ABSTRACT
This chapter points out that the sources or origins of the topics the creative writer uses for Sigmund Freud's novels or stories can be found in certain fantasies (daydreams) that, for the adult, substitute for the childhood activity of playing. Freud stresses that games, like day fantasies, are wish fulfillments (of an erotic and/or ambitious kind); the creative writer is capable of transforming these fantasies into works of lesser or greater art. Daydreams or fantasies share many characteristics of dreams: they wish fulfillments, and are partially based on childhood impressions. In the 1950s, after the publication of "Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms", a group of Kleinian analysts began undertaking the psychoanalytic treatment of psychotic patients, a situation now "allowed" by the Kleinian theories about schizoid mechanisms. Public myths differ from private myths in that they have more durability in time, are transmitted for millennia, and are important sources of inspiration and understanding, though requiring permanent reinterpretations.
