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Chapter 9

Day-Dream, Phantasy and Fiction

"History is the recital of facts represented as true. Fable, on the other hand, is the recital of facts represented as fiction."

This chapter is devoted to formulating a different psychological explanation for the origins of serious fiction from those of escapist romance and in it I suggest that this can be done by differentiation between unconscious phantasy and day-dream; between psychic reality and psychic illusion. Freud spoke with two voices on literature: one when he was pursuing his general ideas on illusion and wish-fulfilment and another when he had a theory derived from his clinical work that he wanted confirmed by his principal allies, the creative writers. In a chapter (1995a) that I wrote for a book on modern psychoanalytic views of Freud's "Creative Writers and Day-dreaming" (1908a), my criticism of Freud's paper was that it did not adequately differentiate between the truth-seeking function of some fiction and the truth-evading function of other fiction, that is, between serious creative writing and escapist literature. "The difference between essentially truthful fiction and intentionally untruthful fiction can be accounted for once the concept of phantasy is enlarged beyond the wish fulfilling day-dream" (Britton R. 1995a pp. 82-3).

In the mode of the depressive-position with the relinquishment of omnipotence and the notion of continuity the object can be felt to exist elsewhere in its absence. The suffering is felt to arise within the self as a consequence of something missing. When the absence of the object is recognised, the place that the object originally occupied and left behind is experienced as space. If this space is felt to contain the promise of the return of the object, it is felt to be benign, if idealised sacred. If in contrast to this benign expectancy it is believed that the space itself eliminates good objects -as an astronomical 'black hole' eliminates matter- it is felt to be a malign space, possibly life-annihilating. The belief in benign space depends ultimately on the love for the object surviving its absence; thus a place is kept for the object's return. If manic omnipotent assertion is resorted to in order to sustain belief in the return then some form of 'second coming' or millenarian hope becomes an article of religious faith. In contrast, malignant space arises when the idea of the object continuing to exist in its absence cannot be tolerated because it causes so much suffering. The object therefore is, in phantasy, annihilated. As a consequence of this, the space left by the object is presumed to be the cause of the object's disappearance and not simply created by its absence. Hence a phantasy comes into existence of an object-destructive space.

Clinically this gives rise to terror of space, external or internal, which  leads to obsessive manipulation of space and time in order to eliminate the danger of gaps appearing in the external world and compulsive space-filling mental activity to eradicate any gaps in psychic space. Some of this mental gap-filling is accomplished by auto-erotically based phantasy.

Klein did not regard auto-erotism as a preliminary stage of development but as co-existent with object related activity, offering a compensatory alternative or refuge from frustration or distressing sensations such as hunger. I think the phantasies associated with auto-erotic activity form the basis for hallucinatory gratification, and the line of phantasy development that stems from that primitive beginning reaches into the type of phantasies that Freud refers to as day-dreams in his paper "Creative Writers and Day-dreaming" (1908a). In wishful psychosis the deficit is denied by hallucinating the missing object, or by a delusion of being it.

Even when external reality is respected, auto-erotically based phantasies may exist in parallel with a realistic attitude, as day-dreams, in what Freud liked to describe as a 'reservation'. He suggested in "Formulations on the two Principles of Mental Functioning" that "with the introduction of the reality principle one species of thought-activity was split off". He compares this psychic retreat with a Natural Park, "...a nation ...will yet set aside certain areas for reservation in their original state...(E.g. Yellowstone Park)" (Freud 1911b p.222). I want to highlight this simile of a reservation, which he uses in other texts, because I think his choice of a spatial metaphor is significant and I have some ideas about the location of day-dreams. I think that the psychic location in which day-dreams take place, Freud's reservation, is a phantasied place, with physical characteristics resembling perceptual space attributed to it but  clearly distinguished from perceptual space. In English this location is called the imagination when it is regarded as a place in the mind and not simply as a function. My theory on the origin of this phantasied psychic space is the subject of the next chapter.

