The Uncanny

In this essay, Freud explicitly examines the relationship between literary analysis and psychoanalysis. The essay begins with the memorable and oft-quoted line: “We may perhaps say that every child at play behaves like a writer” (25). He then adds that “the opposite of play is not seriousness–it is reality” (26). Freud continues by explaining that rather than forgoing the pleasure we once took in playing in adolescence, humans replace play with fantasy. People’s fantasies are less easily observable than children’s play, and adults are generally ashamed of these secret desires.

In his psychoanalytic practice, Freud has learned that healthy and neurotic people both fantasize, but happy people do not, only dissatisfied ones, as “every fantasy [is] wish fulfillment, correcting the unhappy reality” (28). Fantasies are either ambitious or erotic. Fantasies also inhabit three time periods: the present impression, which has aroused the desire; the past memory of an earlier experience; and the future fulfillment of this desire. For instance, an orphaned youth might fantasize about gaining employment and marrying into a wealthy family to repossess themselves of a happy childhood. Fantasies proliferate prior to a lapse into neurosis or psychosis.

Freud also states that “our night dreams are nothing other than fantasies” (29). If our dreams are obscure, it is because at night we are visited by desires that we are ashamed of. Freud claims that dreams are wish fulfillments, just as daydreams or fantasies are; the writer is a daydreamer “in broad daylight” (30). The ubiquity of an invulnerable hero in daydreams and novels, Freud claims, indicates that the ego is central to literary creations. In psychological novels, the other characters act as personifications of “the conflicting currents of his mental life” (31).

Freud continues by saying that “it is highly likely that myths, for instance, correspond to the distorted ins of the wishful fantasies of whole nations, the secular dreams of youthful humanity” (32). For the creative writer:

[T]he true ars poetica lies in the technique by which he overcomes our repulsion, which certainly has to do with the barriers that arise between each single ego and the others [and, moreover] the real enjoyment of a literary work derives from the relaxation of tensions from our minds (33).

The writer, then, enables us to enjoy our fantasies without shame.