Freud - Complete Works (336 page)
Creative Writers And Day-Dreaming
1927
Other typical features of these
egocentric stories point to the same kinship. The fact that all the
women in the novel invariably fall in love with the hero can hardly
be looked on as a portrayal of reality, but it is easily understood
as a necessary constituent of a day-dream. The same is true of the
fact that the other characters in the story are sharply divided
into good and bad, in defiance of the variety of human characters
that are to be observed in real life. The ‘good’ ones
are the helpers, while the ‘bad’ ones are the enemies
and rivals, of the ego which has become the hero of the story.
We are perfectly aware that very
many imaginative writings are far removed from the model of the
naïve day-dream; and yet I cannot suppress the suspicion that
even the most extreme deviations from that model could be linked
with it through an uninterrupted series of transitional cases. It
has struck me that in many of what are known as
‘psychological’ novels only one person - once again the
hero - is described from within. The author sits inside his mind,
as it were, and looks at the other characters from outside. The
psychological novel in general no doubt owes its special nature to
the inclination of the modern writer to split up his ego, by
self-observation, into many part-egos, and, in consequence, to
personify the conflicting currents of his own mental life in
several heroes. Certain novels, which might be described as
‘eccentric’, seem to stand in quite special contrast to
the type of the day-dream. In these, the person who is introduced
as the hero plays only a very small active part; he sees the
actions and sufferings of other people pass before him like a
spectator. Many of Zola’s later works belong to this
category. But I must point out that the psychological analysis of
individuals who are not creative writers, and who diverge in some
respects from the so-called norm, has shown us analogous variations
of the day-dream, in which the ego contents itself with the role of
spectator.
Creative Writers And Day-Dreaming
1928
If our comparison of the
imaginative writer with the day-dreamer, and of poetical creation
with the day-dream, is to be of any value, it must, above all, show
itself in some way or other fruitful. Let us, for instance, try to
apply to these authors’ works the thesis we laid down earlier
concerning the relation between phantasy and the three periods of
time and the wish which runs through them; and, with its help, let
us try to study the connections that exist between the life of the
writer and his works. No one has known, as a rule, what
expectations to frame in approaching this problem; and often the
connection has been thought of in much too simple terms. In the
light of the insight we have gained from phantasies, we ought to
expect the following state of affairs. A strong experience in the
present awakens in the creative writer a memory of an earlier
experience (usually belonging to his childhood) from which there
now proceeds a wish which finds its fulfilment in the creative
work. The work itself exhibits elements of the recent provoking
occasion as well as of the old memory.
Do not be alarmed at the
complexity of this formula. I suspect that in fact it will prove to
be too exiguous a pattern. Nevertheless, it may contain a first
approach to the true state of affairs; and, from some experiments I
have made, I am inclined to think that this way of looking at
creative writings may turn out not unfruitful. You will not forget
that the stress it lays on childhood memories in the writer’s
life - a stress which may perhaps seem puzzling - is ultimately
derived from the assumption that a piece of creative writing, like
a day-dream, is a continuation of, and a substitute for, what was
once the play of childhood.
Creative Writers And Day-Dreaming
1929
We must not neglect, however, to
go back to the kind of imaginative works which we have to
recognize, not as original creations, but as the re-fashioning of
ready-made and familiar material. Even here, the writer keeps a
certain amount of independence, which can express itself in the
choice of material and in changes in it which are often quite
extensive. In so far as the material is already at hand, however,
it is derived from the popular treasure-house of myths, legends and
fairy tales. The study of constructions of folk-psychology such as
these is far from being complete, but it is extremely probable that
myths, for instance, are distorted vestiges of the wishful
phantasies of whole nations, the
secular dreams
of youthful
humanity.
You will say that, although I
have put the creative writer first in the title of my paper, I have
told you far less about him than about phantasies. I am aware of
that, and I must try to excuse it by pointing to the present state
of our knowledge. All I have been able to do is to throw out some
encouragements and suggestions which, starting from the study of
phantasies, lead on to the problem of the writer’s choice of
his literary material. As for the other problem - by what means the
creative writer achieves the emotional effects in us that are
aroused by his creations - we have as yet not touched on it at all.