In the earliest attempts to give an anatomical account of mental function imagination was represented as a spatial compartment of the brain, of equal proportion with the compartments of reason and memory.  Later, in the post-enlightenment period when the newly emerging sciences rendered such anatomical naiveté untenable and the studies of brain and mind had begun to go their separate ways, Coleridge, with Wordsworth, made the most ambitious attempt to define the imagination. He subdivided what might be covered by the term under three heads: primary imagination; secondary imagination; and the fancy. The first he held "to be the living Power and prime Agent of all human Perception"; the second to be "an echo of the former, dissolving, diffusing, dissipating in order to recreate; struggling to idealise and to unify". The third activity for which he retained the old term the Fancy he regarded as an inferior activity doing nothing more than rearranging existing psychic materials in different time and space (Shawcross 1968 vol 1 p.202). It is primary imagination that Mary Warnock has in mind when she concludes, after her impressive philosophical review of the concept of imagination from Locke through to the philosophers of this century, that "we have come by a long and circuitous route to the place where Wordsworth led us. Imagination is our means of interpreting the world, and it is also our means of forming images in the mind". She added "We recognise a form as a form of something, as Wittgenstein said, by its relation with other things. It seems to me both plausible and convenient to give the name 'imagination' to what allows us to go beyond the barely sensory into the intellectual or thought imbued territory of perception" (Warnock 1976 pp. 194-5). Coleridge's primary imagination to my mind closely resembles Susan Isaac's concept of unconscious phantasy as being the mental expression of all sensation and instinct. The secondary imagination is something taken to be creatively re constructive and functions in the absence of the object; in Wordsworth's poetic accounts of secondary imagination it is usually consolatory, symbolic and sublimatory. Coleridge views the fancy as an inferior activity much as Freud views secondary revision as a lesser function giving a superficial gloss to dreams in comparison with the other factors that constitute dream work (Freud 1900b p.490).

The more a work of fiction resembles obvious 'day-dreaming' the more it is likely to be banal, emotionally undemanding, populist, and ignored by serious critics. The more a work resonates with something unconscious and profoundly evocative the more likely it is to be eventually recognised by the critically enlightened even though its initial reception might be unfavourable. One could say that the more fictional writing resembles obvious day-dreaming, the less weight it has and the more it resembles real dreaming, the more seriously we take it. Freud's own comments on the profound effect of King Lear appear to provide some support for this idea. In "The Theme of the three caskets", (1913a p.291-301), Freud suggested that Shakespeare's "regressive revision" of the traditional myth, which was the source of his King Lear, stripped away the distortions of wishful transformation and exposed us unconsciously to the powerful, disturbing, more archaic myth of three women in a man's life: "the woman who bears him, the woman who is his mate and the woman who destroys him..." (ibid p.301).

The part played by day-dreams in the formation of real-dreams is spelled out by Freud in The Interpretation of Dreams. Having described the first three factors "the tendency towards condensation, the necessity for evading censorship, and considerations of representability" (Freud 1900b p.490), he turned to the fourth factor which he called secondary revision. He was more disparaging of this factor than of the other dream factors. "This function behaves in the manner that the poet maliciously ascribes to philosophers; it fills up the gaps in the dream-structure with shreds and patches" (ibid). He goes further and suggests that it resembles day-dreaming in its use of the raw material provided by the other dream factors to produce a narrative satisfying a naive desire for coherence and a plot to please its author. "We might put it simply by saying that this fourth factor of ours seeks to mould the material offered to it into something like a day-dream. If, however, a day-dream of this kind has already been formed within the nexus of the dream-thoughts, this fourth factor in the dream-work will prefer to take possession of the ready-made day-dream and seek to introduce it into the content of the dream" (1900b p.492).

Just as Freud describes day-dreams entering real dreams so real dreams may penetrate day-dreams and unconscious phantasies infiltrate conscious fantasies, thus giving an unexpected weight to fancifully constituted romantic or horrific fictions. The Frankenstein story ostensibly conjured up by Mary Shelley as her part in a literary game was based according to her later account on what Hindle calls a "waking dream" (Hindle M. 1994 p.6); it might as easily described as a night terror (pavor nocturnus), a not uncommon neurotic symptom of childhood related to nightmare. Mary Shelley wrote in her Preface for the revised 1831 edition of the novel:

I did not sleep, nor could I be said to think. My imaginations, unbidden, possessed and guided me, gifting the successive images that arose in my mind with a vividness far beyond the usual bounds of reverie. I saw - with shut eyes, but acute mental vision - I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together.

