PREFACE

 

This is a book of glimpses; glimpses of theory, glimpses of practice and glimpses of a better future. These glimpses are doubtless distorted by the writer's bias and idiosyncrasy; but time will cure this, for someday a younger and abler writer will write a clearer and better book. Such is the way of progress. Meanwhile, the glimpses will provide some with hope and others with the material for derision. For it is a principle which the book enunciates-that those higher abilities which man will someday hold securely appear to him today in tenuous fits and starts.

Since truth asks for no more than coexistence, hypotheses, like people, are best judged by their consequential behavior and not by their pedigree. The reader must expect to be subjected to the views of original but out-of-fashion writers such as Bucke and Sheldon. In this regard, the testimony of a man of Maslow's (1959, p. 89) genius is noteworthy:

It was a startling thing for me to hear a woman describing her feelings as she gave birth to a child in the same words used by Bucke (1929) to describe the "cosmic consciousness." . . . I had to respect constitutional difference of the Sheldonian sort more than I had, as Morris (195 6) had also discovered.

Theories that make any kind of sense out of experience, whether they are visionary like Bucke's or statistically suspect like Sheldon's, deserve respect not on the basis of pedigree but on how much experience they bind and how much sense they make. The connecting of experience in any form is too valuable an act to go unrecognized, whether or not it agrees with other modes or fashions of experiential conceptualization. Hlistory is full of circumstances where a theory neglected for years suddenly is redeemed through the discovery of some new facts. We do not have time in the future for this kind of luxury lag in hypotheses formulation.

The theme of this volume is: "What accounts for the creative development of superior individuals?" The author has been preoccupied with this question for a number of years having first considered it in a volume by Gowan and Demos (1964) and again the next year in "What Makes A Gifted Child Creative?" (Gowan, 1965). But the answers seemed too glib and too superficial, despite another attempt in 1967 (Gowan, Demos and Torrance, 1967). The outcome of several years' study and attention to this matter is the present volume, which mounts a much more detailed investigation into the process.

The plan of this volume is to scrutinize the process of individual development, with special attention to the development of the superior individual, and to attempt to justify the inclusion of creative production as a process in that developmental escalation. This developmental direction, as Piaget noted, is away from the egocentric toward greater freedom and self-actualization.

This plan is carried out in seven chapters.1 The first, an introductory chapter, makes a selective search of the literature in regard to development and creativity. In chapter 2 the existence and periodicity of eight developmental stages is enunciated. Chapter 3 devotes itself to the important concept of escalation with its five attributes of succession, discontinuity, emergence, differentiation and integration. Chapter 4 discusses creativity, and particularly its preconscious sources in relation to developmental stages. Chapter 5 is concerned with the environmental stimulation necessary for creativity at every level. Chapter 6 discusses the problems and penalties of remaining noncreative. Chapter 7 is devoted to the process of self-actualization as it relates to the last three adult cognitive stages of creativity, psychedelia and illumination.

This book will please neither those who advocate nor those who oppose the use of drugs to gain psychedelic effects- an area not of the writer's competency - thus it has been neglected purposely. This action will not please those who aver that the use of drugs is a short cut to Nirvana. Conversely, despite urging by well-meaning individuals to denounce the use of drugs, this too has been avoided for it seems as blameworthy to denounce a method out of prejudice as to advocate it out of ignorance. There are psychedelic effects which are related to both creativity and personal development and these are possible without the involvement of drugs.

Some readers may be surprised by the extensive use that has been made of analogs from physical science. It seems that the tradition started by Lewin is well worth continuing, both because the images of physical science are so clear and discrete and because it is so much better organized at the present time than behavioral science. Modeling from the physical sciences to the behavioral sciences is one way of "piggy-backing" on the extensive accomplishments of physical science in an effort to catch up.

Another feature of the book which will appeal to some readers and not to others is the extensive use of poetry. This action has been rather in the nature of a "happening" than by deliberate design. The poet, however, often is a prophet, and it is he who first foresees the onward course of progress so that, very often, new innovations are first announced implicitly in poetry long before they are adduced by psychological investigation. In several places in the book, poetry has proved to be a happy and appropriate explication of an idea being developed.
Some well-meaning individuals, after reading parts of the manuscript, have said in effect that the book is on religion and that a new type of religious practice is advocated. The charge I wish strongly to refute. The author, a psychologist, not a theologian, is not religiously oriented and is not a member of any organized sect. It appears that religion may have been confused with value. The attempt has been made in these pages to show that the process of development has values and that these values come out of psychologic analysis of man. (This is because they are inherent in man.) Since values have commonly been ascribed to religion in the past, many people think that that is where the values belong; but the history of culture shows first physical science and now behavioral science constantly taking over realms once considered the preserve of religion. The "Krathwohl-Bloom Taxonomy of Educational Objectives in the Affective Domain" is an excellent example of psychologically oriented values. It is felt that those presented in this volume are similar.


IThe lay reader who is uninterested in the literature of development and creativity may wish to skip chapter 1. Some readers may also find Chapter 3 difficult.



The transpersonal ideas which are only slightly evident in this work, were expanded in three subsequent books: DEVELOPMENT OF THE PSYCHEDELIC I14DIVIDUAL (1974); TRANCE ART AND CREATIVITY (1975); and OPERATIONS OF INCREASING ORDER (1980).

San Fernando Valley State College in 1972 became California State University, Northridge.



(N.B.JCG 9/82) When this book was published in 1972 the word decalage was used in terms of misdevelopment of a stage. At about the same time Prof. Kohlberg popularized its use in English as the spread or diffusion of stage characteristics, thus making for confusion. In work subsequent, therefore, we have substituted tile word dysplasia for decalage (meaning misdevelopment). Please make this substition when reading this book.