CREATIVITY
Everyone who tries to cope effectively and consciously with the developmental
tasks of his particular stage of maturity is engaged in a creative task-the
work of selfcreation. 1
-Elsa Whalley
CREATIVITY AS THE OUTCOME OF THE PROPER FUNCTIONING OF DEVELOPMENT
We have seen that the objective of escalation is creativity, which is emergent in the personal "unfoldment" of the individual as part of his developmental process. This unfoldment is as natural as the budding and blossoming of a rose, if proper conditions of sunshine, soil and moisture are present. Once a certain developmental stage has been reached, creativity is a direct outcome of selfawareness.
When asked, "What is creativity?", Erich Fromm, distinguished psychoanalyst,
replied: "It is the ability to see, to be aware, and to respond" (Mooney
and Razik, 1967, p. 44). He continued (ibid, p. 53): ". . . One's own powers
to
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be aware and to respond; that is one's own creativity. To be creative means to consider the whole process of life as a process of birth, and not to take any stage of life as a final stage. Most people die before they have been fully born. Creativeness means to be born before one dies."
Creativity itself is an emergent and characteristic outcome of the theory of developmental stages. When the requisite degree of mental health is present, creativity is an inevitable outcome of developmental process. Maslow (Anderson, 1968, p. 84) speaks of creativity as a "universal heritage of every human" and one which "covaries with psychological health." The individual who gains mental health as he goes through the developmental process exhibits increasing creativeness. An individual who experiences strain and anxiety evidences diminished creativity.
The amount of creativity, other things being equal, is a barometer of one's mental health. Maslow (Anderson, 1958, p. 88) elaborates this idea further when he says: "The creativity of my subjects seemed to be an epiphenomenon of their greater wholeness and integration, which is what self-actualized implies." It is as natural to express creativity under conditions of high mental health as it is for a heated black object to radiate electromagnetic waves. At first there is no emanation, then with increasing temperature there is first heat, then light, and finally ultraviolet rays. Here the increase of temperature corresponds to expanded mental health, and the appearance of electromagnetic waves corresponds to creative production.
In a section of Creativity and Development Anderson (1959, pp. 121 ff.) amplifies the meaning of differentiation and integration in the development process as having five aspects: (1) confrontation of differences, (2) integration, (3) a yielding up or giving up of the old for a new reorganization, (4) a process of differentiation and (5) a positive directionality. Growth creates differences within the individual and emphasizes his uniqueness from others; these differences are combined into new patterns giving rise to originality; originality is intrinsic in creativity, so creativity is an outcome of development.
A critic may ask: "How can creativity be both an outcome of developmental process and the name of a particular cognitive stage (the sixth)?" Industry is the name given by Erikson to the fourth affective stage, yet no one would feel that this naming precludes an industrious attitude being shown at any other period in life. The reason for the name is that this period emphasized industry, just as the sixth stage emphasizes the cognitive style of creative production. The growing boy is ready to make things in the fourth stage, and ready to use his logical powers in a creative fashion in the sixth stage, It is indeed not surprising that in youthful adulthood when all the individual's powers are at the flood, he should have the best opportunity to be creative.
OEDIPAL ORIGINS: MAGIC NIGHTMARE OR CREATIVE FANTASY
While the individual of enough mental health should be creative at all ages and stages, in reality that creativity is expressed in stage spurts. The genesis of creativity occurs in the third stage (initiative-intuitive) period, when
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the child is drawn oedipally to the parent of the opposite sex. He may be plunged into a creative fantasy conceptualization of his world through which, with parental help and love, he gains some control over the new forces in his environment or, without parental help, he may experience a magic nightmare when the environment controls him, and he is powerless.
The creative fantasy is apparent in the third stage when an able and healthy child receives the full affectional approach of the opposite sexed parent. Hence, creative individuals tend to have oedipal and electral complexes. Boys who are affectionally close to their mothers and girls who are unusually close to their fathers during the years from four to seven tend to become more creative than others of similar ability. The child in this period responds to the warm affection of the opposite sexed parent by freely enlarging the bridge between his fantasy life and his real world. The affectionate adult who values the child's ideas stimulates and encourages the child to produce ideas and show off intellectually. The emotional support encourages the child to draw freely from past experiences, and to retrieve half-forgotten ideas from the preconscious. Thus he becomes able to dip further into this area and produce more creative ideas than another child whose efforts might be inhibited by his parent's disapproval or negative judgments.
