7/2/2023 0 Comments 10 by Ben Lerner![]() In a certain line of recent fiction, the boundary between these domains is frequently and deliberately sabotaged: think of Sheila Heti’s How Should a Person Be? (2012), Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle (2008-11), Teju Cole’s Open City (2011). Yet Freud proved himself remarkably contemporary in his insistence on the proximity between the biographical and the fictitious, the remembered and the invented. Reading it now, Freud’s theory can seem a little forced, with the act of writing contrived as a means to an end. ![]() But unlike the child, the writer’s work is destined to fulfill a wish, one triggered by the more fulsome memory of childhood – a time before the wish had cause to exist. The writer, like the child, deals in make-believe. ![]() ![]() Creative writing, he argued, was a form of daydreaming, an adult extension of child’s play. In his essay ‘The Creative Writer and Daydreaming’ (1908), Freud described the writer as a ‘dreamer in broad daylight’. ![]()
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