On December 6, 1907, Sigmund Freud stood before an audience of 90 people. He was delivering a lecture titled "Creative Writers and Daydreaming." Even now, some 120 years later, the text is still widely discussed. Freud's question was this:

"Where do people who create literature actually get their material?"

It was a question about where one finds "inspiration"—something that captivates some people and seems almost impossible for others to even imagine. It is a difficult problem to answer. "If you ask writers, can they answer?"

In this essay, a chapter from the Freud Collected Works published by Open Books, Freud focuses on children's "play."

We were all once children, and all of us were subjects of play. We arranged objects according to our own preferences and created a "new order." Children take play seriously. What adults see as simple make-believe is, for children, the creation of their own world. Freud argues that literary creators are ultimately doing the same thing as children at play.

"In the sense that the child arranges objects according to personal preference and in line with a new order, one could also say that the child behaves like a poet. Traces remain in the language we use that point to this similarity between children's play and the creative act of the poet."



Children are not ashamed of daydreams, but adults sometimes feel embarrassed by the daydreams they are caught up in and try to hide themselves from others. Yet that does not mean adults have stopped seeking pleasure or given it up.

In art, the world of daydreams that reality cannot provide is opened up to others. The "audience" for this play feels pleasure in hearing and watching the creator's story. Even when writers sometimes face rejection or cold reactions, they do not stop their daydreaming. Listening to their confessions, readers empathize and nod at the desires that must be hidden.

"By transforming or veiling the dreams of the day, the literary creator weakens the dream's self-admiring character, which is the dominant feature, while at the same time leading readers into a world of play by offering them purely formal, in other words, aesthetic pleasure through his daydreams."

Freud's argument has also drawn criticism. His lecture was attacked for reducing literature too much to an individual's desire, for blurring the historical and social meanings embedded in works, and for overlooking the idea that the starting point of meaning is not a single author but the combination of countless existing linguistic and cultural codes, as Roland Barthes argued.

That does not make Freud's question invalid. Not every daydream becomes literature, but a reader may still wipe away tears at someone's private confession. Private daydreams are transformed into public pleasure. We often witness the moment when my desire becomes our story.

[Reporter adamhlavac]

This article has been translated by GripLabs Mingo AI.