creative writers and daydreaming essay

The Uncanny

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“Screen Memories”

“The Creative Writer and Daydreaming”

“Family Romances”

Part 1, “Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood”

Part 2, “Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood”

Part 3, “Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood”

Part 4, “Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood”

Part 5, “Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood”

Part 6, “Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood”

Part 1, “The Uncanny”

Part 2, “The Uncanny”

Part 3, “The Uncanny”

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“The Creative Writer and Daydreaming” Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Essay summary: “the creative writer and daydreaming”.

In this essay, Freud explicitly examines the relationship between literary analysis and psychoanalysis. The essay begins with the memorable and oft-quoted line: “We may perhaps say that every child at play behaves like a writer” (25). He then adds that “the opposite of play is not seriousness–it is reality” (26). Freud continues by explaining that rather than forgoing the pleasure we once took in playing in adolescence, humans replace play with fantasy. People’s fantasies are less easily observable than children’s play, and adults are generally ashamed of these secret desires.

In his psychoanalytic practice, Freud has learned that healthy and neurotic people both fantasize, but happy people do not, only dissatisfied ones, as “every fantasy [is] wish fulfillment, correcting the unhappy reality” (28). Fantasies are either ambitious or erotic. Fantasies also inhabit three time periods: the present impression, which has aroused the desire; the past memory of an earlier experience; and the future fulfillment of this desire. For instance, an orphaned youth might fantasize about gaining employment and marrying into a wealthy family to repossess themselves of a happy childhood. Fantasies proliferate prior to a lapse into neurosis or psychosis.

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Freud on Creative Writing and Daydreaming

By maria popova.

Predictably, Freud begins by tracing the subject matter to its roots in childhood, stressing, as Anaïs Nin eloquently did — herself trained in psychoanalysis — the importance of emotional investment in creative writing :

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, rearranges 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.’ 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.

He then considers, as Henry Miller did in his famous creative routine three decades later, the time scales of the creative process:

The relation of phantasy to time is in general very important. We may say that it hovers, as it ware, 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 here it harks back to a memory of an earlier experience (usually an infantile one) in which this wish was fulfilled; and now it creates a situation relating to the future which represents the fulfillment 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.

He synthesizes the parallel between creative writing and play:

A piece of creative writing, like a day-dream, is a continuation of, and a substitute for, what was once the play of childhood.

He goes on to explore the secretive nature of our daydreams, suggesting that an element of shame keeps us from sharing them with others — perhaps what Jack Kerouac meant when he listed the unspeakable visions of the individual as one of his iconic beliefs and techniques for prose — and considers how the creative writer transcends that to achieve pleasure in the disclosure of these fantasies:

How the writer accomplishes this is his innermost secret; the essential ars poetica lies in the technique of overcoming the feeling of repulsion in us which is undoubtedly connected with the barriers that rise between each single ego and the others. We can guess two of the methods used by this technique. The writer softens the character of his egoistic day-dreams by altering and disguising it, and he bribes us by the purely formal — that is, aesthetic — yield of pleasure which he offers us in the presentation of his phantasies. We give the name of an incentive bonus , or a fore-pleasure , to a yield of pleasure such as this, which is offered to us so as to make possible the release of still greater pleasure arising from deeper psychical sources. In my opinion, all the aesthetic pleasure which a creative writer affords us has the character of a fore-pleasure of this kind, and our actual enjoyment of an imaginative work proceeds from a liberation of tensions in our minds. It may even be that not a little of this effect is due to the writer’s enabling us thenceforward to enjoy our own day-dreams without self-reproach or shame.

For more famous insights on writing, see Kurt Vonnegut’s 8 rules for a great story , David Ogilvy’s 10 no-bullshit tips , Henry Miller’s eleven commandments , Jack Kerouac’s 30 beliefs and techniques , John Steinbeck’s six pointers , and Susan Sontag’s synthesized learnings .

