“Creative Writers and Day-dreaming”

For reasons presumably related to its specific content and the questions it raises concerning both his thought and the subject treated, Sigmund Freud's "Der Dichter und das Phantasieren" was translated into English as "Creative Writers and Day-dreaming" and into French as "La creation litteraire et le reve eveille" [Literary creation and daydreaming]. In both cases the translator's approach was to interpret the meaning of the text restrictively and to alter the original title in a way that minimizes its ambiguities. The German word Dichter actually denotes the poet, with all that word's range of implied connotations: imagination, creative capacity, and a tendency to turn away from external reality. In the text itself, the French translators sometimes use the term createur (creator) instead of createur litteraire (literary creator). "Creative Writers and Day-dreaming" thus proves to be a paper that raises more questions than it answers.