On Freud’s “creative Writers and Day-Dreaming”
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On Freud’s “Creative Writers and Day-dreaming”
Introduction
Ethel Spector Person
First presented in 1907 to an audience of some ninety intellectuals, Freud’s paper “Creative Writers and Day-dreaming,” as Marcos Aguinis tells us, established fantasy as “the fourth stroke of genius that he [Freud] inflicted on the stuffy academics of the time,” the first three being “his studies of dreams, parapraxes, and jokes.” The paper is bifurcated in that it stands at or near the headwater of two great streams of inquiry in psychoanalysis: fantasy and applied analysis. On the one hand, it explores the origins of day-dreaming and its relationship to the play of children; on the other, it is Freud’s most straightforward exploration of the creative process. However, the paper conveys something more about fantasy than about creative writers. As Freud himself says, “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” (1908, 152).
Freud starts his paper by searching for some factor that links Everyman