Chapter 9 Daydream, Phantasy and Fiction

History is the recital of facts represented as true. Fable, on the other hand, is the recital of facts represented as fiction.

This chapter is devoted to formulating a different psychological explanation for the origins of serious fiction from those of escapist romance, and in it I suggest that this can be done by differentiation between unconscious phantasy and daydream, between psychic reality and psychic illusion. Freud spoke with two voices on literature: one when he was pursuing his general ideas on illusion and wish-fulfilment; and another when he had a theory derived from his clinical work that he wanted confirmed by his principal allies, the creative writers. In a chapter (Britton 1995a) that I wrote for a book on modern psychoanalytic views of Freud’s ‘Creative writers and daydreaming’ (Freud 1908a) my criticism of Freud’s paper was that it did not adequately differentiate between the truth-seeking function of some fiction and the truth-evading function of other fiction, that is, between serious creative writing and escapist literature: ‘The difference between essentially truthful fiction and intentionally untruthful fiction can be accounted for once the concept of phantasy is enlarged beyond the wish fulfilling daydream’ (Britton 1995a:82-3).

The enlargement of the concept of unconscious phantasy was a result of the work of Melanie Klein, and was linked to her extension of the theory of sublimation and symbolism: ‘Symbolism is the foundation of all phantasy, sublimation, and of every talent, since it is by way of symbolic equation that things, activities, and interests become the subject of libidinal phantasies’ (Klein 1930:220). She thought that what characterised the ‘creative artist’ was access to early infantile phantasy, ‘[if] symbol formation in infantile mental life is particularly rich’, she claimed, ‘it contributes to the development of every talent or even genius’ (Klein 1930:220).

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