“Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming” and Creative States of Consciousness

Freud's paper contains two insights into creativity that I find especially important. One proposes an answer to the question of how artists create the content and form of their works, a question that Freud announces in his first sentence as his main concern:

We laymen have always been intensely curious to know [...] from what sources that strange being, the creative writer, draws his material, and how he manages to make such an impression on us with it and to arouse in us emotions of which, perhaps, we had not even thought ourselves capable. (1908, p. 143)

Freud's answer comes near the end: writers access material in their daydreams that they then disguise to hide repellent, overt drive satisfaction, and they put their fantasies into esthetically pleasing form that gives the reader forepleasure, which serves as a gateway to deeper pleasures (p. 153). This formulation is the ancestor to Ernst Kris's concept of regression in the service of the ego and is a well-known psychoanalytic theory of creativity. But despite the focus on fantasizing, it tells us little about the felt experience, the state of consciousness involved in creativity and esthetic appreciation, except with the broad stroke of saying that it produces pleasure—fantasies are considered mainly as a source that the writer mines for material.

The other insight I want to highlight from this paper does point to the state of consciousness involved during creativity. This occurs near the beginning, when Freud is discussing childhood play: