Daydreaming, Phantasy and the Artist's Process: A Response to "Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming

"a real living form is the natural result of the […] adventure of his spirit into the unknown"

—Georgia O'Keeffe¹

Freud begins "Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming" by wondering "from what sources that strange being, the creative writer, draws his material, and how he manages to make such an impression on us." He goes on to say that "if we ask him, the creative writer gives us no explanation, or none that is satisfactory" (1908a, p. 143). But although Freud was in touch with a number of literary figures (Holland, 1998), he does not give any evidence of having asked them about their creative processes. Instead, drawing a parallel between childhood play and adult daydreams, he claims that creative writing stems from wish-fulfilling phantasies and is an escape from the frustrating bounds of external reality. That is, Freud suggests that both daydreaming and creative writing are defensive activities that serve to avoid the acceptance of painful truths. In order to make this point, he needs to focus only on light romantic fiction in which the sexual and ambitious wishes of the hero are satisfied. Freud himself knew that his argument would not hold good in relation to great literary works or, indeed, great art.

Freud's portrayal of the work of creative writers (and, by implication, of all artists) as the manifestation of wish-fulfilling, shameful daydreams has been criticized by many writers in the creative arts. For instance, painter and critic Roger Fry complained that Freud made pronouncements about artists without acknowledging that "Artists are a group of people of very different temperaments and some of them are actuated by quite different motives, and exercise quite different psychical activities, from others" (Fry, 1924, p. 5). Freud's theories about the creative process, he thought, only apply to second-rate artists. Psychoanalyst Ronald Britton makes a similar point when he writes that "Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming" is limited in that "it does not adequately differentiate between the truth-seeking function of some fiction and the truth-evading function of other fiction—that is between serious creative writing and escapist literature" (Britton, 1995, pp. 82-83). Britton points out that in 1907, when Freud wrote the paper, he was interested in developing his thinking about the relation of the pleasure principle to the reality principle. He had discovered that, in dreams, the dreamer's wishful phantasies can be given free rein without the limitations of reality, and he wanted to demonstrate that daydreaming and creative writing can operate in a similar way. This paper was written early in Freud's writing career, and his views changed and broadened over the following years, but he never revised his daydreaming paper in relation to his later discoveries.

Part of the problem with "Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming" lies in the meaning that Freud attributes to the term "daydreaming." He chooses to use the word in a restricted sense to refer to wish-fulfilling phantasy based on sexual or ambitious frustrations. He does not enter into a discussion of the nature of unconscious phantasy, although there is an implication that unconscious repressed wishes emerge in disguised form in daydreams as they do in night dreams. In "Hysterical Phantasies and their Relation to Bisexuality" (1908b), another work published in the same year, he wrote that unconscious phantasies "have either been there all along and have been formed in the unconscious; or—as is more often the case—they were once conscious phantasies, daydreams, and have since been purposely forgotten and have become unconscious through 'repression'" (Freud, 1908b, p. 161). In "Creative Writers," Freud does not consider phantasies that have "been there all along and have been formed in the unconscious." Yet it may well be these phantasies that compel the serious artist or writer to pursue their quest.

But the term "daydreaming" does not need to have such a narrow compass. Some contemporary artists embrace it when describing their own work. For instance, the British artist Katie Paterson describes the beginning of her creative process as daydreaming. Her...