— Published October 15, 2012 — https://www.themarginalian.org/2012/10/15/freud-creative-writers-and-day-dreaming/ —

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Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming | Sigmund Freud | Psychoanalytic Criticism | Reading Material

Check out my complete reading list recommendations on my YouTube Channel for Tackling the Subjective Part of Jamia's M.A. English Exam: https://youtu.be/lR6sTEQT_kI?si=e7IZRHwMVM7ElLBy A Crucial Reading Material to Attempt An Essay on Psychoanalytic Criticism in Jamia Millia Islamia's M.A. English Entrance Exam. Summary of the Essay: In "Creative Writers and Daydreaming," Freud explores the connection between daydreaming, creativity, and the unconscious mind. He suggests that creative writing is a form of wish fulfilment, allowing writers to express repressed desires and fantasies. Freud argues that the act of writing serves as a means of turning unconscious thoughts into conscious ones, providing a cathartic outlet for the writer. He also discusses the role of identification with characters in literature and how it reflects the writer's own desires and conflicts. Overall, Freud's essay delves into the psychological underpinnings of literary creativity.

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Ayla Michelle Demir

In producing this essay, I have enjoyed exploring twenty four volumes of The Complete Psychological Works of the founder of Psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud (1856-1939). His essays that I read for the first time in the duration of the Exploring Creativity psychoanalytic psychology course are, A Dream is the Fulfilment of a Wish (1900), Creative Writers and Day Dreaming (1907), Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood (1910), The Moses of Michaelangelo (1914), On Transience (1915), and Dostoevsky and Parricide(1927). I also discovered several other essays of Freud’s that deal specifically with creativity, but unfortunately due to limits of space and time, I could not study them all. However in the bibliography, you will find many of Freud’s essays listed that I have read in previous years, so have contributed towards my current level of understanding of psychoanalysis. To help structure this essay, I found it necessary to use paragraph headings relevant to a Classical Freudian understanding of the nature of creativity. I hope the text is sufficiently integrated, flows and makes some sense.........

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Creativity is one of the areas which continuously attracts attention. In an interdisciplinary spirit, this article focuses on the dynamics of creativity with respect to Freudian psychoanalytical thought processes and Jaspers’ conception of a boundary situation. This effort is correlated with the newest research findings in cognitive neuroscience and neurocognitive psychology of creativity. Philosophical research is also brought in to explain the activity of creative thought and a new conception of creativity is offered, with a third thought process used, along with a miniature boundary situation. This represents a development and extension of the original ideas of Sigmund Freud and Karl Jaspers. The current article thus constitutes an examination of the intersection of creativity research, the metapsychology of Sigmund Freud, and the existential philosophy of Karl Jaspers. It makes it a neuro-philosophical discussion par excellence and represents both a theoretical project and translation. Subsequently, a novel conception is offered, namely that creativity as unique human experience is illuminated in the miniature of boundary situation as controlled disinhibition of the intellect or regression in the name of the ego and as controlled spiral movement via dialectical “jumps” or “leaps.”

Liran Razinsky

What are the stakes of writing and publishing, of moving from intimate writing to the public sphere? Examining this question in the case of Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams, read here as an autobiographical text, this paper explores the intricate nexus of ambition, death and writing. Freud is possessed by the possibility of becoming famous, a public persona, immortal. His route to achieving this is the publication of The Interpretation of Dreams. He aspires to greatness, and yet the very project that is supposed to secure it is fragile and insecure; the very project entails a risk. The same text that could secure one’s immortality becomes the locus of one’s absence. Publishing renders the most intimate text public and at a distance from oneself. The wish for glory cannot be assuaged through a published text, which is a public affair. One cannot make a name for oneself.

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On Freud's Creative Writers and Day-dreaming

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This volume contains Freud's essay 'Creative Writers and Daydreaming' which explores the origins of daydreaming, and its relation to the play of children and the creative process. Each contributor offers an insightful commentary on the essay.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Part one | 13  pages, creative writers and day-dreaming (1908), part two | 169  pages, discussion of “creative writers and day-dreaming”, chapter | 16  pages, a masterpiece of illumination, chapter | 6  pages, a modern view of freud’s “creative writers and day-dreaming”, chapter | 14  pages, the clinical value of daydreams and a note on their role in character analysis, chapter | 12  pages, some reflections on phantasy and creativity, chapter | 17  pages, unconscious phantasy, identification, and projection in the creative writer, chapter | 25  pages, reality and unreality in phantasy and fiction, chapter | 15  pages, “creative writers and day-dreaming”, chapter | 11  pages, creative writers and dream-work-alpha, chapter | 31  pages, fantasy and beyond, chapter | 20  pages.

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Creative Writing and Daydreaming by Sigmund Freud

He suggests that the superficial pleasure of the work releases to deeper psychic pleasure and thereby liberate tensions. Thus, reading a text is known the psyche of the author.

