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CHAPTER II

THE ERIKSON-PAIGET-GOWAN

THEORY OF PERIODIC DEVELOPMENTAL STAGES

"It seems to me that the most liberating and viable educational reforms of the next several years will come through the building of curricular and other educative activities around some of the developmental insights of men like Piaget, Bruner, Erikson, Bloom, and Maslow. Although much separates these scholars in terms of analytic style and specific fields of concentration, they all seem to hold to the idea that human beings go through fairly discrete stages of development and that each stage calls for rather special educational treatment. And all of these men seem to be united in their belief that the maximization of human potential within the constraints of each life stage is the best way of preparing for succeeding stages."
-Dr. Stephen K. Bailey, Chairman, Policy Institute, Syracuse University in the Sir John Adams Lecture "Education and the Pursuit of Happiness" UCLA, April 2 8, 19 71 (as quoted p l4ff in the UCLA Educator, 14: 1; (Fall, 1971).
 
2.1 CREATIVITY AND DEVELOPMENTAL STAGE THEORY

In The Development of the Creative Individual, the precursor of this volume, four significant statements were made having bearing on the arguments developed here. These theses can be summarized as follows:
 

1. The Eriksonian and Piagetian stages can be combined into an affective-cognitive developmental chart, having a Periodicity of three; the higher cognitive stages in this chart are respectively: creativity, psychedelia, and illumination.

2. Developmental stages are characterized by escalation which involves five separate but interrelated aspects known as succession, discontinuity, emergence, differentiation, and integration; the concept

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of developmental dysplasia arises from a failure to escalate.

3. Creativity is developmentally oriented and is, in fact, a characteristic of the third (initiative-intuitive) and the sixth (intimacy-creativity) stages.

4. The stabilization and mental health of the preconscious is the key factor in creative output and developmental progress.


The remainder of this chapter will be devoted to an explication and development of these four themes, mostly by major quotations from The Development of the Creative Individual. Since there is a close analogy between the development of creativity in the sixth stage, and the development of psychedelic effects in the seventh, it will be helpful to trace our earlier arguments.
 

1) The Eriksonian and Piagetian stages can be combined into an affective-cognitive developmental chart having a periodicity of three; the higher cognitive stages in this chart are respectively: creativity; psychedelia, and illumination.


It is surprising how few researchers or theorists have considered periodicity as a function of human development, despite the ample opportunity for its observation both in the natural elements (the Mendeleev periodic table) and in human biology (the menstrual cycle in women). Periodicity occurs when the same pattern of events is seen to run through a higher development as has been contained in a corresponding pattern from a lower sequence. Mathematically, 1-n isomorphisms are discovered due to the influence of two overriding independent variables. In the periodic table of the elements, these are the numbers of electrons in the shells and the number of protons in the nucleus. Awareness of these variables helps us to fill spaces in such a model and hence to make predictions and draw conclusions and extrapolations. This must be done with caution because, while nature is generally orderly, it may provide some surprises since the world of experience is often more complex than man's anthropomorphic view of it. Even the periodic table reveals this in its divagations among the rare earths. While being aware of the possibility of periodicity in human development, which would point to underlying variables, attempts should not be made to fit the theory of developmental process into a Procrustean bed.

The goodness of fit of the Freudian (sexual libido), Eriksonian (ego strength) and Piaget (cognitive development) theories to developmental stages is remarkable, however.* When these various views are brought together synoptically, one begins to sense periodic rhythms,



*This section from pp 26-32 of The Development of the Creative Individual, ©1972 by R. Knapp, used by permission.

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which reveal that the whole conceptualization of developmental stage theory is more significant than has been heretofore realized. Indeed, these stages may be divided into a tripartite grouping, depending upon the direction of the attention of the psyche, whether outward toward the world, inward toward the self, or with love toward another person.

Table 1 clearly shows the periodic nature of developmental stages, consisting of triads of stages of infancy, youth, and adulthood. The horizontal triads consist in reality of three categories: the world, the ego, and the other, with the third personal pronoun (it, they) characteristic of the first stage, the first personal pronoun (I) characteristic of the second, and the second personal pronoun (thou) of the third. We have dubbed the columns "latency," "identity", and "creativity" respectively, and indicated the Eriksonian and Piagetian names for the stages - taking the liberty of filling in some guesses for the cognitive aspects of the latter three stages. Thus the diagram becomes an open-ended periodic table of developmental stages which may be used as a model for testing and hypothesis-making in regard to developmental process.

