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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 Fulfillment 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 Freuds 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 Freuds essays listed that I have read
in previous years, so have contributed towards my current level of understanding of
psychoanalysis.
Play
In his Creative Writers and Day Dreaming (1907) essay, Freud considers the nature of
creativity and traces it and general imaginative psychological activity ideation (creating
new ideas) day dreams and phantasy - to childhood, and he links aesthetic pleasure with
fore pleasure and sexual pleasure. He believed everyone is creative and that an artist
creating, psychologically does the same thing as a child. Watching children play, he
observed they gain an enormous amount of pleasure from it and rearrange things in the
world in new ways which please them. Society says the child is allowed to play and
experience pleasure and phantasies and children know their play is not reality. Here we
have the contrast between the individual childs pleasurable play, and the adults serious
world of society and reality. Freud explains that as children grow up and become adults,
they cease to play and give up the pleasure they gained from it. But he wondered whether
it is really possible to give up a pleasure once experienced and he thought actually, we can
never give anything up, only exchange one thing for another. According to Freud, what
appears to be a renunciation of pleasure, is really the formation of a substitute.
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If the objects are destroyed, or if they are lost to us, our capacity for
love, our libido, is once more liberated, and it can then either take other
objects instead, or can temporarily return to the ego. (1)
When a child grows up and becomes an adult, instead of playing with toys and loved
friends to the extent it did in childhood, he/she constructs day dreams and phantasies.
Likewise, the creative artist creates a world of its own in its mind, which it invests with
large amounts of emotion, while separating it from reality. For Freud the unreality i.e.
phantasy of the childs and artists world, is important.
Free Association
According to Freud, creativity occurs when phantasy is given free reign, and it is
hindered if reason examines too closely when creative energy flows. Free association was
his theory of ideas/images linked in a persons mind, that correspond to a complex
organization of memories. It is an invitation to the deepest unconscious instincts to express
themselves. The intellect withdraws its critical observation and trusts to a flow of ideas,
images, sounds, words, movements and gestures, in which the mind is directed to ends it
knows not. By permitting the mind to roam freely, unhampered by the egos conscious
restrictions, free association enables a flow of instinctual energy. Phrases such as stream
of consciousness, unloosening of the emotions and pouring out of the soul, all refer to an
unconscious release equivalent to the creative release of the artist. Freud used terms such
as thread, chain and train to describe a series of spontaneous free floating ideas and
images. In The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901), Jokes and Their Relation to the
Unconscious (1905), The Uncanny (1919) and other essays of his Collected Works, he
writes that free associations and works of art, like dreams, unexpected incidents,
mischievous behaviours, tics, slips of the tongue, punning, jokes, bungled actions, errors,
forgetting, spontaneous and accidental happenings, contain condensed, distorted,
substituted, fragmented, split off and displaced aspects of an individuals deepest
unconscious wishes, desires and fears.
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Symbolism
Symbolism, used extensively in Classical and Modern literature, theatre, painting,
sculpture and the plastic arts, embraces all forms of indirect communication and
representation. A symbol is an indirect representation of an unconscious unsatisfied wish
and unresolved conflict. It evokes something absent or some unfulfilled wish and acts as a
mediator in an indirect and disguised way, psychoanalytically through mechanisms of
distortion, fragmentation, displacement and condensation. In psychoanalytic psychology,
any substitutive formation is said to be symbolic e.g. phantasies, dreams, symptoms and
works of art, are all seen as symbolic expressions of a defensive conflict between
unconscious instinctual wishes and conscious ego defences. And in psychoanalysis
practice, the symbolic is a relation that links the manifest content/products of dreams and
behaviour i.e. letters words sounds images colours objects that are incomplete
compromised substitutive and false formations, to their hidden latent more complete and
deep meaning i.e. bodily stimuli, childhood wishes, desires, memories and conflicts.
Freud makes in his Creative Writers essay, is that many things that are unpleasant and
distressing in reality, such as fighting and killing, become a source of pleasure in art e.g.
action packed films, and many pleasurable things in phantasy e.g. an idealized hero, give
little enjoyment in reality.
According to Freud, the creative artist allows their audiences to enjoy their unconscious
wishes without self-reproach or shame, because if they expressed their intense instinctual
wishes in reality, they would no longer gain pleasure from them and would put others off.
However, when an artist expresses their unconscious wishes formerly through artwork,
he/she is said to soften the egoistic i.e. pleasure seeking nature of the intensely personal
desire, by altering and disguising it and offering the audience pleasure through the formal
presentation of a modified instinctual wish. Freud used the term aesthetic pleasure to
describe the pleasure offered to the audience through works of art, which makes possible
the satisfaction of unconscious wishes in the minds of the audience. According to Freud,
the artists and audiences enjoyment of art comes from, a liberation of tensions in our
minds. (3) It follows from this that unsatisfied tense people phantasize and create because,
the motive force of phantasies are unsatisfied wishes and every single
phantasy is the fulfillment of a wish, a correction of unsatisfying reality. (4)
caught by the paradox of memory. According to Freud, important experiences from early
childhood are not remembered, a psychological phenomenon refered to as Infantile
Amnesia. But apparently insignificant memories are remembered and spontaneously
present themselves with unusal persistence that contrasts with their banality. Such
apparently insignificant yet persistent memories are said to conceal unsatisfied
aggressive/erotic wishes/desires and like works of art, are a compromise between
instinctual wishes and psychicological denfense mechanisms. Screen memories then, are
compromise formations, like parapraxes i.e. bungled actions, mischievous behaviours,
slips of the tonge, wit, puns, play, jokes, phantasies, dreams, errors, accidents and
symptoms. In psychoanalysis, these products of the unconscious are said to be forms
taken by screen memories, attached to an unsatisfied instinctual wish/desire, expressed as a
persistent feeling that a person is ashamed of, so can only be indirectly admitted into
conscious awareness in a disguised form. In this way, both the unconscious wish and the
conscious mechanism of defence are satisfied in the creation of a compromise.