Human beings have innumerable wishes and desires that can't be expressed freely due to social boundary, morality and other restrictions. The desires remain suppressed in our unconscious level of mind. Somehow, we try to express those desires and, according to Freud, there are three ways to do so- Sex, tongue slips and writing . Artists take help of writing to express his repressed desires of their childhood. He fantasizes and creates daydreams in place of playing games of their childhood. Through writing, the author expresses his desires. He remembers his golden past and wants to express the experience of the past in the present but can't do so. Therefore, he fantasizes and manifests his wishes in the form of art.

During childhood, a child plays with the mother's body but later on he identifies himself with fatherly figure, who comes in between mother and child , and the bodily unity with the mother is broken but the desire to play with mother's body remains throughout his life. Children forget their imagination by indulging themselves in games. The writer has nostalgic towards the blissful past and the same romantic nostalgia becomes immense energy for creativity. So, there is some sort of similarity between children and writers. Both use their emotion and imagination seriously in game and writing.

According to Freud, wishes or desires are divided in to two parts as: Ambition : Ambition, which is found only in male not in female, is to uplift the personality. Erotic Wish: This wish is noticed in both- male and female. Freud focuses Id that enforces erotic wish in a person. Id is an irrational and immoral force located at the unconscious level of human mind. It guides sexual desire. However, Idic factor is controlled by a stricter factor, which carries the principal of morality, value and humanitarian, called Superego. Superego does not let id express those desires. There is the conflict between Id and superego. But Ego, that works with the reality principle stands as a mediator between id and superego. When unfulfilled desires are suppressed and pushed back in our unconscious, they manifest in the form of dream, tongue slips and literature. It is ego that helps the writers to express the repressed desires in a socially accepted form, not directly but in disguised form.

There are three phases upon which an artist undergoes while creating a work of art, they are: A. Condensation B. Latent C. Substitution E. Symbolic/ image stage manifest

The first two are the psychological stages that are invisible located in mind but the third one is expressed in language.

Author's mind possesses many desires so he selects the wanted desires but leaves out the unwanted desires. Those selected desires are combined in to single desire, and such process is called condensation. In substitution, those erotic and socially unaccepted desires are substituted by non-erotic ideas and are changed in to socially accepted one. In the symbolic stage, author takes help of symbols of pond, cave, ring and such other circular and concave symbols refer to ' vegina' whereas convex and vertical symbolizes like hill, stick, tree, finger etc, refer to ' Phallus'. While reading a text, the readers identify themselves with the writers and get the aesthetic pleasure.

In releasing unfulfilled desires, the poet uses' censors' but the meaning can be accomplished through analysis. He says, this reading is allegorical. The day dreaming and creative works both transforms the mental contents in to something where the latter is more creative and interesting.

Freud also talks of two kinds of dreams: latent and manifest. Latent dream can only be thought of in our mental imagination, which cannot be seen but manifest dream is the revelation of the disguised one, which we perceive.

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• American Imago

• Daydreaming, Phantasy and the Artist's Process: A Response to "Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming
• Patricia Townsend
• Johns Hopkins University Press
• Volume 78, Number 4, Winter 2021
• pp. 659-683
• 10.1353/aim.2021.0033
• View Citation

Additional Information

• Patricia Townsend (bio)

"a real living form is the natural result of the […] adventure of his spirit into the unknown" —Georgia O'Keeffe 1

Freud begins "Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming" by wondering "from what sources that strange being, the creative writer, draws his material, and how he manages to make such an impression on us." He goes on to say that "if we ask him, the creative writer gives us no explanation, or none that is satisfactory" (1908a, p. 143). But although Freud was in touch with a number of literary figures (Holland, 1998), he does not give any evidence of having asked them about their creative processes. Instead, drawing a parallel between childhood play and adult daydreams, he claims that creative writing stems from wish-fulfilling phantasies and is an escape from the frustrating bounds of external reality. That is, Freud suggests that both daydreaming and creative writing are defensive activities that serve to avoid the acceptance of painful truths. In order to make this point, he needs to focus only on light romantic fiction in which the sexual and ambitious wishes of the hero are satisfied. Freud himself knew that his argument would not hold good in relation to great literary works or, indeed, great art.

