Freud referred to the child as a processor of imaginative activity. In play, the child uses his or her imagination to ‘recreate’ notions of reality. Freud suggests that the creative writer in many ways exemplifies the child’s need for imaginative play drawn through to adulthood.
The creative writer does the same thing as the child at play. He creates a world of phantasy which he takes very seriously-that is, which he then invests with large amounts of emotion--while separating it sharply from reality. (Freud, 1990, V.14, p.132)
In adult terms, creativity allows the writer to recreate realities to satisfy an inherent need to create order out of the disorder of commonly experienced situations and environments. Creativity allows us to rearrange the terms of reality and enhance the notions of imagination and phantasy. In this manner, phantasy plays an integral role in the notion of creativity. Phantasies represent wish fulfillments that are common to all individuals, though not always accessible. We phantasize in order to fulfil needs that cannot be satisfied in reality. As Freud explained,
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 unsatisfied reality. (Ibid. p.134)
These phantasies include sexual or erotic leanings that are affected by the Oedipal Conflict, and impact the imagination and creativity of the individual. In the Oedipal conflict the male child harbors feelings of love and attachment to the mother, while holding anger and hostility towards the father. In the young girl, the process is understood as the reverse. These activities fit themselves into the individual’s ‘shifting’ impressions of life, and change with every change in that individual’s situation.
What it thus creates is a daydream or phantasy, which carries about it traces of its origin from the occasion which provoked it and from the memory. (Ibid. p.135)
Imaginative activity is a cornerstone of the creation of phantasies, as it enables the repressed to find expression in symptomatic behaviours, which are present in the acting out of the phantasy. Freud writes,
As people grow up, then, they cease to play, and they seem to give up the yield of pleasure which they gained from playing. But whoever understands the human mind knows that hardly anything is harder for a man than to give up a pleasure which he has once experienced. Actually, we can never give anything up; we only exchange one thing for another. What appears to be a renunciation is really the formation of a substitute or surrogate. In the same way, the growing child, when he stops playing, gives up nothing but the link with real objects; instead of playing, he now phantasies. He builds castles in the air and creates what are called day-dreams. (Ibid. p.133)
