Freud, Anna (1923). The relation of beating-phantasies to a daydream. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 4: 89–102.1
Freud’s paper “A child is being beaten” (Freud, 1919e—translated for the journal in 1920) is at a conceptual cross-roads. His intention was a discussion and elucidation of masochism,2 but the paper actually discussed the vicissitudes of fantasy and sublimation.
It is almost certain that one of Freud’s four cases was his daughter, Anna (Young-Bruehl, 1988, see also Blass, 1993) whom he analysed from 1918 to 1922. The clinical case in the paper of Anna Freud’s, republished here, which was her membership paper for the Viennese Psychoanalytical Society, is probably an expansion of her own analysis. She used the case to make a contribution to the understanding of fantasy. Freud had understood masochistic fantasies to be an inherent part of the libido, a component instinct, and therefore inherited. It is akin to, and a part of, the Oedipus complex; and his 1919 paper showed the various ways that sadomasochism can be inverted and expressed. Anna Freud’s paper adds a further vicissitude. The primary fantasy can be desexualized, which advances it from being merely gratification to a potential for the capacity to represent, and thus to enable, a creative sublimation. As Blum (1995) commented about the “taming” of the masochism, it became “what would later be called progressive ego and super-ego modification and the development of sublimation” (p. 44). Ultimately, the distinction Anna Freud discerns points to the divergence of aesthetic literature away from pornography (as masturbatory gratification). Anna Freud is elaborating Freud’s unfinished thoughts expressed in 1908 (“Creative writers and day-dreaming”), about the difference between the creative process and wishful thinking, although she does not mention that work. It was a concern of Freud’s which he returned to in his papers on Leonardo (1910c) and Michelangelo’s Moses (1914b).
Anna Freud’s contribution to sublimation and creativity later became an important point of contention with other views on the nature and occurrence of primary fantasies (or phantasies). Given the unusual circumstances for the clinical evidence, some doubt can always be thrown on whether this is a valid contribution to the nature of fantasy per se. Eiferman (1997) postulates it is, instead, an evasion of the sadomasochism between a father and daughter when one is analyst and the other his analysand. Nevertheless, it is still an example of “sublimation of sensual love into tender friendship” (Eiferman, 1997, p. 100) for her father/analyst.
Thus, there are two ways to read this paper: one is in the terms in which it is given, as deductions from the evidence of clinical material; or, second, as a sublimatory process within a psychoanalytic transference. Either way we are introduced to the sublimation underlying creative fantasy life.
1. Subsequently known as “Beating fantasies and daydreams” see The Writings of Anna Freud, Volume 1. New York: International Universities Press, where a revised version was published.
2. Freud’s study is, in effect, a study of female masochism, without acknowledgement of any gender specificity (Deutsch, 1930).
Blass, R. (1993). Insights into the struggle of creativity—a reading of Anna Freud’s “Beating fantasies and daydreams”. Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 48: 161–187.
Blum, H. (1995). The clinical value of daydreams and a note on their role in character analysis. In: E. S. Person, P. Fonagy, & S. A. Figueira (Eds.), On Freud’s “Creative writing and day-dreaming” (pp. 39–52). New Haven: Yale University Press.
Deutsch, H. (1930). The significance of masochism in the mental life of women. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 11: 48–60.
Eiferman, R. (1997). The exceptional position of “A child is being beaten” in the learning and teaching of Freud. In: E. S. Person (Ed.), On Freud’s “A child is being beaten” (pp. 157–178). New Haven: Yale University Press.
Freud, S. (1908e). Creative writers and day-dreaming. S.E., 9: 143–153. London: Hogarth Press.
Freud, S. (1910c). Leonardo da Vinci and a memory of his childhood. S.E., 11: 59–137. London: Hogarth Press.
Freud, S. (1914b). The Moses of Michaelangelo. S.E., 13: 211–238. London: Hogarth Press.
Freud, S. (1919e). A child is being beaten. S.E., 17: 177–204. London: Hogarth Press.
Young-Bruehl, E. (1988). Anna Freud. London: Macmillan.