But I should like at least to point out to you the path that leads
from our discussion of phantasies to the problems of poetical
effects.
You will remember how I have said
that the day-dreamer carefully conceals his phantasies from other
people because he feels he has reasons for being ashamed of them. I
should now add that even if he were to communicate them to us he
could give us no pleasure by his disclosures. Such phantasies, when
we learn them, repel us or at least leave us cold. But when a
creative writer presents his plays to us or tells us what we are
inclined to take to be his personal day dreams, we experience a
great pleasure, and one which probably arises from the confluence
of many sources. How the writer accomplishes this is his innermost
secret; the essential
ars poetica
lies in the technique of
overcoming the feeling of repulsion in us which is undoubtedly
connected with the barriers that rise between each single ego and
the others. We can guess two of the methods used by this technique.
The writer softens the character of his egoistic day-dreams by
altering and disguising it, and he bribes us by the purely formal -
that is, aesthetic - yield of pleasure which he offers us in the
presentation of his phantasies. We give the name of an
incentive
bonus
, or a
fore-pleasure
, to a yield of pleasure such
as this, which is offered to us so as to make possible the release
of still greater pleasure arising from deeper psychical sources. In
my opinion, all the aesthetic pleasure which a creative writer
affords us has the character of a fore-pleasure of this kind, and
our actual enjoyment of an imaginative work proceeds from a
liberation of tensions in our minds. It may even be that not a
little of this effect is due to the writer’s enabling us
thenceforward to enjoy our own day-dreams without self-reproach or
shame. This brings us to the threshold of new, interesting and
complicated enquiries; but also, at least for the moment, to the
end of our discussion.
1930
HYSTERICAL PHANTASIES AND THEIR RELATION TO BISEXUALITY
(1908)
1931
Intentionally left blank
1932
HYSTERICAL PHANTASIES AND THEIR RELATION TO BISEXUALITY
We are all familiar with the delusional
imaginings of the paranoic, which are concerned with the greatness
and the sufferings of his own self and which appear in forms that
are quite typical and almost monotonous. We have also become
acquainted, through numerous accounts, with the strange
performances with which certain perverts stage their sexual
satisfaction, whether in idea or reality. Nevertheless, it may be
new to some readers to hear that quite analogous psychical
structures are regularly present in all the psychoneuroses,
particularly in hysteria, and that these latter - which are known
as hysterical phantasies - can be seen to have important
connections with the causation of the neurotic symptoms.
A common source and normal
prototype of all these creations of phantasy is to be found in what
are called the day-dreams of youth. These have already received
some, though as yet insufficient, notice in the literature of the
subject.¹ They occur with perhaps equal frequency in both
sexes, though it seems that while in girls and women they are
invariably of an erotic nature, in men they may be either erotic or
ambitious. Nevertheless the importance of the erotic factor in men,
too, should not be given a secondary rating; a closer investigation
of a man’s day-dreams generally shows that all his heroic
exploits are carried out and all his successes achieved only in
order to please a woman and to be preferred by her to other
men.² These phantasies are satisfactions of wishes proceeding
from deprivation and longing. They are justly called
‘day-dreams’, for they give us the key to an
understanding of night-dreams - in which the nucleus of the
dream-formation consists of nothing else than complicated day-time
phantasies of this kind that have been distorted and are
misunderstood by the conscious psychical agency.³
¹
Cf. Breuer and Freud (1895), Pierre Janet
(1898, 1), Havelock Ellis (1899), Freud (1900
a
), Pick
(1896).
²
Havelock Ellis (1899) is of the same
opinion.
³
Cf.
The Interpretation of Dreams
(1900
a
)..
