Freud proceeds to consider the nature of fantasy:
We may lay it down that a happy person never phantasies, only an unsatisfied one. The motive forces of phantasies are unsatisfied wishes, and every single phantasy is the fulfilment of a wish, a correction of an unsatisfying reality.13
Although not everyone who engages in fantasy becomes neurotic, and, as we shall see, creative people are a special case because their creative abilities make it possible for them to link their fantasies with reality, fantasy is a dangerous activity. For “neurotics turn away from reality because they find it unbearable—either the whole or parts of it.”14
Freud conceived that, at the beginning of life, the infant was dominated by the pleasure principle and that the pleasures sought were entirely sensual in nature. From time to time, the Nirvana-like bliss of the satisfied infant would be disturbed by “the peremptory demands of internal needs”15 for food, for warmth, and so on. Freud goes on:
When this happened, whatever was thought of (wished for) was simply presented in a hallucinatory manner, just as still happens today with our dream-thoughts every night. It was only the non-occurrence of the expected satisfaction, the disappointment experienced, that led to the abandonment of this attempt at satisfaction by means of hallucination. Instead of it, the psychical apparatus had to decide to form a conception of the real circumstances in the external world and to endeavour to make a real alteration in them. A new principle of mental functioning was introduced; what was presented to the mind was no longer what was agreeable but what was real, even if it happened to be disagreeable. This setting-up of the reality principle proved to be a momentous step.16
So, fantasy is equated with hallucination, with dreaming, with turning away from reality, with the persistence of an infantile mode of mental functioning which Freud called “primary process.” Proper adaptation to the external world is by means of deliberate thought and planning; by postponement of immediate satisfaction; by the abandonment of wish-fulfilling fantasy. Freud wrote:
Art brings about a reconciliation between the two principles in a peculiar way. An artist is originally a man who turns away from reality because he cannot come to terms with the renunciation of instinctual satisfaction which it at first demands, and who allows his erotic and ambitious wishes full play in the life of phantasy. He finds a way back to reality, however, from this world of phantasy by making use of special gifts to mould his phantasies into truths of a new kind, which are valued by men as precious reflections of reality. Thus in a certain fashion, he actually becomes the hero, the king, the creator, or the favourite he desired to be, without following the long roundabout path of making alterations in the external world. But he can only achieve this because other men feel the same dissatisfaction as he does with the renunciation demanded by reality, and because that dissatisfaction, which results from the replacement of the pleasure principle by the reality principle, is itself a part of reality.17
This is surely a strange conception of both art and artist. It implies that, though the artist wins out in the end, and may even escape neurosis, his art is still an indirect way of obtaining satisfactions which, if he was fully adapted to reality, would be unnecessary. Even those who admire and enjoy what the artist has produced are still turning away from reality in the direction of fantasy. The implication must be that art is primarily escapist and that, in an ideal world in which everyone had matured sufficiently to replace the pleasure principle by the reality principle, there would be no place for art.
Yet, in an earlier paper Freud had written:
But creative writers are valuable allies and their evidence is to be prized highly, for they are apt to know a whole host of things between heaven and earth of which our philosophy has not yet let us dream. In their knowledge of the mind they are far in advance of us everyday people, for they draw upon sources which we have not yet opened up for science.18
This is, perhaps, not quite such a positive view of the artist as it appears, since Freud is hinting that, once the sources upon which the artist draws have been opened up by science, so much will be known about the mind that the creative writer’s art will not be needed. This is borne out by what Freud says about science in that same paper on the two principles of mental functioning from which I have already quoted. After noting that religions, also, advocate the postponement of immediate satisfaction, Freud writes:
Religions have been able to effect absolute renunciation of pleasures in this life by means of the promise of compensation in a future existence; but they have not by this means achieved a conquest of the pleasure principle. It is science which comes nearest to succeeding in that conquest; science too, however, offers intellectual pleasures during its work and promises practical gain in the end.19
So science is to be equated with the abandonment of fantasy; with postponement of immediate satisfaction; with “secondary process” mental functioning; with thinking that is adapted to reality. Freud states that thinking acts as a restraint upon discharge:
Thinking was endowed with characteristics which made it possible for the mental apparatus to tolerate an increased tension of stimulus whilst the process of discharge was postponed. It is essentially an experimental kind of acting, accompanied by displacement of relatively small quantities of cathexis together with less expenditure (discharge) of them.20
Freud also wrote, “It is one of the principal functions of our thinking to master the material of the external world psychically.”21
Freud was certainly right in assuming that intellectual functioning is related to the ability to postpone responses to immediate stimuli. David Stenhouse, in his book The Evolution of Intelligence, defines intelligent behavior as “behaviour that is adaptively variable within the lifetime of the individual.”22 The lower we descend down the evolutionary scale, the more likely we are to find that behavior is not variable, but rather consists of preprogrammed, rigid, invariable responses to incoming stimuli. Stenhouse suggests that, if the evolution of intelligent behavior is to occur,
the most important factor is that which gives the individual animal the power not to respond in the usual way to the stimulus-situation which previously initiated an instinctive sequence culminating in a consummatory act. This power not to respond may be absolute, or may be merely the ability to delay the response—withhold it provisionally as it were—but its absence would negate the very possibility of adaptive variability in behaviour.23