Anna Freud
In his paper “A child is being beaten”1 Freud deals with a phantasy which, according to him, is met with in a surprising number of the people who come in search of analytic treatment on account of an hysteria or of an obsessional neurosis. He thinks it very probable that it occurs even more often in other people who have not been obliged by a manifest illness to come to this decision. This “beating-phantasy” is invariably charged with a high degree of pleasure and has its issue in an act of pleasurable auto-erotic gratification. I shall take for granted that the content of Freud’s paper—the description of the phantasy, the reconstruction of the phases which preceded it, and its derivation from the Oedipus complex—is known to the reader. In the course of my paper I shall return to and dwell on it at some length.
In one paragraph of his paper Freud says:
In two of my four female cases an artistic superstructure of daydreams, which was of great significance for the life of the person concerned, had grown up over the masochistic phantasy of beating. The function of this superstructure was to make possible the feeling of gratified excitement, even though the onanistic act was abstained from.
Now I have been able from a variety of day-dreams to select one which seemed especially well calculated to illustrate this short remark. This day-dream was formed by a girl of fifteen, whose phantasy-life, in spite of its abundance, had never come into conflict with reality; the origin, evolution and termination of the day-dream could be established with certainty; and its derivation from and dependence on a beating-phantasy of long standing was proved in analysis.
I shall now trace the course of development of the phantasy-life of this day-dreamer. When in her fifth or sixth year—before school, certainly—she began to entertain a beating-phantasy of the type described by Freud. In the beginning its content remained monotonous: “A boy is being beaten by a grown-up person”. Later on it was changed to: “Many boys are being beaten by many grown-up persons”. The boys, however, as well as the grown-ups remained indeterminate and so did the misdeed for which the castigation was administered. It is to be supposed that when enacted before the imagination of the girl the various scenes were very vivid; the record, however, given of them during analysis was anything but circumstantial or illuminating. Whenever the phantasy was called up it was accompanied by strong sexual excitement and terminated in an onanistic act.
The sense of guilt which attaches itself to the phantasy in his cases, as with this child also, is explained by Freud in the following way. He says that the form of beating-phantasy just described is not the initial one, but is the substitute in consciousness for an earlier unconscious phase. In this unconscious phase the persons who afterwards became unrecognizable and indifferent were very well-known and important—the boy who was being punished was the child who produced the phantasy, the adult who dealt out the punishment was the dreamer’s own father. Further, according to Freud’s paper even this phase is not the primary one, but is only a transformation of a preceding first phase, which belongs to the period of the greatest activity of the parental complex. This first phase had in common with the second that the person beating was the dreamer’s father; the child that was being beaten, however, was not the one who produced the phantasy but some other one, a brother or sister, i.e., a rival in the struggle for the father’s affection. The content and meaning of the phantasy of beating was, in its first phase, therefore: that the child claimed the whole of its father’s love for itself and left the others to his anger and wrath. Later on a process of repression took place, a sense of guilt appeared and, to reverse the former triumph, the punishment was turned back upon the child itself. At the same time, however, in consequence of a regression from the genital to the pregenital anal-sadistic organization, the phantasy of being beaten still stood to the child for a phantasy of being loved. Thus the second phase was formed; but it remained unconscious because of its all-too-significant content, and was substituted in consciousness by a third phase, better calculated to meet the demands of the censorship. To this third phase, however, was attached the libidinal excitement and the sense of guilt, since the secret meaning hidden under its strange form still ran: “My father loves only me.”
With the child mentioned this sense of guilt attached itself less to the content of the phantasy itself—though the latter too was disapproved of from the beginning—than to the auto-erotic gratification which regularly occurred at its climax. The little girl therefore for a number of years made ever-renewed but ever-failing attempts to separate the one from the other, i.e., to retain the phantasy as a source of pleasure and, at the same time, to break herself of the auto-erotic habit, which was felt to be irreconcilable with the moral standard demanded by her ego. The content of the phantasy at that period went through the most complicated alterations and elaborations. In the attempt to enjoy the legitimate pleasure as long as possible, and to put off its tabooed climax indefinitely, she added on descriptions of a wealth of details indifferent in themselves. She constructed whole institutions, schools and reformatories in which the scenes of beating were imagined to take place, and established definite rules which determined the construction of the various scenes. The persons beating were at that time invariably teachers; only later and in exceptional cases the fathers of the boys were added—as spectators mostly. But even in this elaborate embroidering of the phantasy the day-dreamer left the figures indeterminate and denied them all characteristic traits, as for instance, individual faces and names, or personal histories.
I certainly do not want to imply that postponing the pleasurable situation in this way by prolonging and amplifying the whole phantasy is in all cases the manifestation of a sense of guilt, i.e., the consequence of an attempt to separate the phantasy from an onanistic act. The same technical device may be met with in phantasies which have never given rise to a sense of guilt. With these it simply serves to reinforce the excitation and thus to heighten the final pleasure gained by the dreamer.
In the case of this girl the phantasies of beating after a time entered upon a new phase of development. As years went on the ego-tendencies in which the moral demands set up by her environment were incorporated slowly gained strength. Consequently she resisted more and more the temptation to indulge in the phantasy in which her libidinal tendencies had become concentrated. She gave up as a failure all her attempts to separate the phantasy of beating from the onanistic act, and consequently the content of the phantasy fell under the same taboo as the sexual gratification. Every re-activation of the phantasy meant a serious struggle with strong opposing forces and was followed by self-reproaches, pangs of conscience and a short period of depression. The pleasure derived from the phantasy was more and more confined to the climax itself, which was preceded as well as followed by “pain”. Since in the course of time the phantasies of beating came to serve less and less as a source of pleasure, they were largely restricted in their activity.
At about the same time—apparently between her eighth and tenth year—the girl began to entertain a new kind of phantasies, which she herself distinguished by the name of “nice stories”, to separate them from the unpleasant phantasies of beating. These “nice stories” seemed, at first sight at least, to contain a wealth of pleasurable, agreeable situations describing instances of kind, considerate and affectionate behaviour. The figures in these nice stories were distinguished by individual names, their looks and personal appearance were described in detail and their life-histories given, the latter sometimes reaching far back into their imaginary past. The circumstances of the various persons, their acquaintance and relationship with one another, were laid down and the details of their daily life moulded after the pattern of reality. Alterations in the surroundings of the day-dreamer were followed by alterations in the imaginary scenes, and the effects of reading could also be easily traced in the latter. The climax of each situation was invariably accompanied by a strong feeling of pleasure; no sense of guilt appeared and no auto-erotic gratification took place in connection with it. The girl consequently felt no resistance against indulging largely in this kind of day-dreaming. This was, therefore, the artistic superstructure of day-dreams referred to in Freud’s paper. How far one is justified in assuming that it had grown up over the masochistic phantasies of beating I hope to show in the further course of this analysis.
The day-dreamer herself knew nothing about any connection which her pleasant stories might have with the phantasies of beating. If a possibility of this kind had been pointed out to her at that time she would certainly have rejected the idea energetically. The phantasies of beating were to her the personification of everything she considered ugly, prohibited and depraved, whereas the “nice stories” stood to her for beauty and pleasure. She was firmly convinced of the mutual independence of the two kinds of phantasies, the more so since no figure out of a “nice story” ever penetrated into the sphere of the beating-phantasies. The two were kept apart very carefully—even in regard to time: for every re-activation of the phantasies of beating had to be followed by a temporary renunciation of the “nice stories”.
Even during analysis, as was mentioned before, the girl never gave any detailed account of any individual scene of beating. Owing to her shame and resistance all she could ever be induced to give were short and covert allusions which left to the analyst the task of completing and reconstructing a picture of the original situation. She behaved quite differently in regard to the “nice stories”. As soon as her first resistance to free talking had been overcome, she volunteered vivid and circumstantial descriptions of her various day-dreams. Her eagerness in doing so was such that she even gave the impression of experiencing while she was talking a similar or even greater pleasure than while actually day-dreaming. In these circumstances it was comparatively easy to get a general survey of the wealth of figures and situations produced by her fantasy. It turned out that the girl had formed not one but a whole series of so-called “continued stories”, each having a different plot and describing a different set of figures. One of these “continued stories” may be considered the cardinal and most important one; it contained the largest number of figures, existed for years, and underwent various transformations; moreover, other stories branched off from it, which—just as in legends or mythology— acquired in the course of time complete independence. Alongside this main story the girl maintained various smaller and less important ones which she employed in turn. All these day-dreams invariably belonged to the type termed “continued stories”. To gain insight into their organization we will now turn our attention to one particular “nice story” which, because of its brevity and clearness, is best suited to serve the purposes of this paper.
In her fourteenth or fifteenth year, after having formed a number of continued stories which she maintained side by side, the girl accidentally came upon a boy’s story-book; it contained among others a short story of which the action was laid in the Middle Ages. She went through it once or twice with great interest; when she had finished, she returned the book to its owner and did not see it again. Her imagination, however, had already taken possession of the various figures and a number of the details described in the book. She immediately took up the thread of the story, continued to spin out the action and, retaining it henceforward as one of her “nice stories”, she behaved exactly as if she were dealing with a spontaneous product of her own imagination.
In spite of various attempts made during analysis it remained impossible to establish with certainty what had been included in the original story. Its content had been dismembered and devoured by her active imagination, and new phantasies had overlaid it until every attempt at distinction between spontaneous and borrowed details was bound to fail. There remained nothing, therefore, but to leave aside the question of origin and to deal with the content of the imaginary scenes without regard to the sources it had sprung from.
The subject of the story was as follows: A mediaeval Knight has for years been at feud with a number of nobles who have leagued together against him. In the course of a battle a noble youth of fifteen (the age of the day-dreamer) is captured by the Knight’s henchmen. He is taken to the Knight’s castle and there kept prisoner some time, until at last he gains his freedom again.
Instead of spinning out and continuing the tale (as in a novel published by instalments), the girl made use of the plot as a sort of outer frame for her day-dream. Into this frame she inserted a wealth of scenes, every single one of which was organized like an independent story, containing an introduction, development of the plot and climax. Thus there was no logical sequence in the working out of the whole tale. She was free at any moment to choose between the different parts of the tale according to her mood; and she could always interpose a new situation between two others which had been finished and previously joined up with each other.
In this comparatively simple day-dream there are only two really important figures; all the others may be disregarded, as of episodical importance merely. One of these main figures is the young prisoner, who is endowed in the day-dream with various noble and pleasing character-traits; the other is the Knight who is described as harsh and brutal. Several incidents relating to their past and their family-histories were worked out and added to the plot to deepen the hostility between them. This furnished a basis of an apparently irreconcilable antagonism between one character who is strong and mighty and another who is weak and in the power of the former.
Their first meeting was described in a great introductory scene during which the Knight threatens to put the prisoner on the rack, so as to force him to betray important secrets. The youth thus becomes aware of his utter helplessness and begins to dread his enemy. On these two factors—fear and helplessness—all the subsequent situations were based; e.g., in pursuance of his plan, the Knight nearly goes as far as to torture the prisoner, but at the last moment he desists. He nearly kills him through imprisonment in the dungeon of his castle, but has him nursed back to life again before it is too late for recovery. As soon as the prisoner has recovered the Knight returns to his original plan, but a second time he gives way before the prisoner’s fortitude. And while he is apparently bent upon doing harm to the youth, he actually grants him one favour after the other. Similar situations form the later part of the tale, e.g., the prisoner accidentally goes beyond the boundaries of the castle; the Knight meets him there, but does not punish him by renewed imprisonment, as he would have expected. Another time the Knight discovers a similar transgression on the part of the prisoner, but he himself saves him from the humiliating consequences of the deed. Several times the prisoner is subjected to great hardships. These experiences then serve to heighten his enjoyment of some luxuries granted to him by the Knight. All these dramatic scenes were enacted very vividly before the imagination of the girl. In every single one she shared the prisoner’s feelings of fear and fortitude in a state of great excitement. At the climax of each situation, i.e., when the anger and rage of the torturer were transformed into kindness and pity, this excitement resolved itself into a feeling of pleasure.
