Q:

Q: "For Freud, a literary work is analogous to its author's dream." Referring closely to his essay "Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming," discuss Freud's conception of literature.

" A literary Text is to a critic what a dream is to a therapists. Both reveal volumes"

Dr. Clarke, 2005

Although Freud was not in any way a deliberate aesthetic theorist, he did leave his mark on both literature and critical theory through his general psychoanalytic framework and also his specific turning to art to show that the range of applicability of psychoanalysis extended beyond dreams and neurosis to even the highest cultural achievements.

In his essay Creative Writers and Day-dreaming, Sigmund Freud's focus is on the relationship of author and his work, and he seeks to answer that question - which peaks curiosity in the reader of any literary piece - "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? (Adams p.712) With a closer analysis of this work, this essay seeks to discuss Freud's notion of the author, his work and his dreams as it relates to Literature.

To begin to understand this odd relation of literature to its authors, we may recall its analogy, noted by Sigmund Freud, to the relation between dreams and dreamers. Just as dreams often convey meaning and information to the dreamer in puzzling symbolic images, literature may be said to function in a similar way. The author of a literary text can be compared to a dreamer transcribing his dreams into written language. From the Freudian point of view, the author uses literature as a medium, and this medium can be considered a sort of censor, a true meaning of a work hidden behind the manifest "dream". Just as a dreamer is often unaware of the meaning of his/her own dreams, writers too cannot always explain what it is that their writings mean. The writing of literature is many times an almost unconscious performance, which allows for the half veiled expression of ideas and concepts that transcend the conscious mental life or avowed intentions of authors. Dealing frequently with highly charged, emotionally loaded, dangerous, or threatening ideas and desires, dreams and literary texts constitute ways of giving 'safe' (i.e. unclear, ambiguous, and concealed) and also powerful and influential expression to materials which, for a variety of reasons, cannot or should not be fully brought into consciousness or verbal expression. Therefore, the opinions and ideas of an author about his/her own work are not necessarily the most reliable guides toward a meaningful interpretation of a text. Like a psychoanalyst and his patient, an intelligent and attentive reader may be able to understand a text better than the very person who wrote it.

Freud was admittedly generous in attributing to the artist the role of precursor of psychoanalysis in his or her insights into the unconscious, be it in prefiguring the significance of dreams, fetishism, repression and childhood eroticism, Para praxes, the object choice in love, the uncanny, the roles of Eros, daydreams, or almost anything else. Artists' sensitive perception of the hidden indicates that in their knowledge of the human mind "they are far in advance of us everyday people, for they draw upon sources which we have not yet opened up for science."

It is in this vein that Freud pursues his findings in his essay, which highlights at several areas, as it relates to the author and his work.

The first of these draws the analogy between the activity of poetic creation and the world of play and fantasy indulged in by children. Indeed Freud states, "the creative writer does the same as a child at play. He creates a world of fantasy which he takes very seriously - that is, which he invests with large amounts of emotion - while separating it sharply from reality." (712) Freud also notes however that what differentiates the child's play from fantasy is, it is only in play that the child links "his imagined objects and situations to the tangible and visible things of the real world", ( 712) so that, for example, imaginatively zooming along in an auto-mobile, he makes use of a chair as his pretend car.

However, in the course of his development, the child eventually ceases to play seemingly giving up the yield of pleasure, substituting fantasy - daydreams or castles in the air - in its place. However as Freud puts it, "We can never give anything up; we only exchange one thing for another" (713), and what the child is indeed doing is "giving up the link with real objects" Fantasy supplies some of the pleasures lost in the renunciation of play - and sometimes humor does too.

As Freud notes, unlike the child at play, however, adults tend to be ashamed of their fantasies and secret wishes and have to mask or conceal them because they may conflict with or be impermissible in the social world. Yet, as Freud observes, sources of pleasure are only reluctantly and incompletely renounced in psychic life. Thus, creative writing becomes a substitute or surrogate for this childhood play. Just as children construct alternative worlds to fulfil their wishes, so writers play out their latent desires in fictional form. The German language preserves the link between childhood play ("spiel") and imaginative writing in terms such as Lustspiel ("comedy", or literally, "pleasure play") and Trauerspiel ("tragedy", or literally, "mourning play"). (713). Of high importance here, is the fact that the unreality of the writer's imaginative world, has very important consequences for the technique of his art; for many things which, if they were real, could give no enjoyment, can do so in the play of fantasy and many excitements which, in themselves, are actually distressing, can become a source of pleasure for the hearers and spectators at the performance of a writer's work. (713). From his experience with patients, Freud deduces, "that a happy person never fantasies, only an unsatisfied one, thus he claimed that the "motive forces" of all fantasies are unsatisfied wishes and every single fantasy is the fulfilment of a wish, a correction of unsatisfying reality".

Fantasies are most often provoked, Freud argues, by some current impression, some provoking occasion in the present which has been able to arouse one of the subject's major wishes. From there it harks back to a memory of an earlier experience in which this

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