In his text, "Creative writers and Day-dreaming", Sigmund Freud explores the psychoanalytic interpretations of literature and attempts to trace the close structural and functional relationship between the processes of creative writing and day dreaming. The most rational method to study the processes of the mind is to trace the motives of activities akin to the human mental process. A clear perception of the actions of the self and those of others is by reaching the fact that similar actions involve similar motives, desires and beliefs. Freud describes the theoretical value of the dream as that of a "paradigm" as "the first member" of a class of phenomena including " hysterical phobias, obsessions and delusions."
With regard to its speculative nature, Freudian Criticism is broadly concerned with the quest, discovery and analysis of connections between the artist and his work of art. Undertaking a Freudian interpretation, it is possible to relate the mental process of the creative writer and the dream process of a daydreamer. The unconscious like the literary artifact?(poem, novel or play) makes indirect expressions of repressed emotions through images, symbols and metaphors.
The source of creative energy is too mysterious to be explained in direct, explicit and concrete terms. The only means of finding an explanation would be to trace the source of a similar pattern of activity. Since every unit of the human race has the capacity to indulge in imagination but only a few have the gift to express it, the process of discovering a common link would be to explore the collective imagination
The child at play is the elemental linkage to creative activity. The adult dreamer differs in the manifestation of his activity because he separates wish fulfilling dream from wish denying reality by repressing the conscious and relegating the unconscious. This reluctance is based on the active participation of the super ego of the adult dreamer. Freud arrives at the hypothesis that every neurosis is the hidden fantasy of every healthy mind.
The creative writer according to Freud, is analogous to the day dreamer. Applying his dream model to the creative process, Freud arrives at the fact that a work of art is the wish fulfillment of the artist. Freud applies the time schema to the creative process of the artist in order to reveal the analogy between creative writing and day dreaming. Just as a wish fulfilling day dream is born out of the dreamer's provocative present through linkages with an infantile past; the writer's work of art is the wish fulfillment born out of the writer's inspirational present through linkage with the infantile memory.
Thus any work of art reveals the influence of the present inspiring moment and the past infantile memory. Freud concludes that just as a day dreamer substitutes the play of childhood, the creative writer of art too is the surrogate for the child's play.The contrast between a daydreamer and a creative artist is seen in the latter's capacity to make his fantasy a source of pleasure and liberate deeper pleasure of the human psyche by formal and aesthetic techniques. Freud equates the creative writer and the daydreamer by implying that while creative writing imposes the pattern of desire, belief and action;day-dreaming follows the pattern of motive, wish and dream.
