ABSTRACT
"Creative Writers and Day-dreaming" was Freud's first attempt, apart from some comments in The Interpretation of Dreams, to apply psychoanalytic ideas to culture. The intention on this occasion was to contribute to the understanding of the work of the creative writer. The symposium on phantasy held at the 1963 International Congress in Stockholm had some outstanding participants, whose contributions were published in the International Journal of Psycho-Analysis. Hanna Segal summarized the views of the Kleinian school based on the contribution by Susan Isaacs to the so-called Controversial Discussions conducted in London during the Second World War. Anne Hayman states first that Freud saw phantasy as a function of the ego, which produces an imaginative content in an effort to achieve the fulfillment of an unsatisfied wish, which may be conscious or repressed. In 1990, Morton and Estelle Shane offer a clinical view of unconscious phantasy based on self psychology.