Going through the scenes mentioned and forming some new similar situations usually took the girl from a few days up to one or two weeks. At the beginning of each of these periods of daydreaming the elaboration and development of every single scene was methodically carried out. When forming one particular scene in her imagination, she was able to disregard the existence of all the other adventures which had happened before or after it; consequently at the moment she honestly believed in the prisoner’s dangerous position and in the actual possibility of a final catastrophe; so that the prisoner’s dread and anxiety, i.e., the anticipation of the climax, were dwelt on at great length. After several days of day-dreaming, however, a disturbing remembrance of the happy issue of scenes already imagined seemed to penetrate into the daydream; dread and anxiety were described with less conviction, the tone of gentleness and clemency which at the beginning had marked the climax spread farther and farther over it and finally absorbed all the interest formerly taken up by the introduction and development of the plot. The final result of this transformation was that the whole story was rendered unfit for further use, and had to be replaced—at least for a period of some weeks—by another story, which after a certain length of time met the same fate. It was only the main day-dream which lasted so immeasurably longer than the other less important continued stories; the reason probably lay in the great wealth of figures contained in it, as well as in its manifold ramifications. On the other hand, it is not unlikely that this broader elaboration was carried through for the very purpose of ensuring it a longer life every time it was re-activated.
A general survey of the various single scenes of the Knight and Prisoner day-dream revealed a surprising monotony in their construction. The day-dreamer herself—though on the whole intelligent and critical of what she read—had never noticed this fact, not even when relating the story during analysis. But on examination of each scene it was only necessary to detach from the plot itself the manifold minor details which at a first glance gave it its appearance of individuality; in every instance the structure then laid bare was as follows: antagonism between a strong and a weak person; a misdeed—mostly unintentional—on the part of the weak one which puts him at the other’s mercy; the latter’s menacing attitude giving rise to the gravest apprehensions; a slow and sometimes very elaborate intensification almost to the limit of endurance of the dread and anxiety; and finally, as a pleasurable climax, the solution of the conflict, i.e., pardon for the sinner, reconciliation and, for a moment, complete harmony between the former antagonists. With a few variations the same structure held good also for every single scene out of the other “nice stories” invented by the girl.
It is this underlying structure which constitutes the important analogy between the nice stories and the phantasies of beating—an analogy quite unsuspected by the dreamer herself. In the beating-phantasies too, the figures were divided into strong and weak persons, i.e., adults and children respectively; there also it was a matter of a misdeed, though it remained as indefinite as the persons themselves; in the same manner they too contained a period of dread and anxiety. The only decisive disparity between the two kinds of phantasies lies in the difference between their respective solutions, which in the one case consisted of the beating-scene, in the other of the reconciliation-scene.
In the course of analysis the girl became acquainted with these striking points of resemblance in the construction of the two apparently distinct products of her imagination. The suspicion of a connection between them slowly dawned on her; once the possibility of their relationship had been accepted she quickly began to perceive a whole series of connections between them.
Even so the content at least of the beating-phantasies appeared to have nothing in common with that of the nice stories; but this too was disproved by further analysis. Closer observation showed that the theme of the beating-phantasies had in more than one place succeeded in penetrating into the nice stories. As an example we may take the Knight and Prisoner day-dream which has already been discussed. There the Knight threatened to apply torture to the prisoner. This menace always remained unfulfilled; but nevertheless a great number of scenes was built up on it, to which it supplied an unmistakable colouring of anxiety. In the light of previous considerations this menace may easily be recognized as the echo of the earlier scenes of beating: but no description of them was permissible in the nice story. There were other ways in which the theme of beating encroached into the day-dream, not in the Knight and Prisoner daydream itself, but in the other continued stories produced by the girl.
The following observations are taken from the main story, as far as it was revealed during analysis: In the main story the passive, weak character (corresponding to the youth in the Knight and Prisoner day-dream) was occasionally represented by two figures. After committing identical misdeeds, one of these two had to undergo punishment, while the other was pardoned. Here the scene of punishment was in itself neither pleasurably nor “pain-fully” accentuated; it simply served to bring the reconciliation into relief and to heighten by contrast the pleasure derived from the latter. In other places the passive person in the day-dream had to live through in memory a past scene of beating while he was actually being treated affectionately. Here again the contrast served to heighten the pleasure. Or, as a third possibility, the active, strong person, dominated by the gentle mood necessary for the climax, remembered a past scene of beating in which, after committing the same misdeed, he had been the punished one.