The child's successes in winning the affection from the opposite sexed parent gives some semblance of reality to the oedipal fantasies of this period. The bridge between fantasy and reality becomes strengthened while at the same time the child feels "in control," and he grows in the power to discriminate between what is and what is longed for. This control is perhaps what Kris meant by "regression in the service of the ego." This kind of creativity is exhibitionistic, with intrusive, phallic qualities characteristic of the stage. Because more boys are close to their mothers during this period (closer than girls are to their fathers) may be one explanation why there later are more creative men than women in the world of adults.
At this time the child discovers his individuality in a world of powerful and forbidding adults. He recognizes his wants and impulses and senses the strength of his will which can be satisfied either through action or fantasy. Each may lead to pleasure or pain, to joy or guilt, and to growing power and success or to helpless immobilization. For the child this period can be a creative fantasy or a magic nightmare, on the one hand a full expression of the Sullivanian "good me" and on the other a frightening experience of the "not-me," the resolution depending upon the degree of control he can exert as compared with the controls exerted upon him by the significant adults in his life.
Some of the best loved and most enduring fairy tales throughout the world center around this theme of a child imprisoned in a magic kingdom, surrounded by powerful good and evil personifications, who later prove to be impotent. In Alice in Wonderland, Through the Looking Glass and The Wizard of Oz a powerful like-sexed figure (the Queen of Hearts, the Red Queen, and the Wicked Witch of the West) attempts to immobilize the child protagonist. After a series of scary adventures aided by weak, male, nonhuman models (the White Rabbit, the White Knight, and Dorothy's three companions), the child triumphs over
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and reveals the actual impotence of the magical figure. Alice says: "You're nothing but a pack of cards" and herself becomes a queen; Dorothy discovers that even the kindly Wizard of Oz is a fake and gets back to Kansas on her own. This discovery that adults do not actually have the magic powers ascribed to them by the child signals the transformation from the magic nightmare of the third stage to the workaday world of the industry stage.
STABILIZING THE CREATIVE FUNCTION
During the third developmental stage (the initiative period), significant
processes occur within the developing child as he is confronted with the
following tasks:
a. The child learns whether to defend or cope (Bruner).
b. The child learns the symbolic representation of experience (Bruner).
c. 'Me child moves along the (Rank) continuum from adapted to creative.
d. The child "establishes his preconscious" (Kubie) and learns to operate
the creativity cycle.
Let us discuss these in turn.
The Child Learns Whether to Defend or Cope
If you were a knight in a country where there were fire-breathing dragons, you would have two choices. One would be to remain within your castle walls, and defend against the dragons by making the moat deeper and the battlements higher. You could imagine worse and worse dragons until one finally came to get you. On the other hand, you might decide to face the danger and go down fighting. Then you would practice jousting; get the best horse, sword and coat of mail (and asbestos) you could find; and one fine morning ride across the moat prepared to do battle. And if you survived, you would probably find that the dragons were not so bad as they were rumored to be. This is coping.
The writer once talked with a gifted boy about seven who said he had 35 ways of going home from school so that he would not be beaten up by other little boys. When asked how many times he had been beaten up he said "Never," but that was because he had 3 5 different ways of going home from school. Here was a child so busy defending against imaginary dangers he had little time to cope with the real world.
The Child Learns the Symbolic Representation of Experience
Bruner (1966) tells us that about stage three, children go through the enactive, iconic stages and eventually arrive at symbolic representation of experience. Reaching symbolic representation allows a child to make his experience intellectually negotiable; that is, he can describe and communicate it. With this
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comes the satisfaction of what Sullivan calls "consensual validation": one can have the relief of finding out that one's experience is not unique and uncanny (part of Sullivan's "not me") but common to others, and hence may be incorporated without fear into the "me." This reassurance enables the child to continue learning because he has enough ego-strength to cope with and reach out for new experience, rather than to withdraw with fear and defend against imaginary dangers.
The symbolic representation of experience is a big feat for any child since it frees him from much of the "nightmare" trauma which precedes consensual validation. It is even a more significant achievement for the gifted child since it involves him in creative fantasy. More exactly, the early mastery of this task while he is still in the third stage (initiative- intuitive period) exposes him to the creative possibilities of his preconscious which are still accessible while he has gained the ability to communicate them verbally.
Our argument is better represented graphically than otherwise. In figure
5, the lower horizontal line represents chronological age and the left,
vertical mental age. The first three stages are marked off vertically,
and the upper horizontal represents the mental level of symbolic representation
(roughly reading readiness) reached for the average child at approximately
six and a half years of age. The lower diagonal line represents the growth
of the average child which intersects at 6.5 M.A. and C.A. The upper diagonal
represents the growth of the superior child, progressing at a sharper slope
and reaching the level of symbolic representation for a considerable space
while still in the initiative period. Thus this child is able to produce
and communicate verbal concepts at a time when he is still highly influenced
by fantasy, which gives its special enhancement to his developing verbal
creativity. Since IQ is a rough measure of the slope of the diagonal, the
minimum slope to get much of this benefit is about 1.2, which may be the
reason why verbal creativity seems to demand a threshold of about 120 IQ
(1.2 x 100).