Freud's portrayal of the work of creative writers (and, by implication, of all artists) as the manifestation of wish-fulfilling, shameful daydreams has been criticized by many writers in the creative arts. For instance, painter and critic Roger Fry complained that Freud made pronouncements about artists without acknowledging that "Artists are a group of people of very different temperaments and some of them are actuated by quite different motives, and exercise quite different psychical [End Page 659] activities, from others" (Fry, 1924, p. 5). Freud's theories about the creative process, he thought, only apply to second-rate artists. Psychoanalyst Ronald Britton makes a similar point when he writes that "Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming" is limited in that "it does not adequately differentiate between the truth-seeking function of some fiction and the truth-evading function of other fiction—that is between serious creative writing and escapist literature" (Britton, 1995, pp. 82-83). Britton points out that in 1907, when Freud wrote the paper, he was interested in developing his thinking about the relation of the pleasure principle to the reality principle. He had discovered that, in dreams, the dreamer's wishful phantasies can be given free rein without the limitations of reality, and he wanted to demonstrate that daydreaming and creative writing can operate in a similar way. This paper was written early in Freud's writing career, and his views changed and broadened over the following years, but he never revised his daydreaming paper in relation to his later discoveries.

Part of the problem with "Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming" lies in the meaning that Freud attributes to the term "daydreaming." He chooses to use the word in a restricted sense to refer to wish-fulfilling phantasy based on sexual or ambitious frustrations. He does not enter into a discussion of the nature of unconscious phantasy, although there is an implication that unconscious repressed wishes emerge in disguised form in daydreams as they do in night dreams. In "Hysterical Phantasies and their Relation to Bisexuality" (1908b), another work published in the same year, he wrote that unconscious phantasies "have either been there all along and have been formed in the unconscious; or—as is more often the case—they were once conscious phantasies, daydreams, and have since been purposely forgotten and have become unconscious through 'repression'" (Freud, 1908b, p. 161). In "Creative Writers," Freud does not consider phantasies that have "been there all along and have been formed in the unconscious." Yet it may well be these phantasies that compel the serious artist or writer to pursue their quest.

But the term "daydreaming" does not need to have such a narrow compass. Some contemporary artists embrace it when describing their own work. For instance, the British artist Katie [End Page 660] Paterson describes the beginning of her creative process as daydreaming. Her...

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Freud and the Creative Writer: An analysis of Writing, Dreaming and the Interpretation of Dreams

Article sidebar, main article content.

Freud well known for his psychoanalytic theory relates to art in general but focuses on literature in particular. In his thought provoking essays Creative Writers and Daydreaming and The Interpretation of Dreams , Freud like many other writers before him tries to analyze from where the creative writers draw his inspiration and materials and why they have such a tremendous influence on the readers. Freud links this to the activity closest to creative writing and draws our attention to the unconscious or suppressed emotions of our childhood. Splendidly blending science and literature, Freud draws our attention and forces us to rethink the significance of the unconscious minds. Comparing fantasies, the plays of children and dreams, the paper tries to explore and understand Freud’s significance in the contemporary literary scenario. It aims at analyzing the perennial question as to what prompts a creative piece of literature and the forces that distinguishes one man form another even though all men may be ‘poets at heart.’

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License .

Freud, Sigmund. The Interpretation of Dreams. London: Hogarth Press, 1907. Print.

Freud, Sigmund. Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming. The Freud Reader. London: Vintage: 436-443, 1995. Print.

Johnson, Samuel. Preface to Shakespeare: A Facsimile of the 1778 Edition. Print.

Jones, E. Hamlet and Oedipus, in Bevington, David Twentieth Century Interpretations of Hamlet. New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1968. Print.

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Callard F, Staines K, Wilkes J, editors. The Restless Compendium: Interdisciplinary Investigations of Rest and Its Opposites. Basingstoke (UK): Palgrave Macmillan; 2016. doi: 10.1007/978-3-319-45264-7_4

The Restless Compendium: Interdisciplinary Investigations of Rest and Its Opposites.

Chapter 4 writing and daydreaming.

Hazel Morrison .

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This chapter was conceived during an interdisciplinary psychological experiment, in which geographer Hazel Morrison asked participants to record and describe in face-to-face interviews their everyday experiences of mind wandering. Questions abound concerning the legitimacy of interviewee narratives when describing subjective experience, and the limits of language in achieving ‘authentic’ description. These concerns increase when looking at mind-wandering experiences, because of the absence of meta-cognition during periods of self-generated thought. Here, Hazel explores the tensions at play in twentieth-century discourses around the self, fantasy and expression.

