Over the past year, we have been working closely with colleagues here at Boston College to develop a psychologically rich, humanities-informed Creative Writing Master’s Program oriented toward professionals and clinicians who want to hone their craft as writers while deepening their understanding of the human psyche. The idea behind this undertaking is simple: Great writing and great thinking go hand in hand, and creative writing is a fundamentally psychological endeavor.
Indeed, authors often speak of the therapeutic nature of writing and see the practice as essential to their Mental health. Why this is the case, however, is rarely theorized, with writers insisting that they can’t not write but not fully understanding why. A little commented upon essay by Freud, delivered before an audience of laypersons in 1907, may shed some light on the subject.
In “Creative Writing and Day-Dreaming,” Freud likens the exertions of an author toward his craft to the efforts of a child at play. Noting that “The opposite of play is not what is serious but what is real,” he insists that the creative writer is doing something akin to the child in creating a fantasy world, one he takes seriously and invests himself in even though he recognizes it as at odds with reality.
For Freud, of course, the word “fantasy” does not carry the pejorative connotation that it often does for us. Our fantasies are an important part of our mental life and we neglect or disavow them at our peril. It is better, Freud thinks, to cultivate our fantasies—recognizing them always as such and yet nevertheless taking them seriously—in order to do something productive with them. This allows us to nurture our inner child—an aspect of ourselves that needs to be nurtured—while at the same time holding fast to the important distinction between the fictions we play at and the lives we live.
By Freud’s telling, creative writers—and artists of all stripes—provide incredible examples of how to healthfully convert one’s wishes and illusions into something beneficial. What is more, the fantasies of artists enrich not only their own lives but the lives of others as well. Like the child who invents a game that attracts the attention and delight of his playmates, “the writer’s imaginative world … can become a source of pleasure for the hearers and spectators at the performance of the writer’s work.”
That’s all well and good for creative writers, one might object, but what about the rest of us who lack the capacity or inclination to express ourselves through art? What about we who have “ceased to play” and have been “labouring for decades to envisage the realities of life with proper seriousness”? Is there no opportunity for us to “throw off the too heavy burden imposed on [us] by life and win the high yield of pleasure afforded” by playfully creating fictive worlds and entertaining unrealities?
To this, Freud responds that we are all creative writers in some sense. Like Nietzsche, who insists that each of us becomes an artist when we dream, Freud notes that “a piece of creative writing, like a day-dream, is a continuation of, and a substitute for, what was once the play of childhood.” Said differently, we all fantasize like the writer. We all build dream worlds in which our deepest wishes and fears can be explored and played out in the safety of our own imaginations. The only difference is that artists and children do so openly while the rest of us guard our creations from the eyes of others:
People’s phantasies are less easy to observe than the play of children. The child, it is true, plays by himself or forms a closed psychical system with other children for the purposes of a game; but even though he may not play his game in front of grown-ups, he does not, on the other hand, conceal it from them. The adult, on the contrary, is ashamed of his phantasies and hides them from other people. He cherishes his phantasies as his most intimate possessions, and as a rule he would rather confess his misdeeds than tell anyone his phantasies.
Such shame stifles one’s creativity, or at the very least prevents one from experiencing it with the freedom and enjoyment of a child at play. And yet, it is the child within us that is most in need of the release that playful imagining provides. It is the artist that exists in all of us that is begging to come out when we flee the “too heavy burden” of our daily reality and instead choose to imagine life otherwise—better, more prosperous, more just.
Would that we all could nurture this deeply human need. Would that we all could allow our inner child to play. Perhaps, if we learn to see ourselves not as serious adults but serious artists—creative writers ever imagining life anew—we will be better able to.
