Freud, Alec Guinness, John Le Carré and retaining a sense of play

Freud, from “Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming”:

Should we not look for the first traces of imaginative activity as early as in childhood? The child’s best-loved and most intense occupation is with his play or games. Might we not say that every child at play behaves like a creative writer, in that he creates a world of his own, or, rather, rearranges the things of his world in a new way which pleases him? It would be wrong to think he does not take that world seriously; on the contrary, he takes his play very seriously and he expends large amounts of emotion on it. The opposite of play is not what is serious but what is real. In spite of all the emotion with which he cathects his world of play, the child distinguishes it quite well from reality; and he likes to link his imagined objects and situations to the tangible and visible things of the real world. This linking is all that differentiates the child’s “play” from “fantasying.”

The creative writer does the same as the child at play. He creates a world of fantasy which he takes very seriously — that is, which he invests with large amounts of emotion — while separating it sharply from reality.

John Le Carré on watching Alec Guinness prepare for the climactic scene of the TV version of “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy”:

The last big shoot was the discovery of the mole in the house beside the canal…

Alec was in his long johns in the house on the canal and he was making friends with the pistol that he was going to be holding as actors do with a property, really getting it into his hand and making it his own. And he was speculating, really speculating, about who it would be. “Now who do you think is? Could it be that—I do hope it is not that dear Bill Haydon,” And so on, going through the different characters. Now he knew everybody’s line better than everybody knew it, but that made no difference. The Alec who was going to be Smiley did not know who the mole was, though he had a pretty shrewd idea.

I loved, and I continue to love, that the child in him that was able to stay alive… the wonder in him about story that never died. And part of his insecurity, part of his restlessness was that ever wakeful child that needed to be enchanted, or needed to take center stage and pacify the hostile adults around him. To watch the child at work alongside the professional, which was the other part of Alec, was a huge enchantment, for me a master class.”

Anecdote starts at 9:30 here: