study questions

Some Questions for Freud

Freud, “Creative Writers and Daydreaming” (1908)

1. What, according to Freud, is the opposite of play for the child? How is the creative writer "the same as the child at play"?

2. "Hardly anything is harder for a man to give up" than what, according to Freud? What is the truth about "renunciation"? What really happens when a growing child supposedly gives up playing?

3. How does the adult's relationship to his wishes and fantasies differ from the child's?

4. What motivates the "act of fantasizing" What are the two "main groups" of wishes?

5. What is the relation of a fantasy to time--to past, present, and future?

6. How are fantasies like dreams? Why is the meaning of dreams usually obscure?

7. Who, according to Freud, is the real hero of most popular romances, novels, and short stories? To what does the psychological novel owe its "special nature"?

8. What is Freud's surmise about the relationship between creative work and an author's present experience as well as his past?

9. What is the "innermost secret" of a writer"? What is the "essential ars poetica"?

10. What is the relationship between "aesthetic pleasure" and our "actual enjoyment of an imaginative work"? Are they the same thing?

Freud, “The Theme of the Three Caskets” (1913)

1. What, according to Freud, is the choice between the three caskets really about?

2. How would you characterize Freud’s technique in comparing the two scenes involving a choice among three?

3. Why does Freud retell two fairy tales? What point is he trying to make? Is he persuasive?

4. Freud claims there are “forces in mental life tending to bring about replacement by the opposite,” and then proceeds to equate Aphrodite, Goddess of Love, with a mythical Goddess of Death? How can he do this? Is the resulting argument persuasive?

5. How finally does Freud read King Lear?