(Shelley M. 1831 p.13-14)

She imagines the hope of Frankenstein that his creature, a terrible mockery of real Creation, would subside into dead matter but after sleep the artist "...opens his eyes; behold the horrid thing stands at his bedside...I opened mine in terror". She then writes that the hideous phantom still haunted her; she could not get rid of it. She continued:

(ibid)

She continued "On the morrow I announced that I had thought of a story" (ibid). So night terror becomes ghost story which in due course becomes the great science-fiction, philosophical novel Frankenstein (or, the modern Prometheus). Her first thought appeared to be simply ridding herself by projective identification of terror by evoking terror in others. The second thought is the creative one of making her night terror itself into a work of Art, at which point she is both relieved and stimulated.

The ensuing story she told, though startlingly original is like a real dream, obviously overdetermined. It has evident connections with her own birth which killed her mother; her own baby's death at ten days: the disturbing presence of her step sister Claire Clairmont pregnant by Byron and her fear of being a victim of the omnipotent Utopianism of her husband, Shelley, as, in a sense, she had been of that of her father Godwin. Even the day's residue as progenitor is provided for us in her preface when she tells of the conversations of the previous day between Shelley and Byron on Erasmus Darwin's experiments and the possibilities of revitalisation with galvanism. But I would suggest that its continuing power as a modern myth derives from the profound, primitive, unconscious phantasies derived from the dream life of Mary Shelley which inhabit the story.

Having described a real dream, or night terror, being transformed into day-dream and then into a work of fiction I would like to return to the reverse situation where day dream is used as fiction but may carry into the fiction unconscious phantasy. One of the best examples of the use of day dream as source material for later literature must be that of Emily Bronte, in particular for her poetry. Emily and Anne Bronte started the Gondal game as children and continued to play it together or alone until their deaths. It was set in an imaginary island in the North Pacific called Gondal with very detailed dramatic events and characters with strong Byronic overtones. They wrote an extensive prose story of Gondal that is no longer extant; what remains are the poems based on this background its characters and their situations. Emily was a great poet and some of the 'Gondal ' poetry is very fine but it is likely that its prose sources had strong resemblance to the day-dreams of adolescent girls. Derek Stanford, who feels strongly about this, suggests that,

Pain could not trace a line nor grief a shadow there!

(Bronte E. 1992 p.14)

We can echo Charles Morgan "...no genius was needed for the composition of that"!(Spark & Stanford 1966 p.129). Then there is a change in quality so sudden violent and considerable that Charles Morgan thought that the connection between the earlier and later sections might be an editorial error, which was not the case (ibid p.132). The "poem ...from being a dreary exercise in a then outmoded style of Gothic gloom, buds out into one of the greatest statements of mystical experience in English verse"(ibid p.129). From the middle of stanza seventeen to stanza twenty three, the poetry reaches considerable heights as the heroine speaks of her wish for death and touches a universal desire to be free of life. In stanza twenty one she raises the spirit of negation with a sequence of inversions: unseen / revealed;  sense gone / essence feels;  on wing / in harbour;  stoops / bound) evoking a sense of freedom from the restraints of logic, time and place that are to be found at the reality frontier of the Ego.

Then dawns the Invisible, the Unseen its truth reveals;

My outward sense is gone, my inward essence feels-

Its wings are almost free, its home, its harbour found;

Measuring the gulf it stoops and dares the final bound!

(Bronte E. 1992 p.15)

In the next stanza she describes her longing to be free of the restraints of the physical senses:

In these verses it is Emily who speaks, from a different place in her internal world from the make-believe world of Gondal. The verse implies that a more profound truth is expressed: that she feels imprisoned not in a cell but in her own mind and her own body.

When the pulse begins to throb, the brain to think again,

The soul to feel the flesh and the flesh to feel the chain!

(ibid)

We are led to hear this as "the flesh is the chain" and that life itself is the unwelcome morning intruder and death the deliverer. As in other places in her writing death-wish finds a poetic voice.

