“Creative Writers and Day-dreaming”

There are many perspectives from which one can approach this text by Sigmund Freud, and numerous themes that can be developed from it. The Peruvian traditionalist Ricardo Palma taught his students the way to rhyme a sonnet, how to initiate it, and how to terminate it. Freud modestly, and hastily, ends "Creative Writers and Day-dreaming" with: "This brings us to the threshold of new, interesting and complicated enquiries". Concretely, fantasies or daydreams are a response to the desire to rectify an unsatisfactory reality, and each of them floats among three times of representative activity. Freud's model equally explains the productive process of the oneiric elaboration and the productive process of artistic creation. Language is itself a product of a creative process, not only in terms of its meaning but also in its grammar. Steiner calls our attention to the force Freud's clinical evidence grants to literary characters created by Shakespeare, Hoffmann, Balzac, Jensen, and many other authors he studied.