But is scientific thinking really so removed from the sphere of fantasy as Freud assumes? It is clear that, if scientific hypotheses are to gain acceptance, they must be related to the real world, and be proven to increase our understanding of how the real world functions. Although science progresses by the refutation of hypotheses, and each scientific theory is ultimately supplanted by another which includes still more phenomena within its grasp, yet each theory has to be proven by experiment and shown to correspond with external reality. But proving a scientific hypothesis is secondary. Scientific thinking takes its origin from fantasy in exactly the same way as telling stories or any other creative activity. Einstein attributed his creative success not to his abilities as a mathematician and physicist, but to his imagination. Einstein’s own attempt to define “thinking” is worth quoting:
What, precisely, is thinking? When at the reception of sense-impressions, memory pictures emerge, this is not yet “thinking.” When, however, a certain picture turns up in many such series, then—precisely through such return—it becomes an ordering element for such series in that it connects series which in themselves are unconnected. Such an element becomes an instrument, a concept. I think that the transition from free association or “dreaming” to thinking is characterized by the more or less dominating role which the “concept” plays in it. It is by no means necessary that a concept must be connected with a sensorily cognizable and reproducible sign (word); but when this is the case thinking becomes by means of that fact communicable.24
Einstein goes on to say th
at thinking is “a free play with concepts,” and that the justification for this kind of thinking, far removed as it may still be from any consensus of what constitutes “truth,” is that in this way the thinker can emancipate himself from the experience of the senses. In his Notes for an Obituary, Einstein wrote, “Perception of this world by thought, leaving out everything subjective, became, partly consciously, partly unconsciously, my supreme aim.”25 Einstein was sure that most thinking went on without the use of words and that it was, to a considerable degree, unconscious. Freud would have agreed with this part of Einstein’s statement. Indeed, he wrote, “It is probable that thinking was originally unconscious, in so far as it went beyond mere ideational presentations and was directed to the relations between impressions of objects, and that it did not acquire further qualities, perceptible to consciousness, until it became connected with verbal residues.”26 But Freud goes on to say:
With the introduction of the reality principle one species of thought-activity was split off; it was kept free from reality-testing and remained subordinated to the pleasure-principle alone. This activity is phantasying, which begins already in children’s play, and later, continued as day-dreaming, abandons dependence on real objects.27
But are not the greatest achievements of the human mind only possible because human beings are capable of abandoning dependence on real objects, in other words, capable of fantasy? Is not Einstein’s definition of thinking as “a free play with concepts” a form of what Freud pejoratively dismissed as fantasy? Freud treated fantasy as though it was always escapist, but this is not necessarily the case; nor is it true of dreams.
Freud, I believe, was never at ease when thinking strayed too far from the body and physical sensation, which seemed to him to constitute reality. Freudian interpretation always strives to reduce abstractions, such as the notion of beauty, to something physical. For example, Freud writes, “There is to my mind no doubt that the concept of ‘beautiful’ had its roots in sexual excitation and that its original meaning was ‘sexually stimulating.’”28
For Einstein, creative thinking had to be as far removed from sense impressions as possible, since he regarded the latter as unreliable. Einstein wrote, “I believe that the first step in the setting up of a ‘real external world’ is the formation of the concept of bodily objects of various kinds.” So far, Freud would have agreed with him. But Einstein goes on:
The second step is to be found in the fact that, in our thinking (which determines our expectation), we attribute to this concept of the bodily object a significance, which is to a high degree independent of the sense impression which originally gives rise to it. This is what we mean when we attribute to the bodily object “a real existence.” The justification of such a setting rests exclusively on the fact that, by means of such concepts and mental relations between them, we are able to orient ourselves in the labyrinth of sense impressions. These notions and relations, although free statements of our thoughts, appear to us as stronger and more alterable than the individual sense experience itself, the character of which as anything other than the result of an illusion or hallucination is never completely guaranteed.29
Einstein’s new model of the universe depended upon his being able to emancipate himself from “real objects.” Indeed, in order to conceive the special theory of relativity, he had to free himself from the subjective prejudice implicit in being a dweller upon earth, and imagine how the universe would appear to an observer traveling at near the speed of light. Is not this fantasy, albeit fantasy which was later shown by experiment to explain phenomena which did not fit in with Newton’s model?
It might be affirmed that my disagreement with Freud is no more than a semantic issue. Perhaps he is using the word fantasy in one sense, while I am using it in another. It is certainly true that there are such things as escapist fantasies and idle daydreams. These play their part in rather lowly forms of creative activity like “romantic” fiction or the James Bond novels of Ian Fleming. But not all fantasies are of this kind. Freud was convinced that all mental activity which was not dependent on “real objects” was mere wish fulfillment. Yet, just as play can be preparatory for, and hence directed toward, adult activities like fighting, hunting, and sexual intercourse, so daydreaming can also be a form of anticipatory practice. I have often daydreamed about the formidable task of delivering a lecture, and my fantasies about my auditors’ shafts of criticism and expert scrutiny have made me more scrupulous in my presentation than I might otherwise have been.