The Child Moves Somewhere Along the Continuum from Adapted to Creative
We learned in chapter I something about the views of the psychoanalyst Otto Rank regarding adapted, conflicted and creative growth. The child enters stage three (the initiative period) with some ego reserves from stage two (the autonomy period). He has learned that he is not part of his mother and that he can on occasion successfully oppose her. The will, primitively developed in the autonomy period, flowers fully in the next stage when the child becomes master of his body and finds it a source of never-ending energy. This period brings a thrusting initiative which carries the child into multiple dimensions of discovery. In the previous stage, his occasional failures to meet societal demands (such as toileting) was a vice, for it was something over which he had little, if any, control. Doubt and shame were bad enough. But now the child discovers that in this wonderful Garden of Eden there is the serpent of sin, engendered by his will when he makes the wrong choice. This discovery invests choice making (as
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FIGURE 5. WHY THE GIFTED CHILD IS MORE LIKELY TO BE VERBALLY CREATIVE
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opposed to strict obedience to parental demands), with special dangers-the danger of fear and guilt, the danger of anxiety, and most of all the danger of being immobilized and not being cherished - the Sullivanian "bad me."
The joy and sheer delight which the child finds in all kinds of now and creative discoveries is now balanced by the remorse, guilt and anxiety which is brought home to him by punishment for some of these forbidden efforts. ("You must not touch or take this; you must not say that; you must not do the other thing.") Thus the development of initiative brings joy and satisfaction on one side and guilt and immobilization on the other.
The child who is too thoroughly frightened by his mistakes and by parental prohibitions at this stage will give up; he may decide it is best to be completely docile and not risk any painful consequences. In time he will learn to conform automatically, not even for expedience, and this guilt induced immobilization or conformity will later be extended from judgmental parents to a prescriptive school, to a religious creed and an authoritarian society. In later life this man, conscientious but pathetic, will write poignantly in his memoirs, as did the late George Apley, "You can't escape Boston."
Many children are stronger than this and persist in reaching out to find values and experiences other than those sanctioned by parents. Those who fight alone or with minimum adult support feel very "conflicted," to use Rank's phrase. Eternally obsessed with guilt feelings, they develop neurotic tendencies always to fight or flee. And while the neurosis is positive in that it shows the fight is still going on, it is fatal or nearly so for the creative impulse. For the energy which should go into productivity goes instead into waging the war within or fighting "The Inner Conflict," and this is indeed what Kubie (1958) means by The Neurotic Distortion of the Creative Process.
Finally there is the lucky creative child who somehow wins through neurotic involvement to find most of his creative potential intact. This may be due to the affectional support of the opposite sexed parent, whose warmth puts a higher valence on creative activities, and enables the child to uncover and make available his preconscious areas within the ego's reach. The close relationship also blunts the threat of parental prohibition and convinces the child that fewer things are denied and that more things are possible and permitted.
The fantasy of this period which seems to remain in the preconscious of the average child is brought more into reality by the bright child. Whereas, through fear and repression of the experience as a magic nightmare, many children seem to have almost aborted this stage of development, the creative child seems able to bring more of this experience from the "not me" to the "good me" area. He almost seems to have overstayed his leave in this kingdom, and its door to fantasy is always left slightly ajar. The loving parent has provided a wide and safe platform for consensual validation. When the child reports having seen a fire-breathing dragon, for instance, the mother does not scold him for telling a lie, but asks playfully "What color was it?" As with the trauma of birth, very few children come through these stages completely unscathed. And so the creative youngster is apt to retain a superabundance of joy, activity and discovery, only to pay for this outburst of energy by a cyclic slack time characterized by
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guilt, resentment or immobilization. Thus parental reactions during the third stage of initiative has helped mold the child into one of the types described by Rank as adapted, conflicted or creative.
The Child Establishes the Preconscious and Learns to Operate the Creativity Cycle
Growth toward new conceptualization or creative reorganization requires the release of the present conceptualization resulting in a fluid state out of which arises a new and higher organization. An old concept too restricted to accommodate new experiences must be adjusted much as one would slip out of a tight pair of shoes, wander around in the grass for awhile in one's bare feet and then get into a new and larger pair. Psychologically, relaxation of a rigid cognitive structure is accomplished through free play which somehow disengages the too tightly bound concept and hands the whole business to the preconscious. The preconscious in some manner reorganizes the construction and enlarges it and, under suitable conditions, leaks the salient aspects of the reorganization back to the conscious mind. The psychotherapy slogan "unfreeze, change, and refreeze" applies here. Free play unfreezes the concept and makes it fluid. The preconscious changes it, and the new concept is again refrozen into the cognitive structure. Let us investigate this critical process in some detail.