Hysterical Phantasies And Their Relation To Bisexuality
1933
These day-dreams are cathected
with a large amount of interest; they are carefully cherished by
the subject and usually concealed with a great deal of sensitivity,
as though they were among the most intimate possessions of his
personality. It is easy to recognize a person who is absorbed in
day-dreaming in the street, however, by his sudden, as it were
absent-minded, smile, his way of talking to himself, or by the
hastening of his steps which marks the climax of the imagined
situation. Every hysterical attack which I have been able to
investigate up to the present has proved to be an involuntary
irruption of day-dreams of this kind. For our observations no
longer leave any room for doubt that such phantasies may be
unconscious just as well as conscious; and as soon as the latter
have become unconscious they may also become pathogenic - that is,
they may express themselves in symptoms and attacks. In
favourable circumstances, the subject can still capture an
unconscious phantasy of this sort in consciousness. After I had
drawn the attention of one of my patients to her phantasies, she
told me that on one occasion she had suddenly found herself in
tears in the street and that, rapidly considering what it was she
was actually crying about, she had got hold of a phantasy to the
following effect. In her imagination she had formed a tender
attachment to a pianist who was well known in the town (though she
was not personally acquainted with him); she had had a child by him
(she was in fact childless); and he had then deserted her and her
child and left them in poverty. It was at this point in her romance
that she had burst into tears.
Hysterical Phantasies And Their Relation To Bisexuality
1934
Unconscious phantasies have
either been unconscious all along and have been formed in the
unconscious; or - as is more often the case - they were once
conscious phantasies, day-dreams, and have since been purposely
forgotten and have become unconscious through
‘repression’. Their content may afterwards either have
remained the same or have undergone alterations, so that the
present unconscious phantasies are derivatives of the once
conscious ones. Now an unconscious phantasy has a very important
connection with the subject’s sexual life; for it is
identical with the phantasy which served to give him sexual
satisfaction during a period of masturbation. At that time the
masturbatory act (in the widest sense of the term) was compounded
of two parts. One was the evocation of a phantasy and the other
some active behaviour for obtaining self-gratification at the
height of the phantasy. This compound, as we know, was itself
merely soldered together.¹ Originally the action was a purely
auto-erotic procedure for the purpose of obtaining pleasure from
some particular part of the body, which could be described as
erotogenic. Later, this action became merged with a wishful idea
from the sphere of object-love and served as a partial realization
of the situation in which the phantasy culminated. When,
subsequently, the subject renounces this type of satisfaction,
composed of masturbation and phantasy, the action is given up,
while the phantasy, from being conscious, becomes unconscious. If
no other mode of sexual satisfaction supervenes, the subject
remains abstinent; and if he does not succeed in sublimating his
libido - that is, in deflecting his sexual excitation to higher
aims -, the condition is now fulfilled for his unconscious phantasy
to be revived and to proliferate, and, at least as regards some
part of its content, to put itself into effect, with the whole
force of his need for love, in the form of a pathological
symptom.
¹
Cf. Freud,
Three Essays
(1905
d
).
Hysterical Phantasies And Their Relation To Bisexuality
1935
In this way, unconscious
phantasies are the immediate psychical precursors of a whole number
of hysterical symptoms. Hysterical symptoms are nothing other than
unconscious phantasies brought into view through
‘conversion’; and in so far as the symptoms are somatic
ones, they are often enough taken from the circle of the same
sexual sensations and motor innervations as those which had
originally accompanied the phantasy when it was still conscious. In
this way the giving up of the habit of masturbation is in fact
undone, and the purpose of the whole pathological process, which is
a restoration of the original, primary sexual satisfaction, is
achieved - though never completely, it is true, but always in a
sort of approximation.
Anyone who studies hysteria,
therefore, soon finds his interest turned away from its symptoms to
the phantasies from which they proceed. The technique of
psycho-analysis enables us in the first place to infer from the
symptoms what those unconscious phantasies are and then to make
them conscious to the patient. By this means it has been found that
the content of the hysteric’s unconscious phantasies
corresponds completely to the situations in which satisfaction is
consciously obtained by perverts; and if anyone is at a loss for
examples of such situations he has only to recall the world-famous
performances of the Roman Emperors, the wild excesses of which
were, of course, determined only by the enormous and unrestrained
power possessed by the authors of the phantasies. The delusions of
paranoics are phantasies of the same nature, though they are
phantasies which have become directly conscious. They rest on the
sado-masochistic components of the sexual instinct, and they, too,
may find their complete counterpart in certain unconscious
phantasies of hysterical subjects. We also know of cases - cases
which have their practical importance as well - in which hysterics
do not give expression to their phantasies in the form of symptoms
but as conscious realizations, and in that way devise and stage
assaults, attacks or acts of sexual aggression.
