History is the recital of facts represented as true. Fable, on the other hand, is the recital of facts represented as fiction.
(Voltaire, Philosophical Dictionary; in Tripp 1973:218) This chapter is devoted to formulating a different psychological explanation for the origins of serious fiction from those of escapist romance, and in it I suggest that this can be done by differentiation between unconscious phantasy and daydream, between psychic reality and psychic illusion. Freud spoke with two voices on literature: one when he was pursuing his general ideas on illusion and wish-fulfilment; and another when he had a theory derived from his clinical work that he wanted confirmed by his principal allies, the creative writers. In a chapter (Britton 1995a) that I wrote for a book on modern psychoanalytic views of Freud’s ‘Creative writers and day-dreaming’ (Freud 1908a) my criticism of Freud’s paper was that it did not adequately differentiate between the truth-seeking function of some fiction and the truth-evading function of other fiction, that is, between serious creative writing and escapist literature: ‘The difference between essentially truthful fiction and intentionally untruthful fiction can be accounted for once the concept of phantasy is enlarged beyond the wish fulfilling day-dream’ (Britton 1995a:82–3).
The enlargement of the concept of unconscious phantasy was a result of the work of Melanie Klein, and was linked to her extension of the theory of sublimation and symbolism: ‘Symbolism is the foundation of all phantasy, sublimation, and of every talent, since it is by way of symbolic equation that things, activities, and interests become the subject of libidinal phantasies’
(Klein 1930:220). She thought that what characterised the ‘creative artist’
was access to early infantile phantasy, ‘[if] symbol formation in infantile mental life is particularly rich’, she claimed, ‘it contributes to the development of every talent or even genius’ (ibid.).
This enlargement of the term ‘unconscious phantasy’ became contentious and was therefore a central part of the ‘Controversial Discussions’ which took place in the British Psycho-Analytical Society in 1941–5 to clarify the differences between Melanie Klein’s views and those of Anna Freud. As Riccardo Steiner writes in the published account of the Controversies:
[the] notion of unconscious phantasy (spelled with a ‘ph’ to differentiate it from the conscious ‘fantasy’) is probably the major theoretical theme of all the Scientific Discussions. When translating Freud from German into English during the twenties it had already been necessary to adopt a term, which would distinguish the unconscious character of ‘phantasy’, which Freud used relatively rarely, from its conscious aspects.
(King and Steiner 1991:242) As a contribution to this debate Susan Isaacs produced a paper, ‘The nature and function of phantasy’, which is usually taken to be the Kleinian position statement on unconscious phantasy (Isaacs 1952:67–121). In this she suggested that unconscious phantasy is the ‘psychical expression…of instinctual needs’ that Freud referred to in his comments on the id (Freud 1933a:73). Unconscious phantasies, Isaacs maintained, are the mental representation of instinct, somatic and psychic experience, and underlie every mental process. This was a change in use of the term ‘phantasy’ from Freud’s original Phantasie by extending it to include those psychic elements Freud referred to but which remained undefined and unnamed, lurking under such titles as ‘psychical expression…of instinctual needs’ (ibid.). Her justification for using the same term, Phantasie, as that which was applied by Freud and others to developmentally later more elaborated phenomena was that of genetic continuity.
I think an important aspect of this concept which got lost in the
‘Controversial Discussions’ and in Susan Isaacs paper is the distinction between infantile phantasies based on, or accompanying, actual experience (e.g. hunger pain as a biting object) and infantile phantasies conjured up to deny experience (a hallucinatory gratifying object). In part, this was because Klein had not yet introduced her theory of the paranoid-schizoid position and her concept of projective identification. Much was to follow which elucidated the ways in which unconscious phantasy is variously experienced and expressed, particularly by the work of Hanna Segal. As she wrote:
The first hunger and the instinctual striving to satisfy that hunger are accompanied by the phantasy of an object capable of satisfying that hunger…. So long as the pleasure/pain principle is in ascendance,
Daydream, phantasy and fiction
phantasies are omnipotent and no differentiation between phantasy and reality-experience exists. The phantasised objects and the satisfaction derived from them are experienced as physical happenings.