Piaget (1951, pp. 147-50) states: "The underlying structure of play is constituted by a certain reorientation of the ego to reality." Ruitenbeek (1965, p. 16) tells us that "In Creative Writers and Daydreaming, Freud explored the connection between the imaginative play of childhood and the fantasizing of later life Sadler (1969) equates play with creative perception and advocates play as a pathway to personal freedom. Kubie (1958, p. 56) remarks on the application of free association to creativity: "In psychological affairs, free associations are our Gallup Poll" (that is, they sample what is going on in the mind). He continues:
Creativity itself depends upon the process of free association which makes possible preconscious analogic processes yet at the same time exposes them to deformation under the influence of concurrent unconscious processes.1
Sadler (1969) in investigating playful perception, notes the relationship of focal attention to the development of a healthy creative personality. He says:
It is also a perceptual mode that pertains to play. The creative edge of perception whereby we remain open and sensitive to new meanings and increasing awareness of life possibilities originates in and is sustained through play....
Play reveals itself as a basic existential form to keep one's world
open, not defensively, but creatively.2
2From Sadler, W. A., "Creative Existence: Play as a Pathway to Personal Freedom," Copyright, Humanitas, 5:57-80, 1969. Used by permission.
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Getzels and Jackson (1962, p. 99) refer to this sense of playfulness in their subjects as follows:
It is almost as if the creative adolescents experience a special delight in playful intellectual activity for its own sake. They involve themselves in the game-like task ... seemingly because of the intrinsic pleasure that accompanies their use of fantasy.1
The importance of play as an avenue to the preconscious is highlighted by Koestler (1964), who devotes an entire chapter to "Playing and Pretending" in The Act of Creation. The playful and preconscious aspects of creative behavior are further explored in the symposium issue of Daedalus by Kubie (1965, p. 565 ff). In another place Kubie (1958, p. 39) tells us that the free play of preconscious process simultaneously accomplishes two goals:
1. It supplies an endless stream of old data rearranged into new combinations
of wholes and fragments on grounds of analogic elements;
2. It exercises a continuous selective influence not only on free associations,
but also on the minutiae of living, thinking, walking, talking, dreaming,
and indeed every moment of life.2
Lieberman (1967, p. 395) even notes that there are two kinds of play:
The young child's playfulness, and the playfulness outside the play situation shown by the adolescent....
Both the kindergartner and the adolescent represent important age points for the identification and encouragement of divergent thinking. In the preschool years, one might say that spontaneity flows uncensored by the logical operations, which mature after eleven. Lieberman feels that the necessity to toy with ideas and relationships maybe one factor separating the two kinds of play. It is remarkable how Lieberman's opinions confirm what has earlier been asserted here about the emphasis on creativity in stages three and six, with two kinds of creative production consequent. Her thesis connects this difference with the difference in play, whereas ours is a somewhat wider view, but it is obvious that play and free association form one concomitant of the "I-thou" relationship out of which the creative process emerges. Lieberman in her own research (1965) notes confirmatory evidence from Wallach and Kogan (1965) and Jackson and Messick (1964) and connects playfulness with a sense of humor, a personality correlate often noted in creative persons.
Harold Greenwald (Otto and Mann, 1969, p. 16) explains it well:
Play on the other hand is by its very nature creative. One of the few
really outstanding teachers I once had defined art as "concentrated play."3
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In the same article Greenwald quotes Otto as distinguishing seven kinds
of play:
(1) the spontaneous play of a child,
(2) adult play with children,
(3) play with animals,
(4) play with nature (such as rolling in the grass),
(5) primitive play (making mud pies),
(6) thrill play (speeding, skiing or flying) and
(7) mastery play (sports). To which we would add
(8) sexual play,
(9) fantasy play (reveries, daydreams, etc.),
(10) mimetic play (in which the same process is repeated or rehearsed),
(11) hobbies (stamp collecting) and
(12) unconscious play (rubbing coins together in one's pocket as an
unconscious outlet for tension).
The common elements here are:
(a) the exhibition of nonutilitarian energy,
(b) being in a relaxed or regressed mode,
(c) deemphasizing the cognitive and controlling aspects and
(d) inviting preconscious and unconscious flux.
It is not surprising that among the outcomes of play are a restoration
of joy and satisfaction, a realigned conceptual stance which has resulted
from the freeing and flow of previously anchored concepts and a residual
seepage of reorganized and hence creative ideas from the preconscious into
the conscious mind.
