Editor's Introduction: Writer's Block

In Creative Writers and Day Dreaming, Freud (1908) wrote:

“A strong experience in the present awakens in the creative writer a memory of an earlier experience (usually belonging to his childhood) from which there now proceeds a wish which finds its fulfillment in the creative work. The work itself exhibits elements of the recent provoking occasion as well as of the old memory” … The writer softens the character of his egoistic daydreams by altering and disguising it, as he bribes us by the purely formal—that is, aesthetic—yield of pleasure which he offers us in the presentation of his phantasies” (pp. 151, 153).

Such dilution makes it possible for the readers to connect their own, similar fantasies with those of the writer and draw vicarious gratification from the creative product. Thus the writer becomes the “community's daydreamer” (Arlow, 1986, p. 58).

Freud's scheme posits a three step process in creativity. First, there is the “strong experience in the present” i.e. the mobilization, usually sudden and unexpected, of powerful affects and fantasies under the influence of an environmental, external trigger. This stage is passively experienced; it happens. Second is the “wish” which Freud says proceeds from this feeling state. The wish presumably to find a release of the tension, a solution of the problem now faced by the mind, or at least to master the passively experienced intense affect. Finally, there is the step involving “creative work” i.e. ego's effort to give some palatable and even enjoyable shape and form to the difficult wishes and fantasies mobilized by the entire experience. Freud hints at the nature of such creative work by talking of softening, altering, and disguising of the underlying wishes.

To put it in a poetic metaphor, the situation is akin to the ocean throwing a shell on the beach, a toddler's picking it up and carrying it to his mother, and finally, the mother's cleaning it up, putting a thread through the shell and turning it into a necklace