This method of psycho-analytic
investigation, which leads from the conspicuous symptoms to the
hidden unconscious phantasies, tells us everything that can be
known about the sexuality of psychoneurotics, including the fact
which is to be the main subject-matter of this short preliminary
publication.
Hysterical Phantasies And Their Relation To Bisexuality
1936
Owing, probably, to the
difficulties which the unconscious phantasies meet with in their
endeavour to find expression, the relationship of the phantasies to
the symptoms is not simple, but on the contrary, complicated in
many ways.¹ As a rule - when, that is, the neurosis is fully
developed and has persisted for some time - a particular symptom
corresponds, not to a single unconscious phantasy, but to several
such phantasies; and it does so not in an arbitrary manner but in
accordance with a regular pattern. At the beginning of the illness
these complications are, no doubt, not all fully developed.
For the sake of general interest
I will at this point go outside the framework of this paper and
interpolate a series of formulas which attempt to give a
progressively fuller description of the nature of hysterical
symptoms. These formulas do not contradict one another, but some
represent an increasingly complete and precise approach to the
facts, while others represent the application of different points
of view:
(1) Hysterical symptoms are
mnemic symbols of certain operative (traumatic) impressions and
experiences.
(2) Hysterical symptoms are
substitutes, produced by ‘conversion’, for the
associative return of these traumatic experiences.
(3) Hysterical symptoms are -
like other psychical structures - an expression of the fulfilment
of a wish.
(4) Hysterical symptoms are the
realization of an unconscious phantasy which serves the fulfilment
of a wish.
(5) Hysterical symptoms serve the
purpose of sexual satisfaction and represent a portion of the
subject’s sexual life (a portion which corresponds to one of
the constituents of his sexual instinct).
(6) Hysterical symptoms
correspond to a return of a mode of sexual satisfaction which was a
real one in infantile life and has since been repressed.
(7) Hysterical symptoms arise as
a compromise between two opposite affective and instinctual
impulses, of which one is attempting to bring to expression a
component instinct or a constituent of the sexual constitution, and
the other is attempting to suppress it.
(8) Hysterical symptoms may take
over the representation of various unconscious impulses which are
not sexual, but they can never be without a sexual
significance.
¹
The same is true of the relation between
the ‘latent’ dream-thoughts and the elements of the
‘manifest’ content of a dream. See the section of my
Interpretation of Dreams
which deals with the
‘dream-work’.
Hysterical Phantasies And Their Relation To Bisexuality
1937
Among these various definitions
the seventh brings out the nature of hysterical symptoms most
completely as the realization of an unconscious phantasy; and the
eighth recognizes the proper significance of the sexual factor.
Some of the preceding formulas lead up to these two and are
contained in them.
This connection between symptoms
and phantasies makes it easy to arrive from a psycho-analysis of
the former at a knowledge of the components of the sexual instincts
which dominate the individual, as I have demonstrated in my
Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality
. In some cases,
however, investigation by this means yields an unexpected result.
It shows that there are many symptoms where the uncovering of a
sexual phantasy (or of a number of phantasies, one of which, the
most significant and the earliest, is of a sexual nature) is not
enough to bring about a resolution of the symptoms. To resolve it
one has to have
two
sexual phantasies, of which one has a
masculine and the other a feminine character. Thus one of these
phantasies springs from a homosexual impulse. This new finding does
not alter our seventh formula. It remains true that a hysterical
symptom must necessarily represent a compromise between a libidinal
and a repressing impulse; but it may also represent a union of two
libidinal phantasies of an opposite sexual character.
Hysterical Phantasies And Their Relation To Bisexuality
1938
I shall refrain from giving
examples in support of this thesis. I have found from experience
that short analyses, condensed into extracts, can never have the
convincing effect which they are designed to produce. And on the
other hand, accounts of fully analysed cases must be left for
another occasion.
I will therefore content myself
with stating the following formula and explaining its
significance:
(9) Hysterical symptoms are the
expression on the one hand of a masculine unconscious sexual
phantasy, and on the other hand of a feminine one.
