Freud's argument – that artists, reviving memories of childhood daydreams and play activities, succeeded in making them acceptable through their aesthetic technique[1] – was to be widely influential for modernism in the interwar period.
[2] Freud began his talk by raising the question of where writers drew their material from, suggesting that children at play, and adults day-dreaming, both provided cognate activities to those of the literary artist.
[3] Heroic and erotic daydreams or preconscious phantasies in both men and women were seen by Freud as providing substitute satisfactions for everyday deprivations;[4] and the same phantasies were in turn turned into shareable (public) artistic constructs by the creative writer, where they could serve as cultural surrogates for the universal instinctual renunciations inherent in civilization.
[7] If the phantasies came too close to the unconscious repressed, however, the process would fail, leading either to creative inhibition or to a rejection of the artwork itself.
Freud himself epitomised his essay's argument a decade later in his Introductory Lectures,[9] stating of the true artist that: he understands how to work over his daydreams in such a way as to make them lose what is too personal in them and repels strangers, and to make it possible for others to share in the enjoyment of them.