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Writers of fiction do in broad daylight what ordinary mortals do in their sleep: they dream. The relation of the dreamer to the dream has thus become the crucial link between psychoanalysis and literature. Psychoanalysts study the dreamer—the novelist, the dramatist, the poet; and the literary critic analyzes the dream—the novel, the play, the poem. The universe containing both literature and psychoanalysis is as vast as it is mysterious, and at its center stands Sigmund Freud, the first to speculate on the rapport between the drives and fantasies residing in the unconscious and their creative expression in a literary work.
Since those Viennese beginnings of more than three-quarters of a century ago—more precisely, since the publication of Freud's Interpretation of Dreams in 1900—the archives of psychoanalysis and literary criticism have accumulated into a plethora of material that have expanded Freud's findings. Today, library shelves groan under the weight of works attempting to define what precisely is meant by “creativity,” “literature,” “neurosis”. Where precisely is the line that separates the objective from the subjective? How precisely does the writer's imagination process the world it observes? What assumptions do analysts and critics share? Where does the creative impulse have its provenance, in neurosis or in health? And lingering still in the background are those doubts that no dream can ever be interpreted after it has become separated from the dreamer.
The questions proliferate and so do the problems, yet the editors, with assurance and wisdom, have selected 26 essays that make for a carefully balanced anthology. The first section, “Early Psychoanalytic Theory,” introduces the early attempts to connect certain neurotic processes, stemming from the childhood experiences of well-known writers, to recognizable residues in their work. In the first essay, “Creative Writers and Daydreaming,” Freud sought early traces of imaginative activity in the games of chi