Besides penetrating into the day-dream in this manner the beating-theme sometimes formed the actual content of a nice story, on the condition that one characteristic indispensable in the beating-phantasy was left out. This characteristic was the humiliation connected with being beaten. In a few impressive scenes in the main day-dream, for example, the climax consisted of a blow or punishment; when it was a blow, however, it was described as unintentional, when a punishment, it took the form of a self-punishment.
These instances of an irruption of the beating-theme into the nice stories all constituted as many arguments proving the relationship already suggested between the two phantasies. In the further course of analysis the girl furnished another convincing proof of this intimate connection. She one day admitted that on a few rare occasions a sudden reversal from nice stories into beating-phantasies had taken place. In hard times, when things were difficult, for instance, a nice story had sometimes failed to fulfil its function and had been replaced at the climax by a beating-scene; so that the sexual gratification connected with the latter had obtained full discharge for the dammed-up excitation. She had afterwards, however, energetically excluded these occurrences from her memory.
Investigation into the relationship between beating-phantasies and nice stories has so far yielded the following results: (1) a striking analogy in the construction of the single scenes; (2) a certain parallelism in the content; (3) the possibility of a sudden change over from the one to the other. The essential difference between the two lies in the fact that in the nice stories affectionate treatment takes the place of the chastisement contained in the phantasies of beating.
Now these considerations lead back to Freud’s paper, in which the previous history of the beating-phantasies is reconstructed. As already mentioned, Freud says that the form of beating-phantasy here described is not the initial one, but is a substitute for an incestuous love-scene. The combined influence of repression and of regression to the anal-sadistic phase of libido-organization has transformed the latter into a beating-scene. From this point of view the apparent advance from the beating-phantasies to the nice stories might be explained as a return to a former phase. The nice stories seem to relinquish the original theme of the phantasies of beating; but they simultaneously bring out their original meaning, i.e., the phantasy of love that was hidden in them.
This attempt at explanation is, however, so far deficient in one important point. We have seen that the climax of the beating-phantasies was invariably connected with a compulsive onanistic act, as well as with a subsequent sense of guilt. The climax of the nice stories on the other hand is free from both. At a first glance this seems inexplicable; for the onanistic act as well as the sense of guilt are both derived from the repressed love phantasy, and the latter, though it is disguised in the phantasies of beating, is represented in the nice stories.
A solution of the problem is furnished by the fact that the nice stories do not take up the whole of the incestuous wish-phantasy belonging to early childhood. At that time all the sexual instincts were being concentrated on a first object, the father. Afterwards repression of the Oedipus complex forced the child to renounce most of these infantile sexual ties. The “sensual” object-ties were banned to the unconscious, so that their re-emergence in the phantasies of beating signifies a partial failure of this attempt at repression.
While the phantasies of beating thus represent a return of the repressed, i.e., of the incestuous wish-phantasy, the nice stories on the other hand represent a sublimation of it. The beating-phantasies constitute a gratification for the directly sexual tendencies, the nice stories for those which Freud describes as “inhibited in their aim”. Just as in the development of a child’s love for its parents, the originally complete sexual current is divided into sensual tendencies which undergo repression (here represented by the beating-phantasies) and into a sublimated and purely tender emotional tie (represented by the nice stories).
The tasks which the two phantasies were each required to fulfil may now be sketched as follows: the beating-phantasies always represent the same sensual love-scene which, expressed in terms of the anal-sadistic phase of libido-organization, comes to be disguised as a beating-scene. The nice stories, on the other hand, contain a variety of tender emotional object-ties. Their theme, however, is also monotonous; it invariably consists of a friendship formed between two characters opposed in strength, in age, or in social position.
The sublimation of sensual love into tender friendship was naturally favoured by the fact that already in the early stages of the beating-phantasy the girl had abandoned the difference of sex and was invariably represented as a boy.
It was the object of this paper to examine a special case in which beating-phantasies and day-dreams co-existed side by side. The relationship between them and their dependence on each other has been ascertained. Apart from this, analysis of this particular daydreamer also provided an opportunity for observing the further development of a continued story.