Freud’s theory of dreams is equally open to question. Freud was particularly enthusiastic about his dream theory. In his preface to the third English edition of The Interpretation of Dreams, he wrote, “Insight such as this falls to one’s lot but once in a lifetime.”30 He even allowed himself the fantasy that, one day, a marble tablet would be placed on the house in which he first studied dreams seriously. This would read, “Here the secret of dreams was revealed to Dr. Sigm. Freud on July 24, 1895.”31 It is ironic that the discovery of which Freud was proudest does not withstand critical scrutiny. Freud’s mature theory of dreams claims that every dream, even a nightmare or an anxiety dream, is an attempt to fulfill a wish; and that every dream represents a wish fulfillment dating from early childhood as well as a wish fulfillment from current mental life. Because these wishes are for the most part unacceptable, they appear in dreams in disguised form. Hence, what the dreamer actually recalls is only the “manifest content” of the dream. The true meaning of the dream, its so-called “latent content,” can only be revealed when the dreamer’s associations to the images in the dream have been subjected to psychoanalytical scrutiny and interpretation.
The function of the dream, Freud believed, was to preserve sleep by giving disguised expression to wishes of an aggressive or sexual kind which, if they had been allowed to occur to the dreamer in undisguised form, would have been likely to have wakened him.
Although dreams are not couched in the language of everyday speech, there is really no evidence that all dreams are concealing something unacceptable. Nor is there sufficient reason to believe that all dreams represent unfulfilled wishes, although this is certainly true of some. Freud himself recognized that an exception had to be made when considering the dreams of people who have been subjected to some “traumatic” incident, like an accident or an explosion. Such people often have dreams in which the incident itself recurs in undisguised form. Freud guessed that, in such cases, the dream might be an attempt at coming to terms with, or mastering, a disturbing stimulus; a way of looking at dreams which is actually more fruitful than Freud’s original theory.
Jung, who cooperated with Freud for some years in the early 1900s, but who then parted company with him to found his own school, took a very different view of dreams. He did not consider that dreams were concealments, but rather that they were expressed in a symbolic language, which, though it might be difficult to understand, was, in essence, a natural form of human expression. Poetry is another kind of human utterance in which symbol and metaphor play a predominant role, but we do not think of most poetry as willfully obscure on this account.
Dreams seem frequently to be concerned with unsolved problems. A man I knew once dreamed that he was looking into the window of a shop. Inside was a statuette of a beautiful woman standing upon a square base. Since both the statuette and its base were made of some translucent material, the dreamer could see that there were letters carved upon the underside of the base. He knew that what was written there was “The Secret of Life.” But because from his viewpoint the letters were both upside down and the wrong way round, he could not read them. A dream with an extraordinarily similar theme is reported by Dr. Rycroft in his book The Innocence of Dreams.32 A man dreamed that he noticed in the window of an antique shop an old book which he knew contained “The Truth.” On inquiring inside, he was told that the book was the only copy of an otherwise unknown work of Immanuel Kant. But it was written in a language which no one could understand.
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These dreams do not provide solutions to the problems which they raise. Although most creative inspiration comes to people when they are in a state of reverie rather than actually asleep, there are a number of authentic instances of problem-solving during sleep, or of new ideas coming out of a dream. In one experiment, students were presented with a variety of difficult problems which they were required to study for fifteen minutes before going to sleep. Many had dreams related to the problems, and a few reported finding solutions. People have reported dreams in which a game of chess was played, an algebraic problem solved, and a bookkeeping error detected. Robert Louis Stevenson said that the plot of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde came to him in a dream; and the composer Tartini named a composition “The Devil’s Trill Sonata” because he had a dream in which the Devil took up a violin and played it to him.
Stanley Palombo, in his book Dreaming and Memory,33 suggests that dreaming is a way of processing information. During the day, every one of us is exposed to a vast number of incoming stimuli and presented with a mass of “information.” Only a small proportion of this information will be remembered, even for a short time, and still less will be transferred from the short-term memory system to the long-term memory store. However, our adaptation to the environment is largely dependent upon our being able to compare our current experience with our past experience, which is stored in the memory. It is the unfamiliar which engages our attention, while we take the familiar for granted; but we only recognize the unfamiliar as being so because we have a memory of what has gone before. Palombo thinks that dreams are one way in which the experience of the day is matched with the residues of previous experience before being assigned to the long-term memory.
This theory of dreams goes some way to explaining why it is that dreams so often seem to be such a curious mixture of events of the previous day with memories from the remote past. There is a kind of scanning process going on, perhaps selecting things which go together because they share a similar emotional tone rather than because they happened together in time.
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