This process of regression to the preconscious through free play and daydreaming fantasy apparently gets its start during the third (initiative stage) when the child with an oedipal or electral attachment to the parent of the opposite sex develops this ability to dip into the preconscious to bring back creative ideas. The key factors in this process are first the courage to explore this "nightmare" area with its uncanny "not-me" aspects, and the second the attentional shift through fantasy and free play to garner peripheral concepts from the preconscious. Kubie (1958) in his masterpiece, The Neurotic Distortion of the Creative Process, first stressed the importance of this preconscious function in creative production. He states that preconscious processes are attacked by both superego and ego prohibitions, and by unconscious drives. Somehow the preconscious has to grow healthy enough to ward off these attacks and still fulfill its capacity to select and rearrange the data of experience into creative and innovative forms. Kubie believes that the preconscious part of the psyche is the major source of man's creative abilities.
By "establishing the preconscious" we mean the practice of making preconscious experience easily available to the reach of the ego, and of bolstering the preconscious (through use) against the attacks of the other aspects of the psyche. The child through exercising his fantasy to please his mother learns implicitly the rules of relaxation, free association and play, which are requisite for him to gain access into this shadowed area.
With much repression the psyche involves a weak preconscious, barricaded from assaults from either side, and a large area of unconscious motivation, unavailable to conscious use. Little of past experience is available in adaptive behavior. With freedom from threat and supportive parental relations, the preconscious is enlarged at the expense of the unconscious; consequently much more of past experience becomes available for ego use.
Figure 6 illustrates the similarity with which various writers have described the tripartite compartments of the psyche. Freud used three terms: unconscious, preconscious and conscious, and others used similar tri-polar divisions. Thus Sullivan (1965, p. 161) describes similar functions as "bad-me," "not-me" and
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FIGURE 6. TRIPARTITE DIVISION OF THE PSYCHE
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"good-me." "Bad-me" is more conscious than Freud's construct, but is organized as a process variable around increasing anxiety, whereas "not-me" designates frightening, uncanny experience such as those encountered in dreams, nightmares and dissociated behavior. "Good-me" is, of course, a part of conscious positive self concept.
Turning to the existentialists (Ford and Urban, 1963, pp. 455-56), one finds a similar configuration. Umwelt is the world of animal drives-, Eigenwelt is the inner world of man's mind, evolving and becoming; and Mitwelt is the world of conscious human personal relationships. A country parson would have no difficulty in characterizing these three modes; his terms would be "animal," "divine" and "human."
In these three divisions of mind we find
(1) unconscious and basically amoral biological impulses and drives,
(2) self- conscious ego processes and
(3) inner, paranormal, "uncanny" aspects.
One is immediately reminded of Bucke's divisions of consciousness (1923,
p. 1) into
(1) simple consciousness (characteristic of animals),
(2) self-consciousness (characteristic of humans) and
(3) cosmic consciousness (rudimentary in a few humans, but evolving
to become a future characteristic of a finer species).
Such a view immediately suggests our previous argument, namely that the preconscious is the source of man's creativity, particularly when it is strengthened, protected and enlarged through regular use and through increasing mental health. The "establishment" of the preconscious is evidence that the individual is not at war with himself, not alienated from experience, not a split personality. He can be creative because almost all his past experiences, in chewed-up and digested form, ready to be reattached to new concepts, are available to his preconscious collator. It has at its disposal a vast assortment of biological impulses, tabooed acts, rejected compromises, affective pains and pleasures, remembered facts, personal feelings, horrifying nightmares and a host of other material, none of which has been suppressed, but all of which can be reused (much like old newspapers) to print a new edition. What is in the new edition depends on how much freedom the editor (preconscious) has from the incursions of the prohibitions of the conscious and super-ego and the pressures of experiences and feelings suppressed by the unconscious. The health, growth and stability of the preconscious thus becomes of prime importance in investigating the genesis of creativity.
With this in mind, the inspection of figure 7 (adapted from Kubie, 1968) is invited, in which the conscious, preconscious and unconscious are displayed in diagram form from right to left, and the diagrams down the page feature a growth in mental health as well as a growth laterally of the preconscious at the expense of both the conscious and the subconscious.
