Freud - Complete Works (335 page)

  
¹
Emma Eckstein, 1904.

The Sexual Enlightenment Of Children (An Open Letter To Dr. M. Furst)

1918

   The child’s curiosity will
never reach a very high degree of intensity provided it finds
appropriate satisfaction at each stage of his learning.
Enlightenment about the specific facts of human sexuality and an
indication of its social significance should, therefore, be given
to the child at the end of his time at his elementary school
[
Volksschule
] and before he enters his intermediate school
[
Mittelschule
] - that is to say, before he is ten years old.
The period of confirmation would be a more suitable time than any
other at which to instruct the child, who will by that time have a
full knowledge of all the physical facts, in the moral obligations
which are attached to the actual satisfaction of the instinct.
Enlightenment about sexual life carried out along such lines as
this, proceeding step by step and without any real interruption,
and in which the school takes the initiative, seems to me to be the
only kind which takes into account the child’s development
and thus successfully avoids the dangers involved.

   I consider it the most
significant advance in child education that in France the State
should have introduced, in place of the catechism, a primer which
gives the child his first instruction in his position as a citizen
and in the ethical duties which will later devolve on him. But such
elementary instruction is seriously deficient, so long as it does
not include the field of sexuality. Here is the gap which educators
and reformers should set about filling. In countries which have
placed the education of children wholly or in part in the hands of
the clergy, it will, of course, be impossible to ask for this. A
priest will never admit that men and animals have the same nature,
since he cannot do without the immortality of the soul, which he
requires as the basis for moral precepts. Here, once again, we see
the unwisdom of sewing a single silk patch on to a tattered coat -
the impossibility of carrying out an isolated reform without
altering the foundations of the whole system.

1919

CREATIVE WRITERS AND DAY-DREAMING

(1908)

1920

Intentionally left blank

1921

CREATIVE WRITERS AND DAY-DREAMING

We laymen have always been intensely curious
to know like the Cardinal who put a similar question to Ariosto -
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. Our interest is only heightened the
more by the fact that, if we ask him, the writer himself gives us
no explanation, or none that is satisfactory; and it is not at all
weakened by our knowledge that not even the clearest insight into
the determinants of his choice of material and into the nature of
the art of creating imaginative form will ever help to make
creative writers of
us
.

   If we could at least discover in
ourselves or in people like ourselves an activity which was in some
way akin to creative writing! An examination of it would then give
us a hope of obtaining the beginnings of an explanation of the
creative work of writers. And, indeed, there is some prospect of
this being possible. After all, creative writers themselves like to
lessen the distance between their kind and the common run of
humanity; they so often assure us that every man is a poet at heart
and that the last poet will not perish till the last man does.

   Should we not look for the first
traces of imaginative activity as early as in childhood The
child’s best-loved and most intense occupation is with his
play or games. Might we not say that every child at play behaves
like a creative writer, in that he creates a world of his own, or,
rather, re-arranges the things of his world in a new way which
pleases him? It would be wrong to think he does not take that world
seriously; on the contrary, he takes his play very seriously and he
expends large amounts of emotion on it. The opposite of play is not
what is serious but what is real. In spite of all the emotion with
which he cathects his world of play, the child distinguishes it
quite well from reality; and he likes to link his imagined objects
and situations to the tangible and visible things of the real
world. This linking is all that differentiates the child’s
‘play’ from ‘phantasying’.

Creative Writers And Day-Dreaming

1922

   The creative writer does the same
as the child at play. He creates a world of phantasy which he takes
very seriously - that is, which he invests with large amounts of
emotion while separating it sharply from reality. Language has
preserved this relationship between children’s play and
poetic creation. It gives [in German] the name of
‘
Spiel
’ [‘play’] to those forms of
imaginative writing which require to be linked to tangible objects
and which are capable of representation. It speaks of a
‘
Lustspiel
’ or ‘
Trauerspiel
’
[‘comedy’ or ‘tragedy’: literally,
‘pleasure play’ or ‘mourning play’] and
describes those who carry out the representation as
‘
Schauspieler
’ [‘players’: literally
‘show-players’]. The unreality of the writer’s
imaginative world, however, 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 phantasy, 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.