Instinctual energy is said to be relatively undetermined in regard to its object and is always
capable of changing it, so if a particular instinct cannot be satisfied, an individual can be
compensated by the satisfaction of another instinct, or by sublimation.
Sublimation
Freud thought all behavior originated from and is powered by instinctual libidinal
forces of nature, whose aims are often in conflict with societal and cultural directives.
Consequently, the concept of sublimation was formulated to describe psychological
processes in which instinctual desires are turned towards socially valued aims.
Sublimation was first conceptualized by Freud in his Three Essays on the Theory of
Sexuality (1905) essay, to account for human activity which has no apparent connection
with libido, but actually is motivated by the instinctual forces of nautre. Inspirations,
inventions, intellectual inquiry, political, religious and social struggles as well as the
struggle of artistic creation, are some of the sublimated activities described by Freud. In
his Civilized and Sexual Morality and Modern Nervous Illness (1908) essay, he writes
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Through the creative process of sublimation, aggressive and erotic instincts are
deflected, diverted and displaced from their original aim, without diminishing their
intensity, to socially acceptable and valuable aims, making repression unnecessary. This
capacity to substitute and exchange an original natural instinctual aim, for a modified
formal instinctual aim, which is no longer overtly erotic or aggressive but still
psychologically associated to the original instinctual aim, is the capacity for sublimation.
In the Civilized Sexual Morality essay, Freud goes on to say that cultural products such as
literature, theatre, painting, sclupture and the plastic arts,
stir up all the passions and encourage sensuality and a craving for pleasure
and contempt for every fundamental ethical principle and every ideal. (8)
This is because artistic and cultural products express and reflect an individuals
instinctual pressures, tensions, struggles and conflicts as well as the peace, beauty and
order within the psyche, and also express and reflect struggles/conflicts and harmonious
relations in the family, neighbourhood and the wider society, culture, religion, country, etc.
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References
1. Freud, S. (1995) On Transience (1915), in Vol. XIV, On the History of the Psychoanalytic
Movement, Papers on Meta-Psychology and Other Works. The Standard Edition of the Complete
Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. The Institute of Psychoanalysis and The Hogarth Press,
London. p.306
2. (1995) Creative Writers and Day Dreaming (1907), in Vol. IX, Delusions and Dreams in
Jensens Gradiva and Other Works. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of
Sigmund Freud. The Institute of Psychoanalysis and The Hogarth Press, London. p.149
3. ibid p.153
4. ibid p.146
5. ibid p.147
6. ibid p.148
7. (1995) Civilized Sexual Morality and Modern Nervous Illness (1908), in Vol. IX, Delusions
and Dreams in Jensens Gradiva and Other Works. The Standard Edition of the Complete
Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. The Institute of Psychoanalysis and The Hogarth Press,
London. p. 183
8. ibid p.184
9. (1955) Dostoevsky and Parricide (1927), in Vol. XXI, The Future of an Illusion,
Civilization and its Discontents and Other Works. The Standard Edition of the Complete
Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. The Institute of Psychoanalysis and The Hogarth Press,
London. p.177
10. (1995) On Transience (1915), in Vol. XIV, On the History of the Psychoanalytic
Movement, Papers on Meta-Psychology and Other Works. The Standard Edition of the Complete
Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. The Institute of Psychoanalysis and The Hogarth Press,
London. p.305
11. ibid p.306
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3
(1995) Screen Memories (1899), in Vol. III, Early Psychoanalytic Publications. The Standard
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4 (I) 4 (II) & 5
(1995) A Dream is the Fulfillment of a Wish, Distortion in Dreams (1900), in Vol. IV, The
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6
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7
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8
(1960) The Relation of Jokes to Dreams and to the Unconscious (1905), in Vol. VIII, Jokes and
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12
9
(1995) Creative Writers and Day Dreaming (1907), in Vol. IX, Delusions and Dreams in
Jensens Gradiva and Other Works. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of
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(1995) Civilized Sexual Morality and Modern Nervous Illness (1908), in Vol. IX, Delusions and
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10
(1995) Some Psychological Peculiarities of Obsessional Neurotics: Their Attitude Towards
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11
(1995) Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood (1910), in Vol. XI, Five Lectures of
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12
(1995) Remembering, Repeating and Working Through (1914), in Vol. XII, The Case of
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14
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13
14 PFL
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Vinci and Other Works. The Penguin Freud Library, Penguin Books, London.
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15 (I) (II)
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17
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19
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21
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