Freud and Daydreams
A similarly positive view of fantasy was taken by Sigmund Freud. He considered that men and women 'cannot subsist on the scanty satisfaction which they can extort from reality. "We simply cannot do without auxiliary constructions", as Theodor Fontane once said... dwelling on imaginary wish fulfillments'. As childhood adaptation to the reality principle developed, so too 'one species of thought activity was split off; it was kept free from reality-testing and remained subordinated to the pleasure principle alone. This activity is fantasying...continued as day-dreaming. He compared such phantasising to the way a 'nature reserve preserves its original state where everything...including what is useless and even what is noxious, can grow and proliferate there as it pleases'.
Daydreams for Freud were thus a valuable resource. '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...such phantasies may be unconscious just as well as conscious'. He considered 'These phantasies include a great deal of the true constitutional essence of the subject's personality' and that the energetic man 'is one who succeeds by his efforts in turning his wishful phantasies into reality', while the artist 'can transform his phantasies into artistic creations instead of into symptoms...the doom of neurosis'.
Read more about this topic: Fantasy (psychology)
Famous quotes containing the words freud and, freud and/or daydreams:
“I am opposed to writing about the private lives of living authors and psychoanalyzing them while they are alive. Criticism is getting all mixed up with a combination of the Junior F.B.I.- men, discards from Freud and Jung and a sort of Columnist peep- hole and missing laundry list school.... Every young English professor sees gold in them dirty sheets now. Imagine what they can do with the soiled sheets of four legal beds by the same writer and you can see why their tongues are slavering.”
—Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961)
“I have found little that is “good” about human beings on the whole. In my experience most of them are trash, no matter whether they publicly subscribe to this or that ethical doctrine or to none at all. That is something that you cannot say aloud, or perhaps even think.”
—Sigmund Freud (1856–1939)
“Many of our daydreams would darken into nightmares, were there a danger of their coming true!”
—Logan Pearsall Smith (1865–1946)