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This collection of papers, based on Freud's “Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming” is most welcome, for Freud opened up a connection between child's play, phantasy, and creativity that has remained fruitful
throughout the century. The contributors to the volume have taken this occasion to make summaries of their most important contributions concerning phantasy and creativity, and have presented informed reviews of essential ideas on the topic from Freud, Klein, and Bion.
Several authors debate the nature of unconscious phantasy and its relation to our sexual and aggressive drive life, and to the creative process as it emerges from internalized infantile object relations, or a matrix of core sensations (Blum, Infante, Sandler and Sandler, Chasseguet-Smirgel, Britton).
Aquinis highlights the complex relationship between memory and phantasy in Freud's theory. “Freud shows that, for the purpose of phantasies, ‘past, present and future are strung together, as it were, on the thread of a wish that runs through them.’” Aquinis notes that phantasy often distorts memory in order to conceal it: “It may even deceive by misrepresenting the facts… Phantasy is as paradoxical as the transference, performing simultaneous functions of resistance and access, opening and closing…. Its ultimate end is to deny castration. In addition to being a liberator, every phantasy has the character of a defensive fiction.”
Trossman questions the value of making a distinction between daydreaming and unconscious phantasy, seeing that the unconscious components of the phantasy play a role in the intensity of all creative preoccupations
Blum expands on the clinical usefulness of understanding day-dreams that have punitive or dysphoric aspects, for these can indicate unconscious masochistic fantasies. Moreover, in treatment, “the day-dream always has a transference dimension, and the patient's attitude toward the daydream, the telling of the daydream, and the style of daydreaming, are replete with significa