ABSTRACT
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 daydream, 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 (Britton 1995a) that I wrote for a book on modern psychoanalytic views of Freud’s ‘Creative writers and daydreaming’ (Freud 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 daydream’ (Britton 1995a:82-3).