In order to speculate further on this poem I would like to anticipate the notion developed in the next chapter. This is the idea that the imagination as a place in the mind where unwitnessed events take place is in origin the phantasied primal scene. This mental space is called in the next chapter the other room. Gondal, for example, is an imaginary world located in the mental space first developed by the phantasy of a never to be entered other room in which parental existence continues during parental absence. Emily therefore has a Gondal day-dream which is based on and elaborates a real unconscious phantasy of the primal scene. The version we have just been looking at is sado-masochistic, with mother as chained victim of a tyrannical father. Into this scenario by projective identification, Emily inserts in the place of her mother a romanticised version of herself as heroine and victim producing an erotic-masochistic Gondal day-dream which forms the conscious basis for the poem. I am inclined to think that the unconscious sado-masochistic primal scene is itself an exciting defensive transformation of a depressive phantasy of a dying mother and an abandoned infant. Having by projective identification put herself in mother's place she calls up her phantasy of death as the seductive rescuer. What he rescues her from was in origin her own infantile distress, incarceration, and separation from her mother now projected into the phantasied primal scene and erotised in the process. By this means the scene is transformed into one where intercourse with death forms the basis of an erotic scene. When this more profound material finds its way into the poem it speaks to us differently, resonating with our own unconscious phantasies.

Having pursued a lengthy diversion, in order to explore day-dream and unconscious phantasy, I would like to return to my contention that on literature Freud speaks with two voices. One when he is pursuing his general ideas on illusion and another when he has a theory derived from his clinical practice that he wants confirmed by his allies, the major figures of literature.

Freud was to change his ideas fundamentally on the relation of the inside to the outside world in the years after The Ego and the Id. He even relented on his evaluation of religion.

I perceived ever more clearly that the events of human history, the interactions between human nature, cultural development and the precipitates of primeval experiences (the most prominent example of which is religion) are no more than a reflection of the dynamic conflicts between the ego, the id and the super-ego, which psychoanalysis studies in the individual--- are the very same processes repeated upon a wider stage. In the Future of an Illusion I expressed an essentially negative valuation of religion. Later, I found a formula which did better justice to it: while granting that its power lies in the truth which it contains, I showed that truth was not a material but a historical truth (1935 p.72).

References

Britton R. (1995a) "Reality and Unreality in Phantasy and Fiction" in On Freud's 'Creative   Writers and Day-dreaming' ed. Person E.S., Fonagy P., Figueira S.A., New Haven: Yale University Press, 82-107

  Bronte E. (1992) Emily Jane Bronte the Complete Poems ed. Gezari J. London: Penguin Books

Freud S. (1900b) The Interpretation of Dreams, SE V 339-630

Freud S. (1908a) "Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming" SE IX: 141-154

Freud S. (1913a) "The Theme of the three caskets", SE XII: 291-301

Freud S. (1933a) "New Introductory Lectures: Lecture XXXI", SE XXII: 57-80

Freud S. (1911b) "Formulations on the two Principles of Mental Functioning", SE XII: 213-8

Freud S. (1935) "Postscript" to "An Autobiographical Study" SE XX: 71-76

Hindle M. (1994) Mary Shelley Frankenstein, Penguin Critical Studies, London: Penguin Books

Isaacs S. (1952) "The Nature and Function of Phantasy" in Developments in psychoAnalysis ed. Klein M., Heimann P., Isaacs S., Riviere J., London: Hogarth (1970) 169-197

Klein M. (1930) "The Importance of Symbol-Formation in the Development of the Ego" in The Writings of Melanie Klein vol I ed. Roger Money-Kyrle, Joseph B., O'Shaughnessy E., Segal H., London: Hogarth (1975) 219-33

King P. & Steiner R. (1991) "The Freud-Klein Controversies 1941-45", London: Routledge

Rodman F.R. (1987) The Spontaneous Gesture Selected letters of D.W. Winnicott Cambridge Mass, & London: Harvard University Press

Rosenfeld (1971) "A clinical approach to the psychoanalytic theory of the life and death instincts: an investigation into the aggressive aspects of narcissism", International Journal of psychoAnalysis 52: 169-78

Segal H. (1964) Introduction to the Work of Melanie Klein, London: Hogarth

Shawcross J. (1968) Biographia Literaria by S.T. Coleridge vols. 1 & II, Oxford: Oxford University Press

Shelley M. (1831) Frankenstein (or, the Modern Prometheus), ed. M.J. Weiss & C.F. Reasoner, Laurel-Leaf Library, New York: Dell (1965)

Spark M.& Stanford D. (1966) Emily Bronte her life and work, London: Peter Owen

Steiner J. (1993) Psychic Retreats, London: Routledge

Warnock M. (1976) "Imagination", London: Faber and Faber

Winnicott D. W.  (1960b) "Ego Distortion in terms of True and False Self", in The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment, London: Hogarth (1965) 140-152