(Segal 1964:13) This is also true, as she points out, of phantasies derived from negative experience:
a hungry, raging infant, screaming and kicking, phantasises that he is actually attacking the breast…and experiences his own screams which tear him and hurt him as the torn breast attacking him in his own inside. Therefore not only does he experience a want, but his hunger-pain and his own screams may be felt as a persecutory attack on his own inside.
(Segal 1964:13) Both these kinds of phantasy, of an ideal object as the source of goodness (based on somatic satisfaction) and of a bad object as the source of evil (based on somatic suffering), are in the mode of the paranoid-schizoid position. The hallucinatory wish-fulfilling object, with its function of the denial of loss by the omnipotent assertion of gain, is the forerunner of the manic defence.
In the mode of the depressive position, with the relinquishment of omnipotence and the notion of continuity the object can be felt to exist elsewhere in its absence. The suffering is felt to arise within the self as a consequence of something missing. When the absence of the object is recognised the place that the object originally occupied and left behind is experienced as space. If this space is felt to contain the promise of the return of the object it is felt to be benign, if idealised sacred. If, in contrast to this benign expectancy, it is believed that the space itself eliminates good objects—as an astronomical black hole eliminates matter—it is felt to be a malign space, possibly life-annihilating. The belief in benign space depends ultimately on the love for the object surviving its absence; thus a place is kept for the object’s return. If manic omnipotent assertion is resorted to in order to sustain belief in the return, then some form of ‘second coming’ or millenarian hope becomes an article of religious faith. In contrast, malignant space arises when the idea of the object continuing to exist in its absence cannot be tolerated because it causes so much suffering. The object therefore is, in phantasy, annihilated. As a consequence of this, the space left by the object is presumed to be the cause of the objects disappearance and not simply to have been created by its absence. Hence a phantasy comes into existence of an object-destructive space.
Clinically, this gives rise to terror of space, external or internal, which
leads to obsessive manipulation of space and time in order to eliminate the danger of gaps appearing in the external world, and compulsive space-filling mental activity to eradicate any gaps in psychic space. Some of this mental gap-filling is accomplished by auto-erotically based phantasy.
Klein did not regard auto-erotism as a preliminary stage of development but as co-existent with object-related activity, offering a compensatory alternative to or refuge from frustration or distressing sensations such as hunger. I think the phantasies associated with auto-erotic activity form the basis for hallucinatory gratification, and the line of phantasy development that stems from that primitive beginning reaches into the type of phantasies that Freud refers to as daydreams in his paper ‘Creative writers and day-dreaming’ (Freud 1908a). In wishful psychosis the deficit is denied by hallucinating the missing object, or by a delusion of being it.
Even when external reality is respected, auto-erotically-based phantasies may exist in parallel with a realistic attitude, as daydreams, in what Freud liked to describe as a reservation. He suggested in ‘Formulations on the two principles of mental functioning’ that ‘with the introduction of the reality principle one species of thought-activity was split off’. He compares this psychic retreat with a Natural Park: ‘a nation…will yet set aside certain areas for reservation in their original state…(E.g. Yellowstone Park)’ (Freud 1911b:222). I want to highlight this simile of a reservation, which he uses in other texts, because I think his choice of a spatial metaphor is significant and I have some ideas about the location of daydreams. I think that the psychic location in which daydreams take place, Freud’s reservation, is a phantasised place, with physical characteristics resembling perceptual space attributed to it but clearly distinguished from perceptual space. In English this location is called the imagination when it is regarded as a place in the mind and not simply as a function. My theory on the origin of this phantasised psychic space is the subject of the next chapter.