The experience of mind wandering – which tends, now, to be placed by the discipline of psychology under the umbrella term ‘self-generated thought’, along with associated states such as daydream, fantasy and reverie – is recognized as a ubiquitous component of everyday life. 1 ‘[I]n day-dreaming’, wrote Jerome Singer, ‘all of us are in a sense authorities because of the very private nature of our experiences’. 2 Yet when looking to the history of psychological research that underpins contemporary understandings of mind wandering, ‘all of us’, that is, the generic you and I who experience our minds wandering every day, are notably absent. This isn’t to say that the voices, experiences and narratives of everyday people are entirely obscured. Rather the reliability – or, one might say, the authority – of the subjective viewpoint is repeatedly denigrated. 3

This, argue Schooler and Schreiber, is because although our experience of mind wandering is in itself undeniable, our ability to accurately represent our experience is frequently inadequate. 4 A momentary loss of ‘meta-cognition’, or self-reflexive awareness of our mental state, is commonly recognized to characterize the transition to the mind wandering state. 5 And if we are unable to recognize our minds having wandered, the validity of our accounts of these fugitive mental processes must be questionable. There are historical precedents to this problematic. The psychologist William James, for example, famously compared the attempt to capture such fleeting subjectivity as that of grasping ‘a spinning top to catch its motion, or trying to turn up the gas quickly enough to see how the darkness looks’. 6

I agree that the aforementioned denigration of the authority of subjective experience may be traced to this long-standing issue of meta-cognition, and its absence during periods of mind wandering. However, James recognized a second impediment to introspection, which, until recently, has received little attention within mainstream psychology. This he identified as the limitation of language, claiming an ‘absence of a special vocabulary for subjective facts’, which hindered the study of all ‘but the very coarsest of them’. 7 More than a century on, Callard, Smallwood and Margulies, in a commentary on scientific investigations of the mind at ‘rest’, recognize a similar problematic. A ‘historical bias’, they write, ‘toward explicating external processing has meant the psychological vocabulary for describing internally generated mental content is relatively stunted.’ 8 Nonetheless, they suggest there exist pockets of literature, now ‘largely unknown or disregarded in cognitive psychology’ which once used heterogeneous methods to study and elicit states of ‘daydream, fantasy, mind wandering and dissociation’. 9

To bring some of these methods to greater visibility, this chapter looks back to the period 1908–23, a period during which daydream and fantasy were experimentally explored through diverse introspective practices, ranging from the free association methods of psychoanalysis to stream of consciousness literary techniques. Reading Sigmund Freud’s famous essay ‘Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming’ (1908), in relation both to his daughter Anna Freud’s essay ‘The Relation of Beating-Phantasies to a Day-Dream’ (1923) and to Virginia Woolf’s short story ‘The Mark on the Wall’ (1919), this chapter explores the place of writing within complexes of daydream and fantasy. These interconnected texts make clear the complexities of articulating inner, mental phenomena through the medium of the written word. In so doing, they offer additional paths through which we might understand why the subjective viewpoint has often been denigrated or downplayed within the history of daydreaming and mind wandering research. i

• Multiplicity of the Self and the Fragility of Self-Representation

Sigmund Freud’s essay ‘Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming’ (1908) is known for its long-standing contribution to studies of daydream and fantasy, phenomena now frequently brought into confluence with mind wandering. 10 Freud recognized imaginative activities such as daydreaming, ‘phantasy’ and building ‘castles in the air’ as normal human behaviour. Yet despite the ubiquitous nature of daydreaming, he understood it to necessitate concealment. 11

Why? Freud identified socially unacceptable egoistic and erotic wishes as significant motive forces that furnish the contents of fantasy and daydream. Freud wrote of the ‘well-brought-up young woman’ being ‘allowed a minimum of erotic desire’, and of the young man who must learn to subdue an ‘excess of self-regard’ to gain acceptance in society. At the extreme, to allow one’s daydreams to become ‘over-luxuriant’ and overpowerful was seen to risk the onset of ‘neurosis or psychosis’. 12

Only the creative writer, argued Freud, was uniquely able to articulate ‘his [sic] personal daydreams without self-reproach or shame’. The aesthetic qualities of prose were seen by Freud to ‘soften’, ‘disguise’ and sublimate the egotistical elements of the daydream, allowing author and reader alike covert indulgence in the pleasure of fantasizing. 13 ii

Creativity, Self and Sublimation: ‘The Mark on the Wall’

Virginia Woolf’s short story ‘The Mark on the Wall’ (1919) exemplifies the skill of the creative writer in giving expression to daydream, reverie and fantasy. Like Freud, Woolf recognizes the commonality of the experience of daydreaming: even the most ‘modest mouse-coloured people’, claims the narrator, cherish moments of self-referential imaginative indulgence, despite believing ‘genuinely that they dislike to hear their own praises.’ 14 Moreover, Woolf’s text addresses how, for daydream and fantasy to be freely expressed, the writer must deploy tactics of disguise and deflection.

