Coffee With David

I was asked where I get my ideas from. The easy answer is everywhere. It is true as I get ideas from phrases I hear, stories I read, people I meet, or even songs I listen to. It is a quick answer, but it is less than descriptive. Ideas do not just come at me like cosmic rays from the sky. The truth be told, my creativity is as water that flows from my fountainhead, which binds the chaos into the stream of story. I use the term fountainhead in reference to the philosophy of novelist, screen writer, playwright, and philosopher Ann Rand.

Ann Rand once said “man’s ego is the fountainhead of human progress.” While it can easily be said that she may have referred to the inflated sense of self-worth that can be seen in many of the artistic, architectural, scientific, and other developments of mankind, it is not what she was referring to, that is neither the reference of ego that Rand nor I refer to.
The term ego that we refer to was first called “das ich” by the man who created its scientific philosophy—Dr. Sigmund Freud. The ego we refer to is the ego of the psychoanalysis model of id, ego, and super-ego. Freud wrote, “The ego is that part of the id which has been modified by the direct influence of the external world ... The ego represents what may be called reason and common sense, in contrast to the id, which contains the passions ... in its relation to the id it is like a man on horseback, who has to hold in check the superior strength of the horse; with this difference, that the rider tries to do so with his own strength, while the ego uses borrowed forces.” [Freud, The Ego and the Id (1923)]
My creativity flows from my id, searching for an idea, a purpose and reason to flow. Unbound, unharnessed it would flow without direction or form, flooding the world around me with nonsense and ranting. Instead, to be more than mere fancy or pleasure, it is harnessed, the pressure build and shoots out the spouts of my fountainhead, for the purpose of the story it will tell.
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