   There is another consideration
for the sake of which we will dwell a moment longer on this
contrast between reality and play. When the child has grown up and
has ceased to play, and after he has been labouring for decades to
envisage the realities of life with proper seriousness, he may one
day find himself in a mental situation which once more undoes the
contrast between play and reality. As an adult he can look back on
the intense seriousness with which he once carried on his games in
childhood; and, by equating his ostensibly serious occupations of
to-day with his childhood games, he can throw off the too heavy
burden imposed on him by life and win the high yield of pleasure
afforded by
humour
.

Creative Writers And Day-Dreaming

1923

   As people grow up, then, they
cease to play, and they seem to give up the yield of pleasure which
they gained from playing. But whoever understands the human mind
knows that hardly anything is harder for a man than to give up a
pleasure which he has once experienced. Actually, we can never give
anything up; we only exchange one thing for another. What appears
to be a renunciation is really the formation of a substitute or
surrogate. In the same way, the growing child, when he stops
playing, gives up nothing but the link with real objects; instead
playing
, he now
phantasies
. He builds castles in the
air and creates what are called
day-dreams
. I believe that
most people construct phantasies at times in their lives. This is a
fact which has long been overlooked and whose importance has
therefore not been sufficiently appreciated.

   People’s phantasies are
less easy to observe than the play of children. The child, it is
true, plays by himself or forms a closed psychical system with
other children for the purposes of a game; but even though he may
not play his game in front of the grown-ups, he does not, on the
other hand, conceal it from them. The adult, on the contrary, is
ashamed of his phantasies and hides them from other people. He
cherishes his phantasies as his most intimate possessions, and as a
rule he would rather confess his misdeeds than tell anyone his
phantasies. It may come about that for that reason he believes he
is the only person who invents such phantasies and has no idea that
creations of this kind are widespread among other people. This
difference in the behaviour of a person who plays and a person who
phantasies is accounted for by the motives of these two activities,
which are nevertheless adjuncts to each other.

Creative Writers And Day-Dreaming

1924

   A child’s play is
determined by wishes: in point of fact by a single wish-one that
helps in his upbringing - the wish to be big and grown up. He is
always playing at being ‘grown up’, and in his games he
imitates what he knows about the lives of his elders. He has no
reason to conceal this wish. With the adult, the case is different.
On the one hand, he knows that he is expected not to go on playing
or phantasying any longer, but to act in the real world; on the
other hand, some of the wishes which give rise to his phantasies
are of a kind which it is essential to conceal. Thus he is ashamed
of his phantasies as being childish and as being unpermissible.

   But, you will ask, if people make
such a mystery of their phantasying, how is it that we know such a
lot about it? Well, there is a class of human beings upon whom, not
a god, indeed, but a stern goddess - Necessity - has allotted the
task of telling what they suffer and what things give them
happiness. These are the victims of nervous illness, who are
obliged to tell their phantasies, among other things, to the doctor
by whom they expect to be cured by mental treatment. This is our
best source of knowledge, and we have since found good reason to
suppose that our patients tell us nothing that we might not also
hear from healthy people.

   Let us now make ourselves
acquainted with a few of the characteristics of phantasying. We may
lay it down that a happy person never phantasies, only an
unsatisfied one. The motive forces of phantasies are unsatisfied
wishes, and every single phantasy is the fulfilment of a wish, a
correction of unsatisfying reality. These motivating wishes vary
according to the sex, character and circumstances of the person who
is having the phantasy; but they fall naturally into two main
groups. They are either ambitious wishes, which serve to elevate
the subject’s personality; or they are erotic ones. In young
women the erotic wishes predominate almost exclusively, for their
ambition is as a rule absorbed by erotic trends. In young men
egoistic and ambitious wishes come to the fore clearly enough
alongside of erotic ones. But we will not lay stress on the
opposition between the two trends; we would rather emphasize the
fact that they are often united. Just as, in many altar-pieces, the
portrait of the donor is to be seen in a corner of the picture, so,
in the majority of ambitious phantasies, we can discover in some
corner or other the lady for whom the creator of the phantasy
performs all his heroic deeds and at whose feet all his triumphs
are laid. Here, as you see, there are strong enough motives for
concealment; the well-brought-up young woman is only allowed a
minimum of erotic desire, and the young man has to learn to
suppress the excess of self-regard which he brings with him from
the spoilt days of his childhood, so that he may find his place in
a society which is full of other individuals making equally strong
demands.