Woolf’s experimental approach to depicting inner monologue mimics the rhythms and effects of the wandering mind, as her writing gravitates from domestic space towards thoughts of childhood fancy. The sight of burning coals evokes description of a ‘calvacade of red knights … an old fancy, an automatic fancy, made as a child perhaps’. Distracted, her thoughts ‘swarm upon a new object’: a poorly perceived mark, ‘black upon the white wall …’. Rich and humorous, her prose flits from some current impression (a bowl, flower, cigarette smoke) to self-referential thoughts and fantasies. Intermittently her train of thought returns to the mark on the wall: lifting this new object up ‘as ants carry a blade of straw so feverishly’, before leaving it to be picked up later, afresh. 15

While Woolf’s text meanders, and on occasion tumbles, from one thought to the next, a succession of passages offers the opportunity to reflect on the thought processes that permit fantasized, egotistical self-expression. ‘I wish I could hit upon a pleasant track of thought’, states the narrator, ‘a track indirectly reflecting credit upon myself’. These, she continues, ‘are not thoughts directly praising oneself’. Rather, they express indirectly a figure of self, ‘lovingly, stealthily … not openly adoring’. This, declares Woolf’s narrator, ‘is the beauty of them’. 16

Woolf portrays daydreaming as a mode of thought that allows for the creation of a sense of self invested with depth, colour and romance. Yet the author also recognizes an inherent danger in giving voice to daydream and fantasy. Woolf’s text hints at deep motivations for concealment and sublimation, for like Freud, she writes of the urge to protect the idealized self-image from the gaze of the external world. If this idealized self-image were to be openly recognized, its integrity would become threatened. To have one’s fantasized sense-of-self disappear is, for the narrator, to become ‘only a shell of a person’, as seen by others. Indeed, writes Woolf, ‘what an airless, shallow, bald, prominent world it becomes!’ 17

For the protagonist of the story, the destruction of an inner self-image that exists within the realm of fantasy is a genuine threat. Fear lies with the potential for ‘idolatry’, for a sense of self being ‘made ridiculous, or too unlike the original to be believed in any longer’. In this sense, Woolf’s short story suggests why daydream, fantasy and mind wandering are states of mind that resist introspective redescription: to give self-expression to the wandering mind is to risk damaging the inner self. Writing, I suggest, emerges as a crucial intermediary for Woolf, through which the fantasized self may be given self-expression. 18

• Fragmentation

[I]n the daydream each new addition or repetition of a separate scene afford[s] anew opportunity for pleasurable instinctual gratification. In the written story … the direct pleasure gain is abandoned. 19

Anna Freud – as the quotation above from her essay ‘The Relation of Beating-Phantasies to a Day-Dream’ (1923) indicates – offers another model for the complex relationship between daydreaming, subjectivity and writing. In this essay, she presents the case of a young female patient, characterized by a strong propensity to daydream. The girl, Anna Freud writes, had a history of fantasy thinking in which two polarized thought patterns dominated. By encouraging the girl, during analysis, to express the contents of these daydreams, Anna Freud explores how processes of repression and transformation link the inner daydream to its articulation in the ‘real’ world. 20 In doing so, she postulates more precisely than Sigmund Freud how daydreaming experience is transformed and transfigured once communicated through the written word.

In Anna Freud’s essay, the girl’s early fantasies of beating are shown to have culminated in masturbatory climax. As the girl aged, these fantasies were increasingly repressed as the girl associated them with shame and displeasure. The girl was then reported to have developed seemingly converse daydreams, which she labelled ‘nice stories’. These are understood by Anna Freud as the transformation of the beating fantasy into stories acceptable to the girl’s sense of morality, which yet enable a similar degree of pleasurable gratification.

