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Teachers' Resource Web Study Questions on Sigmund Freud "Creative Writers and Daydreaming"; Trilling's "Freud
and Literature" Reading Questions "Creative Writers and Daydreaming" 1. What, according to Freud, is the opposite of play for the child? How is the creative writer "the same as the child at play"? 2. "Hardly anything is harder for a man to give up" than what, according to Freud? What is the truth about "renunciation"? What really happens when a growing child supposedly gives up playing? 3. How does the adult's relationship to his wishes and fantasies differ from the child's? 4. What motivates the "act of fantasizing" What are the two "main groups" of wishes? 5. What is the relation of a fantasy to time--to past, present, and future? 6. How are fantasies like dreams? Why is the meaning of dreams usually obscure? 7. Who, according to Freud, is the real hero of most popular romances, novels, and short stories? To what does the psychological novel owe its "special nature"? 8. What is Freud's surmise about the relationship between creative work and an author's present experience as well as his past? 9. What is the "innermost secret" of a writer" What is the "essential ars poetica"? 10. What is the relationship between "aesthetic pleasure" and our "actual enjoyment of an imaginative work"? Are they the same thing? Trilling's "Freud and Literature" 11. What, according to Trilling, is the common characteristic of both Freud and romanticism? 12. What, according to Trilling, is the crucial difference between neurotic dreaming and art? How is a poet fundamentally unlike a dreamer or a neurotic? How should the relationship between the "illusions of art" and reality differ from the relationship between neurotic fantasy and reality? 13. To what in art or literature is psychoanalysis theoretically indifferent? What two things does the "analytical method claim to do"? 14. Why, according to Trilling, is it dangerous for criticism to speculate about the "unconscious intention" of a literary work? 15. What does Trilling mean when he speaks of the "mithridatic function" of tragedy? How is this notion related to Freud's speculations (in Beyond the Pleasure Principle) about the non-hedonistic intent of certain kinds of dreaming? Discussion Questions 1. Sidney, Johnson, and Freud all discuss the relationship between literature and the question of what a human being might wish or desire. Compare and contrast their respective views. 2. How does the Freudian notion of literature affect answers to the perennial question about the knowledge or truth literature might give? If Freud is correct, what can we learn from literature? 3. Is Freud's theory of literature mimetic or expressive? Explain. 4. How might Coleridge, with his notion of the organic relationship between form and meaning, criticize Freud's approach to literature? What does Freud's theory tell us about the form or medium of creative work? Is it really sensible to talk about "meaning" in a poem without consideration of the formal "embodiment" of that meaning in the medium of language? 5. Does Freud's theory of literature tend to trivialize it? 6. If Freud is correct, does literature have a moral function? Or does his theory tend to confirm, in a modern way, some of Plato's worst suspicions? *The first reading selection is from Adams, Hazard. Critical Theory Since Plato. Rev. ed. New York: Harcourt, 1992. 712-16. The Trilling essay was included in the first edition of the same anthology, pp. 949-57.
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