Each diagram illustrates the relationship between conscious, preconscious and unconscious portions of the psyche in differing individuals from very sick (top) to very well (bottom). In the first instance (the psychotic), the preconscious has vanished under pressure from the external pressures of the conscious and the taboos of the unconscious; the other two portions have broken apart, resulting in a split personality. In the second diagram (the neurotic) the preconscious, while diminished under buffeting from the conscious and the unconscious,
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FIGURE VII. DEVELOPMENT OF THE PRECONSCIOUS
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still managed to exist and hold the personality together. In the third diagram (the average), a thick impenetrable wall has been established, protecting the preconscious but compartmentalizing the psyche and preventing intercommunication. In the fourth diagram (the creative), the preconscious is healthy and expanded enough so that the walls have been replaced by a permeable membrane through which, under osmotic pressure, ideas filter through to the conscious and subconscious. In the fifth diagram (the psychedelic), the preconscious has grown in extent, and the membrane has been replaced by doors which swing open, giving the ego direct contact with the preconscious and hence a feeling of strangeness and expansion. In the last diagram (illumination), the three aspects are merged into a continuous state of wholeness.
The essence of process toward both greater mental health and greater creativity lies in the strengthening and developing of the preconscious so that it enlarges to assume a more important share in the tripartite membership of the individual psyche. This aggrandizement signals improved mental health and progress toward self-actualization, of which creative performance is an early indication. McLuhan and the existentialists emphasize a better balance between rational and pararational aspects of the psyche, and perhaps in this instance they are merely restating the thesis which has just been illustrated here.
A good deal of space has been devoted to a full explanation of the function of play and retrieval through free association and fantasy to "establish the preconscious": as a healthy, working, viable member of the psyche, able to protect its boundaries, and more easily available to the use of the ego. But now it must be emphasized that this is the beginning, not the end, of a developing creative life style which will escalate in future stages to gain new repertoires and techniques. The child will learn, for example, implicitly to follow the Wallas stages of preparation, incubation, illumination and verification. His ego will grow bolder and more courageous in encounters with the preconscious. Finally, he will also discover that the process of creative production is a cycle in which the positive amplitude is creativity, and the nonproductive part of the cycle need not result in negative or destructive reactions to self or others, but should be used for rest and relaxation. But the beginnings in "establishing the preconscious" are crucial. Kubie sums it up when he states (1959, p. 143): "Creativity is a product of preconscious activity. This is the challenge which confronts the education of the future."1
Creativity would be a more common experience if only the preconscious
were not such a formidable phantasmagoria to deal with. A creative masterpiece
may represent a supreme effort to resolve or at least to deal with a frightening
"not me" conflict that even a recurrent nightmare cannot exorcise. Mack
(1970, p. 94) believes that terrifying dreams and nightmares are particularly
likely to result in creative production, especially if the ego is able
to master the situation and not be intimidated by it. As Mack states (1970,
p. 99): "Creativity and madness are two alternatives to nightmares, or
more accurately to the critical
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conflicts which give rise to them." The difference, he goes on to point out, lies in the hold on reality which the artist has because art, as Kris (1952) has pointed out, is related to the degree of intactness of the ego.
In the ballet Coppelia, when Swanhilde and her companions venture into the dark atelier of Dr. Coppelius, she encounters a frightening array of automatons in menacing positions. Only gradually as her fear ebbs, does she grasp the creative possibilities of the situation. In a similar manner, the preconscious is a dark repository of the leftover stage props of living; and when we venture into this darkened and chaotic property room of our minds, we, like Swanhilde, may be in for a good scare, or, if we have courage and cleverness, we may be able to put the props together into a new play, fantasy or creation. Mack (1970, p. 99) believes that "creative ability can be a powerful integrating force" to restore stability and balance after a frightening exposure of the ego to the "not me" of the preconscious.
Greenacre (1962) in discussing creativity in adults, points out that its manifestation may relieve but not solve conflicts. And Mack (1970, p. 180) feels that "we should perhaps measure psychological health by a capacity ... to achieve fruitful accommodations." Robert Louis Stevenson, an extremely creative author, who in his private life often seemed regressed in the oedipal period, tells us how he converted nightmares into some of his many fanciful stories (1909). Beset by nightmares, he discovered that he could impose his will on these preconscious experiences and, by modifying and shaping them to the demands of his ego, he could convert them into useful literary products. The key question in the encounter with the dark, dissociated forms of the "not me" is whether the ego will be daunted and immobilized and forced to let its energies out in dreams, nightmares and psychotic episodes, or whether by a supreme act of will it can create, out of the seeming chaos, a new and higher order.
STAGE RELATIONSHIPS OF CREATIVITY
The previous section has dwelt on the vital role of stage three (initiative) in the development of creative performance. But it should also be noted that figure I in chapter 2 suggests that the sixth stage (intimacy) has special potential for creative adults. Society and young adults in the sixth stage are often so concerned and involved over the sexual aspects of the period that the possibilities it affords for creative arousal are missed altogether. The gifts of countless artists, poets and musicians have flowered in this stage, generally in direct response to the inspiration of a beloved companion. Dante, Byron, and Wagner are three wellknown examples, but Galois and Arriaga, geniuses who died before reaching their majority, are even more appropriate illustrations. A peculiar property of this stage in outstandingly creative persons lies in a tempering of oncoming aging, in keeping the artist youthful, often in appearance, and always in spirit. We shall try to analyze this phenomenon more thoroughly in later chapters.
