English 456: C20 Criticism and Theory Comments on Freud's "Creative Writers..." (1908) Al Drake | Cyber Cafe | Thurs. 4-6 Although Freud was not a literary critic, he was an excellent writer and a highly literate one, too, so we may sensibly place him in a long tradition of authors defending the value of art--Sidney, Kant, Schiller, Wordsworth, Shelley, and many others. And although Freud is no romantic, separating form from content as openly as he does (something Hazard Adams notes in his introduction to "Creative Writers"), his emphasis on the therapeutic value of literature ties him at least indirectly to the romantic expressivist tradition. From the outset of his early essay, Freud consistently allies fiction with playing and imagination. He reminds us that children and artists alike "play" with real enthusiasm, even seriousness. But before we get to fiction, we must examine what Freud says about the more general activity of daydreaming. While children, of course, play openly and with real objects (dolls, toy trains, and so forth) and often orient their play towards the roles they will take on with adulthood, the adult, while not renouncing play, must exchange the child's openness and real objects for a more shadowy kind of activity--fantasizing. This exchange must be made partly because in the adult world, play is seen as something less than appropriate--after all, an adult would look strange playing at becoming a grown-up--but more importantly because of the nature underlying some of the adult's fantasies. Adults, infused with feelings of shame about their sexual imaginings and their ambition, learn to conceal and distort them. One is reminded of Wordsworth's poetry about the loss involved in moving from childhood to adult life--mostly the loss between nature and the passions. Freud implies that adults have lost a healthy relationship to their own desires. Adult reality is unsatisfying, then, and since in the Freudian economy what is repressed does not simply go away, the ability to fantasize or daydream becomes an important escape mechanism for the dissatisfied. At this point Freud is able to link the creation of daydreams to the making of literary texts: in each activity, a current impression arouses a significant wish, and we then recall an instance in the past when that wish was fulfilled. (Note 1) That done, we project a future in which the wish is to be fulfilled again. In a literary text, that fulfillment will be distributed along a written narrative and perhaps among several characters. The main thing to understand is that art amounts to a substitution for children's play; it is therapeutic wish-fulfillment. As Wordsworth says, "The child is father of the man." For Freud, adulthood seems to be not so much a leaving-behind of childhood but an unconscious attempt to hold on to as many sources of gratification as possible, while realizing all the time the great power asserted against the "pleasure principle" (that which determines the impulse to satisfy one's desires) by the "reality principle." If Freud went no further, his theory would leave us dissatisfied for a very simple reason: common experience tells us that nothing is more of a conversation-stopper than trying to impose upon another the stuff of your own dreams or fantasies--the hearer is bound to take it as a selfish gesture. How, then, does the writer of fiction lull us into enjoying such a narcissistic enterprise? By two basic methods: firstly, by aesthetic skill--the formal qualities of the text fill us with aesthetic enjoyment. Secondly, the oppressiveness of the author's egotism is softened by the devices of distortion and concealment--we do not quite recognize the "daydream" for what it really is. In essence, says Freud, artists bribe us into accepting what is therapeutic for them. But our aesthetic enjoyment is only a kind of "forepleasure," according to Freud. The deeper result lies at the heart of Freud's defense of literary art: in making us accept their own fantasies in a pleasantly distorted form, writers bring about in us a "liberation of tensions." That liberation is the true value of art, implying as it does the regaining of psychological community rather than neurotic individual isolation. As one class member (Diane Gihring) put it well, the writer's work makes us realize, however indirectly, that it is still acceptable for us adults to exercise our imagination, to fantasize, to daydream. It is okay to be dissatisfied with the reality that everyone keeps telling us we must accept. Remember Freud's definition of normalcy, the aim of psychoanalytic practice: one must be able "to love, to work, and to play." Normalcy, then, includes imagination, and art is fundamentally imaginative, a realm where play and fantasy rule. Though Freud and the German romantic artist Friedrich Schiller differ on many things, both would agree that art is a form of play bearing important implications for both the individual and society as a whole. (Note 2) Art is one vital way in which we reaffirm our capacity to imagine a better, more satisfying life for ourselves and others. In Wordsworth we are told that the "poet binds together by passion and knowledge the vast empire of human society." Freud's more circumspect version of that claim revolves around the healthy social and individual effects of "the liberation of tensions." One final note is that Freud's early enthusiasm about the healing power of art--though art by no means replaces the more directed and conscious practice of psychoanalysis, Freud would surely insist--lessens in his later works. We should remember that in his 1939 book Civilization and its Discontents (written in the shadow of Hitler's annexation of Freud's native Austria), art is one of the things that, though valuable, turn out to be unsatisfactory in providing humans with a stable source of pleasure. By the time of his later work, Freud has become much more pessimistic about humanity's ability to avoid destroying itself, much less to achieve sustained pleasure. Notes Note 1. "Mental work is linked to some current impression," says Freud. Something happens in the present that arouses "one of the subject's major wishes." This provoking mental occasion recalls "a memory of an earlier experience . . . in which this wish was fulfilled; and it now creates a situation relating to the future which represents a fulfillment of the wish." In Freud's example, a young man is hit with the provoking incident of visiting a prospective employer. This incident awakens in him sexual and ambition-based desires, which he then proceeds to fulfill in the course of daydreaming. "Work" (Arbeit), for Freud, is a complex term associated with "psychical working-out," "dream work," "mourning work," and so on. Work has to do with "the Freudian conception of a psychical apparatus which transforms and transports the energy entering it, the instinct being defined in this perspective as ‘a measure of the demand made upon the mind for work.'" A further definition of psychical working out: "Term used by Freud in different contexts to designate the work the psychical apparatus carries out in order to control the excitations which reach it and whose accumulation threatens to become pathogenic. This work consists in integrating the excitations into the psyche and establishing associative links between them." (The Language of Psycho-Analysis. Jean LaPlanche and J.B. Pontalis. transl. Donald Nicholson-Smith. New York: Norton.) The subject's wish, then, links the past, present, and future, the latter in fictional form as represented in art. Note 2. Schiller posits a "Spieltrieb" or play drive. See his Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man. This play drive is not the same thing as the dissatisfaction- or shame-induced need Freud identifies in "Creative Writers and Daydreaming," but it is worth comparing the two writers' statements about the importance of art and "play."
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