Notes on Creative Writers and Day Dreaming (1908)
This text was written by Freud nine years after his famous Interpretation of Dreams. What, essentially, does it add, if not, before finally coming to his interpretation of symptoms in the 1920s, a thought that we dream also in waking life? In fact, it is the symptom which shows us precisely that we dream in waking life — this was a point introduced by Jacques Lacan in the 1970s. The day dream, in some sense, is a localized example of the waking dream. Let us use this as our compass.
Freud opens his essay by promoting a curiosity: from what material does the creative writer produce his or her art? Clearly, it is language, but Freud decides to go much further: “might we say that every child at play behaves like a creative writer, in that he creates a world of his own, or, rather, rearranges the things of his world in a new way which pleases him?” Here, in an evidently simple statement, we can see that Freud, after highlighting the possibility of each one of us being a poet, brings together the concepts of enjoyment or satisfaction and world.
This is important: we construct our own world, at play, through our enjoyment, as children. And this shouldn’t be dissociated from the contemporary condition of so-called mature humanity. He continues, “it would be wrong to think he does not take that world seriously.” It means, I believe, that even though it is a world made of satisfaction, we take it serious, which means that we allow ourselves to believe in it. We believe in the world that is supported by our enjoyment.
Yet, Freud says, the child nonetheless distinguishes play from reality. It is here that we might raise an objection. Indeed, is it not the case, today, that reality and play comingle, that, in the world-making efforts of contemporary man there is rather an inability to distinguish reality from play? Let us leave it as a question.
Freud continues, with the creative writer in mind, by writing that “language has preserved this relationship between children’s play and poetic creation.” At this point, he opens the question of language as representation. There are two points: first, the reduction of the world to language, and to satisfaction. Second, the place of representation for language.
The creative writer distinguishes his play from reality and this is to protect the space of its enjoyment. I quote Freud: “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 distressing, can become a source of pleasure…” Here, we can see that the creative writer separates enjoyment from reality, and elevates, in a way, language as a representation of that reality — but, precisely, a representation which is a faulty one, one which distinguishes itself, explicitly, from that reality.
At this point, could we not generalize the condition of the creative writer? Could we not, since it clear in the early stages of play where there is no role distinction, or, rather, where roles are taken discrete on a one-by-one basis (e.g., play at being a mother, play at being a shopper, a doctor, and so on, each in their turn), suggest that the enjoyment is precisely in the failure of representation? Let us also leave this as a question.
At this point, Freud’s foresight appears: “he may one day find himself in a mental situation which once more undoes the contrast between play and reality.” Humour, for example, achieves this function.
Freud’s presupposition here was that people become more mature as they age, which means that they abandon or relinquish some of the enjoyment in favor of representation: “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 then he adds a proviso: “but whoever understands the human mind knows that hardly anything is harder for a man to give up a pleasure which he has once experienced. Actually, we can never give up anything; we only exchange one thing for another.” He continues, “what appears to be a renunciation is really the formation of a substitute or surrogate.” This passage is crucial: Freud is rectifying some misunderstandings that are likely in what he previously wrote, increasing the level of his clarity for the reader, guiding the reader: we never relinquish jouissance, we only substitute, but this substitution is really a failure of representation. The day-dream is really just a substitute for the satisfaction of the object’s proximity: instead of sandcastles here, sandcastles in the air.
This phrase “substitute” is important, because a “substitute satisfaction” is what Freud will later call a “symptom.”
The point is that the adult who has apparently relinquished enjoyment, has, in fact, only found enjoyment in substitution, which means that the adult has developed symptoms.
The phantasy is placed into the air, as the support system for his symptom. Hence, behind the symptom, there is a phantasy. Freud writes, later in the essay, that “phantasies are the immediate mental precursers of the distressing symptoms complained of by our patients.”
Freud makes a statement that seems to me to be very important: “a happy person never phantasies, only an unsatisfied one.” I bring this alongside a statement made by Lacan: “the subject is happy,” by which he means the subject of the drive. In some sense, we can say, at bottom, all subject’s are happy, even those whose unsatisfied lives divert the subject toward a substitute happiness.
If we are to invoke a notion of singularity, it is at this level of the phantasy as a wish, that is, as an enjoyment that strings together the drive and desire. Freud writes: “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 fulfillment 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.”
The last part of the essay links day-dreams and fantasies to dreams as such. Hence, he shows, in a way which you can verify if you wish, that, basically, we dream in waking life, and that symptoms are simply another mode of dreaming. Here, it is clear, the phantasies and wishes and symptoms are distortions, substitutions, not unlike dream censorship