It is interesting that Erikson (Evans, 1966, p. 57) appears to locate this second burst of creativity in the generativity (seventh) stage instead of the sixth.
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Talking about the reasons for the term he says:
If I would call this strength creativity, I would put too much emphasis on the particular creativity which we ascribe to particular people. I use generativity, because I mean everything that is generated: children, products, ideas and works of art.1
While Creativity Is Emphasized at Stages Three and Six, It Is Not Absent at Other Stages
We tend to create for those we love. The motivational pressures resulting
from oedipal love at stage three and heterosexual love at stage six power
the creativity surges at these stages. Being different in flavor, each
stage gives rise to different kinds of creativity. But once a creative
style of life has been established through contact with the preconscious,
processes and techniques tend to persist as strategies available to the
ego. They may even expand and proliferate at any stage under suitable conditions
of mental health and environmental stimulation.
Creative performance is the synthesis of several independent systems:
(a) differential abilities and their stimulation as in the Guilford
structure of intellect model
(b) mental and physical health
(c) antiauthoritarian and nurturing tendencies in parents and others
in the environment
(d) the life styles established in the third and sixth stages of development.
The first three can occur at any time in human life. Tendencies toward creative performance, especially those influenced by education, can and do occur at all stages of development.
The shift and reorganization of concepts required as the child goes from one cognitive level to another may demand energy or impose strain which temporarily diminishes creative performance. This may explain why Torrance (1962, 1964) has found that there are drops at fourth and seventh grade in creativity test scores, since these grades mark the onset of new developmental stages. Such higher cognitive stages, however, as "categorizing" in the concrete operations stage and "if then" contingency in the formal operations stage add new degrees of freedom to ego functioning, and this escalation gives the possibility of higher and more complex productions.
Creativity Occurs in Individuals of Less Than Perfect Mental Health Even Though Mental Health Enhances Creative Performance
The creative person is not necessarily perfect and without flaw. Actually,
creativity occurs rather early in the development of the mentally healthy
individual and promises the continuation of such mental health, much as
ego strength
(page 69)
measures predict the successful termination of therapy. Creative performance tends to influence development in the direction of mental health, as fruit on a tree or dividends on a stock promise the future vitality of an organism. Hence almost all children are creative, but few adults are. Adverse conditions or circumstances may deny the early promise, or the playful creativity of the child may not have been bolstered with the cognitive task structure necessary to produce the more formal and finished productions of adult creativity. Childish creativity requires only playfulness; adult creativity requires discipline.
Developmental process with moderate environmental stimulation and some openness in the life style carry the child naturally toward creative expression through adolescence. The problem is to remain creative after the biological push to development is over at sexual maturity. This is when "normal" people go to seed. Those adults who continue to be creative preserve their creative drives by a simultaneous search for greater amounts of mental health and for environments which stimulate and enhance creative response. We shall discuss details of this search in the next chapter.
Creativity enhances mental health in the adult, but in adults, as in children, creative insights often come before the power to nurture the idea and follow through with it is gained. Most of us have creative ideas on occasion, as most women occasionally become pregnant. But whereas many women carry the fetus full term and have the baby, most of us continually abort the creative ideas and never bring them to fruition.
Creativity is not a rare experience accessible only to genius. It is a natural and indeed an inevitable outcome of an intelligent mind when functioning in conditions of desirable mental health. Every inward (preconscious) state has an inherent tendency to form, but it lies supine until revitalized and expressed by the attention of the conscious mind. This pressing outward imprints on the latent plastic state the cognitive properties of the conscious mind, the creative vision of the preconscious and the limitations of the unconscious. The visible product is, therefore, colored by the author's views which may be idiosyncratic and imperfect. The knack of creativity is not only in "turning on" the potency of the preconscious mind which nurtures the idea, but also in the art of "turning on" nontrivially, so that the new creation may be truly new, worthy and consequential and not tarnished with imitation and imperfection. We find these latter elements particularly in the child's first attempt to be creative, and teachers, parents and guidance personnel need help in raising the child's sights so that the product will not be new merely to the child (and repetitious to the culture), but also original enough to be new and truly innovative for all.
Every creative accomplishment is an actualization of an "impossible dream," a visible outpicturing of an inward state; it is, therefore, sacramental in the truest sense. But its shock of recognition and "effective surprise" depends upon even more than this; namely, that it contains within itself the bud or nucleus of a vision of perfection and of further progress toward it. This final emanation of grace gives the creative act its characteristic and indefinable charm, for it not only contains the happy and explicit solution to a present problem, but an implicit promise of growth toward an even higher resolution.
