Churchill's Black Dog by Anthony Storr

Author:Anthony Storr [Anthony Storr]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 1989-08-21T16:00:00+00:00

The creative writer does the same as the child at play. He creates a world of phantasy which he takes very seriously—that is which he invests with large amounts of emotion—while separating it sharply from reality.12

Freud proceeds to consider the nature of fantasy:

We may lay it down that a happy person never phantasies, only an unsatisfied one. The motive forces of phantasies are unsatisfied wishes, and every single phantasy is the fulfilment of a wish, a correction of an unsatisfying reality.13

Although not everyone who engages in fantasy becomes neurotic, and, as we shall see, creative people are a special case because their creative abilities make it possible for them to link their fantasies with reality, fantasy is a dangerous activity. For “neurotics turn away from reality because they find it unbearable—either the whole or parts of it.”14

Freud conceived that, at the beginning of life, the infant was dominated by the pleasure principle and that the pleasures sought were entirely sensual in nature. From time to time, the Nirvana-like bliss of the satisfied infant would be disturbed by “the peremptory demands of internal needs”15 for food, for warmth, and so on. Freud goes on:

When this happened, whatever was thought of (wished for) was simply presented in a hallucinatory manner, just as still happens today with our dream-thoughts every night. It was only the non-occurrence of the expected satisfaction, the disappointment experienced, that led to the abandonment of this attempt at satisfaction by means of hallucination. Instead of it, the psychical apparatus had to decide to form a conception of the real circumstances in the external world and to endeavour to make a real alteration in them. A new principle of mental functioning was introduced; what was presented to the mind was no longer what was agreeable but what was real, even if it happened to be disagreeable. This setting-up of the reality principle proved to be a momentous step.16

So, fantasy is equated with hallucination, with dreaming, with turning away from reality, with the persistence of an infantile mode of mental functioning which Freud called “primary process.” Proper adaptation to the external world is by means of deliberate thought and planning; by postponement of immediate satisfaction; by the abandonment of wish-fulfilling fantasy. Freud wrote:

Art brings about a reconciliation between the two principles in a peculiar way. An artist is originally a man who turns away from reality because he cannot come to terms with the renunciation of instinctual satisfaction which it at first demands, and who allows his erotic and ambitious wishes full play in the life of phantasy. He finds a way back to reality, however, from this world of phantasy by making use of special gifts to mould his phantasies into truths of a new kind, which are valued by men as precious reflections of reality. Thus in a certain fashion, he actually becomes the hero, the king, the creator, or the favourite he desired to be, without following the long roundabout path of making alterations in the external world.

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