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On Freud's “Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming,” the fourth volume in the “Contemporary Freud: Turning Points and Critical Issues” series, is by and large a splendid book that left me with an overall good feeling.
Nevertheless, the book has at least two serious flaws. I assume that psychoanalysts are familiar with Freud's groundbreaking 1908 article. Since the original paper is reprinted in the book and extensively reviewed by Person in her introduction, it is time consuming and unnecessary for all the contributors, with the exception of Ronald Britton, to repeat the contents of the title article.
Second—and this criticism is as true for Freud as for his followers—the book deals far more with fantasy than with creativity, a fact that is not surprising in a book written by psychoanalysts. I found myself pouring through the chapters, searching for original thinking about creativity. Since much more is known about fantasy, I will leave aside the important contributions made on the subject by the contributors and use the space allotted to me here to point out what they have added to our knowledge of creativity.
Britton, in “Reality and Unreality in Phantasy and Fiction,” goes beyond Freud in differentiating between the truth-seeking function of some fiction and the truth-evading function of others. Britton states that Freud did not address the essential difference between serious and escapist fiction. The more a work of fiction resembles daydreaming, the more likely it is to be banal, populist, and critically disparaged; the more it resonates with something unconscious and profoundly evocative, the more apt it is to be critically acclaimed. Britton, like Chasseguet-Smirgel, believes that the major distinction between serious creative writing