(page 70)
After a careful case study investigation of the influence of mental health on creativity Fried (1964) concluded that increased mental health as established through therapy improved artistic work habits, freed and sublimated aggressive, destructive tendencies into productive work patterns, reduced omnipotent fantasy which had caused the artists to destroy many of their works which were below the masterpiece level, and improved human relations which tended to preserve creative energy. The creativity increase in these artists undergoing therapy appeared as an early dividend resulting from their increased mental health.
CREATIVITY AS EVOLUTIONARY DEVELOPMENT: THROWBACKS AND THROW-FORWARDS
Creativity is a characteristic not only of individual human behavior, but also of the species in general. What is true of the development of the superior individual is also true of the developing aspects of mankind. The emergence of creative abilities is a triumph not only of individual development but, as Bucke (1929) points out, the harbinger of evolutionary progress for all men. Astronaut Armstrong echoed these ideas when he first stepped onto the moon: "One small step for a man; one giant step for mankind."
In the grand progression of evolutionary life, each man has a small degree of freedom because he can choose within limits to ride in the van or bring up the rear. The atavist in society is a throwback to former days, a reconceptualization of the past. The creative man, by contrast, is an earnest of the future, a throwforward to a better time and humanity. He constitutes an implicit and intuitive statement of powers yet to be fully apprehended by the species. That his clutch on these powers is sometimes weak and spasmodic should not bother us, for it was Browning who said: "A man's reach should exceed his grasp, else what's a heaven for?"
The sense of destiny, of being caught up in process toward the future, a quality exhibited by many creative or self- actualized people, is part of an existential act of becoming in which one is thrown forward into the living actualization of one's potentialities. One becomes in flux like the electron in orbit, having energy and momentum but no position or fixity.
Hallman (1963) speaks of this sense of worth and destiny as follows:
The third set of meanings contained in the criterion of openness points to the need of the creative personality to have a sense of personal destiny and worth which will allow him to accept himself as the source of values. It is obvious that anyone who tolerates uncertainties and conflicts for long must enjoy an anchorage within some value system apart from the conventional order, and this would need to be himself. The forward-looking search for possibilities which characterizes the creative process implies an acceptance of self as a source of judgment. The new creations exist at first in the future and in tentative form; they exist as possibilities. If they become original creations, they must take on the values which the individual assigns to them. Since the creative person must speculate, test, modify, and postpone completion of his work, he needs to rely on his own sensitivity for guidance.
(page 71)
The guilt-immobilized, uncreative (reactive) individual is transparent and easily recognized. His dress, manner and attitude betray stress, fixity and stasis. He is role typed, not versatile; tense, not relaxed; uneasy, not confident; superstitious, not flexible; bound, not free; phlegmatic, not buoyant; static, not dynamic; stolid, not energetic; dull, not scintillating; dowdy, not chic; inhibited, not spontaneous; inert, not active; self-conscious, not selfless; discouraged, not happy; and an object of sympathy rather than personally appealing.
Life is more than mere intervals between trips to the toilet; it can be intervals between trips to the stars. Is it more meaningful to regard man as a reactive being or as a creative mind? If man is a reactive being, a mere brute creature imprisoned in a universe for which he has no responsibility, he is much like the steer that grazes the plain and, like the steer, he will end up butchered. But if man has a creative mind, he has a part in the noumenon of that creation and, in the alternation of that open-ended universe, he can intervene constructively in his own future and in the future of his species.
Creativity is the process of transforming the horrors and fears of the Sullivanian "not me" into a productive fantasy in the preconscious mind. There is a magic aura to this transformation in which the critical question is whether the ego is to be controlled and immobilized by this frightening environment (as one is in nightmares), or whether the ego through the help of a powerful parental figure is able to organize this apparent chaos, control these magic elements and transform them into a creative fantasy, replacing horror with harmony.
Shakespeare illustrates both the process and the product of this metamorphosis in Ariel's song:
Full fathom five thy father lies
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes;
Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea change
Into something rich and strange;
Sea nymphs hourly ring his knell;
Hark, I hear them; Ding-Dong Bell.
-The Tempest, 1; 2
Here Ariel represents the ego, aided by the parental figure of Prospero, the good magician. Out of the substance of a drowned cadaver (surely a most horrible object), there is nothing "but doth suffer a sea change/into something rich and strange." The horror, dread and uncanniness of the "not me" become muted and transformed into value, approbation and beauty, and the end result is creative fantasy in its ultimate form.