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  • "Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming" and Creative States of Consciousness
  • John Rosegrant (bio)

Freud's paper contains two insights into creativity that I find especially important. One proposes an answer to the question of how artists create the content and form of their works, a question that Freud announces in his first sentence as his main concern:

We laymen have always been intensely curious to know […] 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.

(1908, p. 143)

Freud's answer comes near the end: writers access material in their daydreams that they then disguise to hide repellent, overt drive satisfaction, and they put their fantasies into esthetically pleasing form that gives the reader forepleasure, which serves as a gateway to deeper pleasures (p. 153). This formulation is the ancestor to Ernst Kris's concept of regression in the service of the ego and is a well-known psychoanalytic theory of creativity. But despite the focus on fantasizing, it tells us little about the felt experience, the state of consciousness involved in creativity and esthetic appreciation, except with the broad stroke of saying that it produces pleasure—fantasies are considered mainly as a source that the writer mines for material.

The other insight I want to highlight from this paper does point to the state of consciousness involved during creativity. This occurs near the beginning, when Freud is discussing childhood play: [End Page 645]

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 […] 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 invests with large amounts of emotion—while separating it sharply from reality.

(1908, p. 144)

With these thoughts, Freud has opened the door to the idea that creative writing takes place in a particular psychic state. But Freud did not go through this door to see where it would lead.

To explore what lies on the other side of that door, I am going to turn to the writings of J. R. R. Tolkien. As a lead-in, I want to commend Freud for his inability in "Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming" (1908) to maintain a sharp distinction between popular fiction and "those writers most esteemed by the critics" (p. 149). Freud briefly discriminates these classes of literature because he thinks the former type of writing is closer to undisguised daydreaming and thus makes his thesis clearer. However, only two pages later he points out that there is an uninterrupted series of transitional cases. Tolkien's major work, The Lord of the Rings (1954–1955/2004), has often been excoriated by the literary establishment as dwelling in the depths of the popular fiction category; however, more recently, there has been increasing recognition that even though it is a fantasy with an exciting plot, it addresses serious issues seriously. What is important for my present purposes is that in looking at Tolkien, we move from the generalities of Freud's paper to consideration of a specific prominent creative writer who thought deeply about creative processes, considered his fictional works to be in part an exploration of creativity, and in addition wrote two academic essays that touch on the nature of creativity.

The first of these, "Beowulf, the Monsters and the Critics" (Tolkien, 1936), revolutionized the study of Beowulf by making the claim that it should be understood as a literary masterpiece rather than only excavated for historical understanding of the Anglo-Saxons. Tolkien introduced this claim with the following extended allegory: [End Page 646]

A man inherited a field in which was an accumulation of old stone, part of an older hall. Of the old stone some had already been used in building the house in which he actually lived, not far from the old house of his fathers. Of the rest he took...

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