Some years after the first emergence of the Knight and Prisoner day-dream the girl suddenly made an attempt to write down its content. As a result she produced a sort of short story describing the youth’s life during his imprisonment. It began with a description of the torture he underwent and ended with the prisoner’s refusal to try to escape from the castle. His readiness to remain in the Knight’s power suggested the beginning of their friendship. In contrast to the day-dream all the events were laid in the past and appeared in the form of a conversation between the prisoner’s father and the Knight.
Thus, while retaining the theme of the day-dream, the written story completely changed the elaboration of the content. In the daydream the friendship between the strong and the weak character developed anew in every single scene; in the written story, on the other hand, the friendship developed slowly and its formation took up the whole length of the action. In the new elaboration the single scenes of the day-dream were abandoned; part of the material contained in them was used for the story, their various single climaxes, however, were not replaced by a main climax terminating the latter. The end, i.e., a harmony between the former antagonists, was anticipated but not described in the story. Consequently here the interest, which in the day-dream concentrated on particular points, was more equally diffused over the whole course of the action.
These modifications in the structure corresponded also to modifications in the gratification obtained. In the day-dream every new formation or repetition of a single scene provided another opportunity for pleasurable instinctual gratification. This direct way of obtaining pleasure was abandoned in the written story. The girl indeed did the actual writing in a state of pleasurable excitement, similar to her mental state when day-dreaming; the finished story, however, did not call forth this excitement. Reading the story had no more effect on the girl than reading a story with a similar content produced by a stranger.
This brings the surmise very near that the two essential changes from the day-dream to the written story, i.e., abandoning the single scenes and renouncing the pleasure derived from the various single climaxes, were intimately connected. It seems obvious that the written story had other motives and served another purpose than the day-dream. If this were not so then the development of the Knight’s Story out of the day-dream would signify a transformation of something useful into something utterly useless.
When asked the reasons which had induced her to write the story the girl could give only a single conscious one. She said the story had originated at a period when the day-dream had been unusually vivid. Writing it was a defence against over-indulgence in it. The characters were so real to her and took up so much of her time and interest that she formed the purpose of creating a sort of independent existence for them. As a matter of fact, after it was written down the Knight and Prisoner day-dream actually faded away. This explanation, however, does not altogether clear the matter up. If it were the vividness of the scenes which induced her to write the story it remains inexplicable why, in writing it, she abandoned those particular scenes and dwelt on others which were not included in the day-dream (e.g. the torture-scene). The same reasoning holds good for the characters; for in the story some of the characters that were fully developed in the day-dream are lacking and are replaced by others unknown in the former (as, for instance, the prisoner’s father).
Another motivation for the written story is shown by following out a remark of Dr Bernfeld’s, relating to literary attempts by adolescents. Bernfeld says that in these cases the motive for writing out a day-dream may be extrinsic, not intrinsic. According to him it is most often prompted by certain ambitious ego-tendencies, as, for example, the wish to be regarded as a poet and to win in that capacity the love and esteem of others. In applying this theory to the case under discussion the development from the day-dream to the written story may be represented as follows:
The private phantasy was transformed under the pressure of the ambitious tendencies mentioned above into a communication for others. During the transformation all regard for the dreamer’s personal needs were replaced by consideration of the future readers of the story. It was no longer necessary for the girl to gain pleasure directly from the content, since the written story as such gratified her ambition, and was thus indirectly pleasurable. After having renounced the direct way of attaining pleasure, there was then no reason left for retaining the various single climaxes which had been the source of pleasure before. Similarly she was now free to disregard the restrictions which had forbidden her to describe situations derived from the phantasies of beating. The torture, for example, could be introduced. When writing the story she regarded the whole content of the day-dream from the point of view of its suitability for representation and made her choice between the different parts accordingly. The better she succeeded in rounding off the action, the greater would be the impression she created and, simultaneously, the pleasure she indirectly derived from the story. By renouncing her private pleasure in favour of the impression she could create in others she turned from an autistic to a social activity, and thus found her way back from the life of imagination to life in reality.
* The following paper was written on the basis of several discussions which I had with Frau Lou Andreas-Salomé.—A. F.
† Article citation:
Freud, A. (1923). The relation of beating-phantasies to a day-dream. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 4: 89–102.