In both the beating fantasies and ‘nice’ daydreams, Freud relates that the girl ‘did not feel bound to work out a logical sequence of events’ of the kind that would characterize a written narrative. Rather she scanned forward and back to differing phases of the tale; she might ‘interpose a new situation between two already completed and contemporaneous scenes’, to the extent that the ‘frame of her stories was in danger of being shattered’. 21 Each repetition and addition to the daydream was understood to enable renewed opportunity for ‘pleasurable instinctual gratification’. Yet when the daydream became ‘especially obtrusive’, the girl turned to writing, reportedly ‘as a defence against excessive preoccupation with it’. 22

Anna Freud noted a sharp difference between the unbridled, multi-layered sequence of events that made up the daydream, and the structured, novelistic quality of daydreams transformed into a written story. iii No longer a series of overlaid, repetitive episodes, culminating time and again in pleasurable climax, once written down the ‘finished story’ reportedly did ‘not elicit any such excitement’ as during the experiencing of the daydream. Yet this, concluded Anna Freud, put her patient ‘on the road that leads from her fantasy life back to reality’. 23 Like Sigmund Freud, who wrote that even if an individual were to communicate his or her phantasies they would leave the listener cold, Anna Freud recognized the role of language in transforming the affects that accompany the daydream. Outside the psychoanalytic encounter, fantasy thoughts are placed within a more linear, textual framework that flattens the dynamic nature of such thinking. iv

Taking these three texts together, we might relate the suspicion of everyday introspective accounts of mind wandering at least in part to the complex relations tying daydream and fantasy to the written word. Language, embedded within distinct social contexts, is in many ways considered duplicitous in relation to the contents of consciousness. Even if literary techniques, such as Woolf ‘s, attempt to evoke the rhythms and affects characteristic of the wandering mind, writing itself is the site of an opacity that accompanies the unfurling of inner life into the social world. As James noted more than a century ago, the ‘ lack of a word’ imposes limitations on language’s ability to represent inner experience, complicating any straightforward relationship between experience and expression. 24

• Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the Volkswagen Foundation.

See Chap. 5 .

Cf. Chap. 7 .

Cf. Chap. 10 .

Cf. Chap. 6 .

Jonathan Smallwood and Jonathan W. Schooler, ‘The Restless Mind’, Psychological Bulletin 132, no. 6 (2006): 947. [ PubMed : 17073528 ]

Jerome L. Singer, The Inner World of Daydreaming (New York: Harper, 1966), 6.

See also Anthony Jack and Andreas Roepstorff, ‘Introspection and Cognitive Brain Mapping: From Stimulus-Response to Script-Report’, Trends in Cognitive Sciences 6, no. 8 (2002): 333–39 [ PubMed : 12140083 ]; Felicity Callard, Jonathan Smallwood, and Daniel S. Margulies, ‘Default Positions: How Neuroscience’s Historical Legacy Has Hampered Investigation of the Resting Mind’, Frontiers in Psychology 3 (2012): 321 [ PMC free article : PMC3437462 ] [ PubMed : 22973252 ].

Jonathan Schooler and Charles A. Schreiber, ‘Experience, Meta-Consciousness, and the Paradox of Introspection’, Journal of Consciousness Studies 11, no. 7–8 (2004): 17–18.

Jerome L. Singer, ‘Daydreaming, Consciousness, and Self-Representations: Empirical Approaches to Theories of William James and Sigmund Freud’, Journal of Applied Psychoanalytic Studies , 5, no. 4 (2003), 464.

William James, The Principles of Psychology. Vol. 1 (New York: Dover, 1950), 244.

Ibid., 195.

Callard, Smallwood, and Margulies, ‘Default Positions’, 3.

Sigmund Freud, ‘Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming’ (1908), in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud , trans. and ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press: The Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1953–74), 9: 144–45.

Ibid., 144–5.

Ibid., 146–7.

Ibid., 152.

Virginia Woolf, The Mark on the Wall (Richmond, Surrey: Hogarth Press, 1919), 4.

Anna Freud, ‘The Relation of Beating-Phantasies to a Day-Dream Freud’ (1923), in Introduction to Psychoanalysis: Lectures for Child Analysts and Teachers, 1922–1935 (London: Hogarth Press and The Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1974), 154–5.

Ibid., 157.

Ibid., 146.

Ibid., 154–5.

James, The Principles of Psychology. Vol. 1, 195–6.

