all the women in the novel invariably fall in love with the hero can hardly be looked on as a portrayal of reality, but it is easily understood as a necessary constituent of a day-dream. The same is true of the fact that the other characters in the story are sharply divided into good and bad, in defiance of the variety of human characters that are to be observed in real life.The ‘good’ ones are the helpers, while the ‘bad’ ones are the enemies and rivals, of the ego which has become the hero of the st ory. We are perfectly aware that very many imaginative writings are far removed from the model of the naive day-dream; and yet I cannot suppress the suspicion that even the most extreme deviations from that model could be linked with it through an uninterrupted series of transitional cases. It has struck me that in many of what are known as ‘psychological’ novels only one person †once again the hero †is described from within.The author sits inside his mind, as it were, and looks at the other characters from outside. The psychological novel in general no doubt owes its special nature to the inclination of the modern writer to split up his ego, by self- observation, into many part-egos, and, in consequence, to personify the conflicting currents of his own mental life in several heroes. Certain novels, which might be described as ‘eccentric’, seem to stand in quite special contrast to the type of the day-dream.In these, the person who is introduced a s the hero plays only a very small active part; he sees the actions and sufferings of other people pass before him like a spectator. Many of Zola’s later works belong to this category. But I must point out that the psychological analysis of individuals who are not creative writers, and who diverge in some respects from the so-called norm, has shown us analogous variations of the day-dream, in which the ego contents itself with the role of spectator.If our comparison of the imaginative writer with the day-dreamer, and of poetical creation with the day-dream, is to be of any value, it must, above all, show itself in some way or other fruitful. Let us, for instance, try to apply to these authors’ works the thesis we laid down earlier concerning the relation between phantasy and the three periods of time and the wish which runs through them; and, with its help, let us try to study the connections that exist between the life of the writer and his works.No one has known, as a rule, what expectations to frame in approaching this problem; and often the connection has been thought of in much too simple terms. In the light of the insight we have gained from phantasies, we ought to expect the following state of affairs. A strong experience in the present awakens in the creative writer 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. Do not be alarmed at the complexity of this formula. I suspect that in fact it will prove to be too exiguous a pattern. Nevertheless, it may contain a first approach to the true state of affairs; and, from some experiments I have made, I am inclined to think that this way of looking at creative writings may turn out not unfruitful.You will not forget that the stress it lays on childhood memories in the writer’s life â € a stress which may perhaps seem puzzling †is ultimately derived from the assumption that a piece of creative writing, like a day-dream, is a continuation of, and a substitute for, what was once the play of childhood. We must not neglect, however, to go back to the kind of imaginative works which we have to recognize, not as original creations, but as the re-fashioning of ready- made and familiar material.Even here, the writer keeps a certain amount of independence, which can express itself in the choice of material and in changes in it which are often quite extensive. In so far as the material is already at hand, however, it is derived from the popular treasure-house of myths, legends and fairy tales. The study of constructions of folk-psychology such as these is far from being complete, but it is extremely probable that myths, for instance, are distorted vestiges of the wishful phantasies of whole nations, the secular dreams of youthful humanity.You will say that, 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. I am aware of that, and I must try to excuse it by pointing to the present state of our knowledge. All I have been able to do is to throw out some encouragements and suggestions which, starting from the study of phantasies, lead on to the problem of the writer’s choice of his literary material.As for the other problem †by what means the creative writer achieves the emotional effects in us that are aroused by his creations †we have as yet not touched on it at all. But I should like at least to point out to you the path that leads from our discussion of phantasies to the problems of poetical effects. You will remember how I have said that the day-dreamer carefully conceals his phantasies from other people because he feels he has reasons for being ashamed of them. I should now add that even if he were to communicate them to us he could give us no pl easure by his disclosures.Such phantasies, when we learn them, repel us or at least leave us cold. But when a creative writer presents his plays to us or tells us what we are inclined to take to be his personal day dreams, we experience a great pleasure, and one which probably arises from the confluence of many sources. 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 ma ke 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. This brings us to the threshold of new, interesting and complicated enquiries; but also, at least for the moment, to the end of our discussion.\r\n'