Freud on passing from gaming to day-dreaming and phantasies construction

📷: Freud with his daughter Anna and
his granddaughter Eva, 1927

As people grow up, then, they cease to play, and they seem to give up the yield of pleasure gained from playing. But whoever understands the human mind knows that hardly anything is harder for a man than to give up a pleasure which has once experienced. Actually, we can never give anything up; we only exchange one thing for another.

What appears to be a renunciation is really the formation of a substitute or surrogate. In the same way, the growing child, when he stops playing, gives up nothing but the link with real objects; instead of playing, he now phantasies. He builds castles in the air and creates what are called day–dreams. I believe that most people construct phantasies at times in their lives. This is a fact which has long been overlooked and whose importance has therefore not been sufficiently appreciated”.

Freud in Creative Writers and Day Dreaming ( 1908). Page 145, Standard Edition

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