ABSTRACT
"Der Dichter und das Phantasieren" could be translated literally as "The Poet and Fantasizing." At the time Freud wrote it, in 1908, his enthusiasm was at its height for the explanatory power of his notion that the pleasure principle, subjugated in daily life by the reality principle, had found a region where it could operate freely in dreams and neurotic symptoms. In this paper he added children's play, Phantasie, and imaginative writing. "The creative writer does the same as the child at play. He creates a world of phantasy which he takes very seriously, that is, investing with large amounts of emotion while separating it sharply from reality". The paper precedes by many years his thoughts in "Beyond the Pleasure Principle" and his description of an internal world in "The Ego and the Id". In the mode of the depressive-position with the relinquishment of omnipotence and the notion of continuity, the object can be felt to exist but be absent.
