title: Insights into the struggle of creativity. A rereading of Anna Freud's "Beating fantasies and daydreams".
abstract: The wish to create, the dilemmas regarding the value, source, and ownership of one's potential and ideas, and the threats that these involve, are explored as they emerge in a dialogue between Anna Freud and her father, embedded in Anna Freud's first paper "Beating Fantasies and Daydreams" (1922). Insight into these aspects of the struggle of creativity contributes to the understanding of their relationship to writing, masochism, sublimation, and other associated psychological processes. Through the analysis of the paper the identity of the patient described is revealed to be Anna Freud herself. This sheds light on her personal development and the way in which it influenced developments in psychoanalytic thinking.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology and Student Counseling Services, Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
authors.forename: R B
authors.initials: RB
authors.lastname: Blass
mesh_terms: D001317:Austria; D003405:Creativity; D004325:Dreams; D004739:England; D005201:Fantasy; D005260:Female; D005619:Freudian Theory; D049672:History, 19th Century; D049673:History, 20th Century; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D011572:Psychoanalysis / Q000266:history; D011573:Psychoanalytic Interpretation; D014956:Writing