In the earliest attempts to give an anatomical account of mental function imagination was represented as a spatial compartment of the brain, of equal proportion to the compartments of reason and memory. Later, in the post-Enlightenment period—when the newly emerging sciences rendered such anatomical naivety untenable, and the studies of brain and mind had begun to go their separate ways—Coleridge, with Wordsworth, made the most ambitious attempt to define the imagination. He subdivided what might be covered by the term under three headings: primary imagination, secondary imagination and the fancy. The first he held to be ‘the living Power and prime Agent of all human Perception’; the second, ‘an echo of the former, dissolving, diffusing, dissipating in order to recreate; struggling to idealise and to unify’; the third activity, for which he retained the old term ‘the fancy’, he regarded as an inferior activity doing nothing more than rearranging existing psychic materials in different time and space
Daydream, phantasy and fiction
(Shawcross 1968, vol. II: 202). It is primary imagination that Mary Warnock has in mind when she concludes, after her impressive philosophical review of the concept of imagination from Locke through to the philosophers of the twentieth century, that ‘we have come by a long and circuitous route to the place where Wordsworth led us. Imagination is our means of interpreting the world, and it is also our means of forming images in the mind’ (Warnock 1976:194). She added:
We recognise a form as a form of something, as Wittgenstein said, by its relation with other things. It seems to me both plausible and convenient to give the name ‘imagination’ to what allows us to go beyond the barely sensory into the intellectual or thought imbued territory of perception.
(Warnock 1976:195) Coleridge’s primary imagination to my mind closely resembles Susan Isaac’s concept of unconscious phantasy as the mental expression of all sensation and instinct. The secondary imagination is something taken to be creatively reconstructive and functions in the absence of the object; in Wordsworth’s poetic accounts of secondary imagination it is usually consolatory, symbolic and sublimatory. Coleridge views the fancy as an inferior activity, much as Freud views secondary revision as a lesser function giving a superficial gloss to dreams in comparison with the other factors that constitute dream work (Freud 1900b:490).
The more a work of fiction resembles obvious ‘daydreaming’, the more likely it is to be banal, emotionally undemanding, populist and to be ignored by serious critics. The more a work resonates with something unconscious and profoundly evocative, the more likely it is eventually to be recognised by the critically enlightened, even though its initial reception might be unfavourable. One could say that the more fictional writing resembles obvious daydreaming, the less weight it has, and the more it resembles real dreaming, the more seriously we take it. Freud’s own comments on the profound effect of King Lear appear to provide some support for this idea. In ‘The theme of the three caskets’ Freud suggested that Shakespeare’s ‘regressive revision’ of the traditional myth, which was the source of his King Lear, stripped away the distortions of wishful transformation and exposed us unconsciously to the powerful, disturbing, more archaic myth of three women in a man’s life: ‘the woman who bears him, the woman who is his mate and the woman who destroys him’ (Freud 1913a:301).
The part played by daydreams in the formation of real dreams is spelt out by Freud in The Interpretation of Dreams. Having described the first three factors, ‘the tendency towards condensation, the necessity for evading
censorship, and considerations of representability’ (Freud 1900b:490), he turned to the fourth factor, which he called secondary revision. He was more disparaging of this factor than of the other dream factors: ‘This function behaves in the manner that the poet maliciously ascribes to philosophers; it fills up the gaps in the dream-structure with shreds and patches’ (ibid.). He goes further, suggesting that it resembles daydreaming in its use of the raw material provided by the other dream factors to produce a narrative satisfying a naive desire for coherence and a plot to please its author:
We might put it simply by saying that this fourth factor of ours seeks to mould the material offered to it into something like a day-dream. If, however, a day-dream of this kind has already been formed within the nexus of the dream-thoughts, this fourth factor in the dream-work will prefer to take possession of the ready-made day-dream and seek to introduce it into the content of the dream.
(Freud 1900b:492) Just as Freud describes daydreams entering real dreams, so real dreams may penetrate daydreams and unconscious phantasies infiltrate conscious fantasies, thus giving an unexpected weight to fancifully constituted romantic or horrific fictions. The Frankenstein story ostensibly conjured up by Mary Shelley as her part in a literary game was based, according to her later account, on what Hindle calls a ‘waking dream’ (Hindle 1994:6); it might as easily be described as a night terror (pavor nocturnus), a not uncommon neurotic symptom of childhood related to nightmare. Mary Shelley wrote in her Preface for the revised 1831 edition of the novel:
I did not sleep, nor could I be said to think. My imaginations, unbidden, possessed and guided me, gifting the successive images that arose in my mind with a vividness far beyond the usual bounds of reverie. I saw—
with shut eyes, but acute mental vision—I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together.