Creative Writers And Day-Dreaming

1925

   We must not suppose that the
products of this imaginative activity - the various phantasies,
castles in the air and day-dreams - are stereotyped or unalterable.
On the contrary, they fit themselves in to the subject’s
shifting impressions of life, change with every change in his
situation, and receive from every fresh active impression what
might be called a ‘date-mark’. The relation of a
phantasy to time is in general very important. We may say that it
hovers, as it were, between three times - the three moments of time
which our ideation involves. Mental work is linked to 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 (usually an
infantile one) in which this wish was fulfilled; and it now creates
a situation relating to the future which represents a fulfilment of
the wish. What it thus creates is a day-dream or phantasy, which
carries about it traces of its origin from the occasion which
provoked it and from the memory. Thus past, present and future are
strung together, as it were, on the thread of the wish that runs
through them.

   A very ordinary example may serve
to make what I have said clear. Let us take the case of a poor
orphan boy to whom you have given the address of some employer
where he may perhaps find a job. On his way there he may indulge in
a day-dream appropriate to the situation from which it arises. The
content of his phantasy will perhaps be something like this. He is
given a job, finds favour with his new employer, makes himself
indispensable in the business, is taken into his employer’s
family, marries the charming young daughter of the house, and then
himself becomes a director of the business, first as his
employer’s partner and then as his successor. In this
phantasy, the dreamer has regained what he possessed in his happy
childhood - the protecting house, the loving parents and the first
objects of his affectionate feelings. You will see from this
example the way in which the wish makes use of an occasion in the
present to construct, on the pattern of the past, a picture of the
future.

   There is a great deal more that
could be said about phantasies; but I will only allude as briefly
as possible to certain points. If phantasies become over-luxuriant
and over-powerful, the conditions are laid for an onset of neurosis
or psychosis. Phantasies, moreover, are the immediate mental
precursors of the distressing symptoms complained of by our
patients. Here a broad by-path branches off into pathology.

   I cannot pass over the relation
of phantasies to dreams. Our dreams at night are nothing else than
phantasies like these, as we can demonstrate from the
interpretation of dreams.¹ Language, in its unrivalled wisdom,
long ago decided the question of the essential nature of dreams by
giving the name of ‘day-dreams’ to the airy creations
of phantasy. If the meaning of our dreams usually remains obscure
to us in spite of this pointer, it is because of the circumstance
that at night there also arise in us wishes of which we are
ashamed; these we must conceal from ourselves, and they have
consequently been repressed, pushed into the unconscious. Repressed
wishes of this sort and their derivatives are only allowed to come
to expression in a very distorted form. When scientific work had
succeeded in elucidating this factor of
dream-distortion
, it
was no longer difficult to recognize that night-dreams are
wish-fulfilments in just the same way as day-dreams - the
phantasies which we all know so well.

  
¹
Cf. Freud,
The Interpretation of
Dreams
(1900
a
).

Creative Writers And Day-Dreaming

1926

   So much for phantasies. And now
for the creative writer. May we really attempt to compare the
imaginative writer with the ‘dreamer in broad
daylight’, and his creations with day-dreams? Here we must
begin by making an initial distinction. We must separate writers
who, like the ancient authors of epics and tragedies, take over
their material ready-made, from writers who seem to originate their
own material. We will keep to the latter kind, and, for the
purposes of our comparison, we will choose not the writers most
highly esteemed by the critics, but the less pretentious authors of
novels, romances and short stories, who nevertheless have the
widest and most eager circle of readers of both sexes. One feature
above all cannot fail to strike us about the creations of these
story-writers: each of them has a hero who is the centre of
interest, for whom the writer tries to win our sympathy by every
possible means and whom he seems to place under the protection of a
special Providence. If, at the end of one chapter of my story, I
leave the hero unconscious and bleeding from severe wounds, I am
sure to find him at the beginning of the next being carefully
nursed and on the way to recovery; and if the first volume closes
with the ship he is in going down in a storm at sea, I am certain,
at the opening of the second volume, to read of his miraculous
rescue - a rescue without which the story could not proceed. The
feeling of security with which I follow the hero through his
perilous adventures is the same as the feeling with which a hero in
real life throws himself into the water to save a drowning man or
exposes himself to the enemy’s fire in order to storm a
battery. It is the true heroic feeling, which one of our best
writers has expressed in an inimitable phrase: ‘Nothing can
happen to
me
!’ It seems to me, however, that through
this revealing characteristic of invulnerability we can immediately
recognize His Majesty the Ego, the hero alike of every day-dream
and of every story.