Emily Martin- Freud on Poetry

Sigmund Freud is known to be the founder of psychoanalysis. In “The Relation of the Poet to Day-Dreaming,” he describes the relationship between the writing styles of the poet and the mental habits of an adult.

He begins by exploring the imaginative habits of a child and contrasting them to the mental habits of an adult. Freud writes that the play one engages in during childhood is never truly done away with. Instead, it is replaced by daydreaming in adulthood. Both forms of play create alternate worlds, spun up by a sort of wish. In child’s play, the wish is to be grown up. In a phantasy, the wish is to improve the adult’s somehow unsatisfactory reality. As the adult is expected to have abrogated her playful ways, she is ashamed of her phantasies and usually does not make them known, whereas a child does not conceal its play.

Describing the process of the daydream Freud explains that past, present, and future are all sewn together with a common wish. He writes: “ The activity of phantasy in the mind is linked up with some current impression, occasioned by some event in the present, which had the power to rouse an intense desire. From there it wanders back to the memory of an early experience, …in which this wish was fulfilled. Then it creates for itself a situation which is to emerge in the future, representing the fulfillment of the wish-this is the daydream…” (302).

This neurologist argues that poets and narrative authors employ the afore described process when writing. In a story or poem, the hero carries out actions that the writer wishes they could partake in. It is some real experience that arouses a memory, probably from childhood, that arouses a wish that the author fulfills in her work; the character in the piece is the ego or alter-ego of the author.