• Further Reading
• Callard, Felicity, Jonathan Smallwood, Johannes Golchert, and Daniel S. Margulies. ‘The Era of the Wandering Mind? Twenty-First Century Research on Self-Generated Mental Activity’. Frontiers in Psychology: Perception Science 4 (2013): 891. [ PMC free article : PMC3866909 ] [ PubMed : 24391606 ]
• Corballis, Michael C. The Wandering Mind: What the Brain Does When You’re Not Looking . Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2015.
• Freud, Sigmund. The Interpretation of Dreams . Translated by Joyce Crick. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.
• Schooler, Jonathan W, Jonathan Smallwood, Kalina Christoff, Todd C. Handy, Erik D. Reichle and Michael A. Sayette. ‘Meta-Awareness, Perceptual Decoupling and the Wandering Mind’. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 15. no. 7 (2011): 319–26. [ PubMed : 21684189 ]
• Woolf, Virginia To the Lighthouse . Edited by David Bradshaw. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.

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Monographs, or book chapters, which are outputs of Wellcome Trust funding have been made freely available as part of the Wellcome Trust's open access policy

• Cite this Page Morrison H. Writing and Daydreaming. In: Callard F, Staines K, Wilkes J, editors. The Restless Compendium: Interdisciplinary Investigations of Rest and Its Opposites. Basingstoke (UK): Palgrave Macmillan; 2016. Chapter 4. doi: 10.1007/978-3-319-45264-7_4
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The Unique Burial of a Child of Early Scythian Time at the Cemetery of Saryg-Bulun (Tuva)

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Pages:  379-406

In 1988, the Tuvan Archaeological Expedition (led by M. E. Kilunovskaya and V. A. Semenov) discovered a unique burial of the early Iron Age at Saryg-Bulun in Central Tuva. There are two burial mounds of the Aldy-Bel culture dated by 7th century BC. Within the barrows, which adjoined one another, forming a figure-of-eight, there were discovered 7 burials, from which a representative collection of artifacts was recovered. Burial 5 was the most unique, it was found in a coffin made of a larch trunk, with a tightly closed lid. Due to the preservative properties of larch and lack of air access, the coffin contained a well-preserved mummy of a child with an accompanying set of grave goods. The interred individual retained the skin on his face and had a leather headdress painted with red pigment and a coat, sewn from jerboa fur. The coat was belted with a leather belt with bronze ornaments and buckles. Besides that, a leather quiver with arrows with the shafts decorated with painted ornaments, fully preserved battle pick and a bow were buried in the coffin. Unexpectedly, the full-genomic analysis, showed that the individual was female. This fact opens a new aspect in the study of the social history of the Scythian society and perhaps brings us back to the myth of the Amazons, discussed by Herodotus. Of course, this discovery is unique in its preservation for the Scythian culture of Tuva and requires careful study and conservation.

Keywords: Tuva, Early Iron Age, early Scythian period, Aldy-Bel culture, barrow, burial in the coffin, mummy, full genome sequencing, aDNA

Information about authors: Marina Kilunovskaya (Saint Petersburg, Russian Federation). Candidate of Historical Sciences. Institute for the History of Material Culture of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Dvortsovaya Emb., 18, Saint Petersburg, 191186, Russian Federation E-mail: [email protected] Vladimir Semenov (Saint Petersburg, Russian Federation). Candidate of Historical Sciences. Institute for the History of Material Culture of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Dvortsovaya Emb., 18, Saint Petersburg, 191186, Russian Federation E-mail: [email protected] Varvara Busova  (Moscow, Russian Federation).  (Saint Petersburg, Russian Federation). Institute for the History of Material Culture of the Russian Academy of Sciences.  Dvortsovaya Emb., 18, Saint Petersburg, 191186, Russian Federation E-mail:  [email protected] Kharis Mustafin  (Moscow, Russian Federation). Candidate of Technical Sciences. Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology.  Institutsky Lane, 9, Dolgoprudny, 141701, Moscow Oblast, Russian Federation E-mail:  [email protected] Irina Alborova  (Moscow, Russian Federation). Candidate of Biological Sciences. Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology.  Institutsky Lane, 9, Dolgoprudny, 141701, Moscow Oblast, Russian Federation E-mail:  [email protected] Alina Matzvai  (Moscow, Russian Federation). Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology.  Institutsky Lane, 9, Dolgoprudny, 141701, Moscow Oblast, Russian Federation E-mail:  [email protected]

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