(Shelley 1831:13–14) She imagines the hope of Frankenstein that his creature, a terrible mockery of real Creation, would subside into dead matter, but after sleep the artist
‘opens his eyes; behold the horrid thing stands at his bedside…. I opened mine in terror’ (ibid.: 13). She then writes that the hideous phantom still haunts her; she cannot get rid of it. She continues:
I must try to think of something else. I recurred to my ghost story…. O!
if I could only contrive one which would frighten my reader as I myself had been frightened that night!
Daydream, phantasy and fiction
Swift as light and as cheering was the idea that broke in upon me. ‘I have found it! what terrified me will terrify others’.
(Shelley 1831:13–) She continued ‘On the morrow I announced that I had thought of a story’
(ibid.: 14). So night terror becomes ghost story, which in due course becomes the great science-fiction, philosophical novel Frankenstein (or, The Modern Prometheus). Her first thought appeared to be simply to rid herself of terror by projective identification, by evoking terror in others. The second thought is the creative one of making her night terror itself into a work of art, at which point she is both relieved and stimulated.
The ensuing story, though startlingly original, is like a real dream, obviously overdetermined. It has evident connections with her own birth, which caused her mother’s death, and with her own baby’s death at the age of ten days, as well as with the disturbing presence of her stepsister Claire Clairmont, pregnant by Byron, and her fear of being a victim of the omnipotent Utopianism of her husband, Shelley, as, in a sense, she had been of that of her father Godwin. Even the day’s residue as progenitor is provided for us in her Preface when she tells of the conversations of the previous day between Shelley and Byron on Erasmus Darwin’s experiments and the possibilities of revitalisation with galvanism. But I would suggest that its continuing power as a modern myth derives from the profound, primitive, unconscious phantasies derived from the dream life of Mary Shelley which inhabit the story.
Having described a real dream, or night terror, being transformed into daydream and then into a work of fiction, I would like to return to the reverse situation, where daydream is used as fiction but may carry into the fiction unconscious phantasy. One of the best examples of the use of daydreams as source material for later literature must be that of Emily Brontë, who used them in particular for her poetry. Emily and Anne Brontë started the Gondal game as children and continued to play it, together or alone, until their deaths. It was set in an imaginary island in the North Pacific called Gondal, with very detailed dramatic events and characters with strong Byronic overtones. They wrote an extensive prose story of Gondal that is no longer extant; what remains are the poems based on this background, its characters and their situations. Emily was a great poet and some of the Gondal poetry is very fine, but it is likely that its prose sources had strong resemblance to the daydreams of adolescent girls. Derek Stanford, who feels strongly about this, suggests that ‘what is good in Gondal is incidental and irrelevant to it…the lyrical beauty of expression, the fervour and profundity of thought in these poems is out of all proportion to the ramshackle structure and childish melodramatic plots’
(Spark and Stanford 1966:125). He further suggests—and this has
considerable relevance for our theme—that ‘the Gondal structure of characters and incidents represented a conscious creation on the part of Emily and Anne; and that this conscious framework acted as a magnet, a call boy, to Emily’s unconscious mind’ (ibid.: 129).
I think we can see an example of this in a Gondal poem of thirty-eight stanzas called The Prisoner. The first three stanzas are well written and evocative, setting the scene; they remind one of the opening part of Wuthering Heights. From stanza four to stanza seventeen the verse is close to the plot of unjust imprisonment, in a dank dungeon, of a beautiful, tragic, heroine discovered close to death by a childhood friend and potential admirer, Lord Julian. These verses are melodramatic, thinly disguised masochistic, erotic daydreams. The seventh stanza gives an example of their quality:
The captive raised her face; it was as soft and mild As sculptured marble saint or slumbering, unweaned child;
It was so soft and mild, it was so sweet and fair,
It was so soft and mild, it was so sweet and fair,