Q: \

Q: "For Freud, a literary work is analogous to its author's dream."   Referring closely to his essay "Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming," discuss Freud's conception of literature.

" A literary Text is to a critic what a dream is to a therapists.   Both reveal volumes"
Dr. Clarke, 2005

Although Freud was not in any way a deliberate aesthetic theorist, he did leave his mark on both literature and critical theory through his general psychoanalytic framework and also his specific turning to art to show that the range of applicability of psychoanalysis extended beyond dreams and neurosis to even the highest cultural achievements.
In his essay Creative Writers and Day-dreaming, Sigmund Freud's focus is on the relationship of author and his work, and he seeks to answer that question - which peaks curiosity in the reader of any literary piece – "from what sources that strange being, the creative writer draws his material, and how he manages to make such an impression on us with it and to arouse in us emotions of which perhaps we had not even thought ourselves capable? (Adams p.712) With a closer analysis of this work, this essay seeks to discuss Freud's notion of the author, his work and his dreams as it relates to Literature.  
To begin to understand this odd relation of literature to its authors, we may recall its analogy, noted by Sigmund Freud, to the relation between dreams and dreamers. Just as dreams often convey meaning and information to the dreamer in puzzling symbolic images, literature may be said to function in a similar way. The author of a literary text can be compared to a dreamer transcribing his dreams into written language.   From the Freudian point of view, the author uses literature as a medium, and this medium can be considered a sort of censor, a true meaning of a work hidden behind the manifest "dream".   Just as a dreamer is often unaware of the meaning of his/her own dreams, writers too cannot always explain what it is that their writings... [continues]

Read full essay