Each stage has a special relationship and affinity for another, three stages removed from it. Stages 1, 4, and 7 (trust, industry, and generativity) are noticeable for a peculiarly thing-oriented, sexually latent aspect dealing with the relationship of the individual with his world of experience. In stage 1 it is the world of percepts; in stage 4, the size, shape, form, and color of things and what one can make out of them; in stage 7, the world of significant others (such as children) who are not love objects in a libidinal sense. This may also broaden to the world of ideas, formulas, productions, art creations, and other "mental children." Freud by naming the fourth stage "latency" intuitively grasped the thing-oriented, nonaffectively valent nature of this stage and its columnar family. The drop in sexual interest as the child "cools" it through the oedipal resolution entering stage 4 is particularly noticeable. He literally stops trying to "make people" in favor of making things. Not so easily spotted - because often adults have difficulty in entering the generativity period - is the sexual abatement in favor or nurturance of children or sublimation to create some innovative production which occurs with parenthood or mastery of some medium. It is as if the "name of the game" changes so that the primary attention is focused off libidinal drives to other more thing-oriented objects.

A second common aspect of the first, fourth, and seventh stages is the immersion in the world of the senses. It is a practical time when things get done and changes occur. In combination with this regard for the external world, there is a certain calmness or coolness of the ego which results in a lack of self-consciousness. The infant, the boy, and the parent are so busy with their activities, so completely absorbed in experiencing, that they have little time to assess their

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TABLE I: THE ERIKSON-PIAGET-GOWAN PERIODIC DEVELOPMENTAL STAGE CHART

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feelings or to search for their identity. After the tasks of this stage are completed, they will return to a new identity search on more advanced levels, fortified with their accomplishments in the real world.

By contrast with the previous, the second, fifth, and eighth stages are ego bound, ego oriented, and ego circumscribed. They are all about "me" (my identity, my existence and interpersonal relationships, and my salvation). They are times of searching introspection, of withdrawal rather than return, of defiance of authority rather than obedience to it, and of "marching to the music of a different drum." In each of these periods man tries to come to terms with himself. In stage 2 he finds his identity or ego, in stage 5 he redefines it in terms of what he can do as a young adult, and in stage 8 he again redefines it in terms of the meaning of his life and death in the cosmos.

Parents and society often find those involved in this set of stages rather difficult to live with. Whether it is the infant's negativism, the adolescent's clamor for independence or the budding saint's march to the sea to make salt, the attitude and action of the individual is frequently anathema to authority figures, be it active resistance or passive disdain.

For the individual in these times of withdrawal, it is very easy to believe that no one understands us, that we are somehow different, unique and incongruent with the rest of humanity. We often spend too many hours in self-examination, either in reproach or adulation with "the world forgotten and by the world forgot." If the world is "too much with us" in stages 1, 4, and 7, it is too little with us ofttimes in stages 2, 5 and 8, for we are busy examining our own navels. One consequence of this overemphasis on introspection is a kind of moodiness which results from the discrepancy between what the ego wants itself to be and what it finds it can be and do.

Stages 3 and 6 (initiative and intimacy) deal with the love relationship and its expansion from narcissistic self-love through oedipal love of parents to generalized heterosexual love, to fixation on some individual person. (For all we know there may exist stage 9, where agape love, in the manner of a Buddha or Messiah embraces all mankind.) Since love is requisite for creation on a mental as well as a physical plane, it is not surprising that stages 3 and 6 have special interest for us as students of creativity. We have already described in chapter 1 how creativity first develops in the initiative stage from the control over the environment experienced through the affectional approach of the opposite-sexed parent. A similar feeling occurs in the sixth stage (intimacy), when adolescent creativity is normally enhanced through the inspiration of the opposite-sexed beloved figure. In the latter instance, however, biological consummation can in some cases reduce the high energy potential aroused so that it is more often when this consummation is delayed, or prevented at least in part, that we get great art, music, and literature. Obviously this kind

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of situation differs with different individuals, some of whom (like Elizabeth Barrett Browning) find fulfillment in love and block in the frustration of it.

In consequence of the connection between love in our lives and creativity, if we want to become creative, we should put more love into our lives. Most of us live on a starvation diet so far as love is concerned. What man could not create if he were universally admired, valued, and inspired? This principle is not to imply that sexual freedom or promiscuity is a prerequisite for creative action, but it does suggest that more openness and demonstrativeness in love and affection in all our social relationships, more awareness of our feeling aspects and less inhibition of them, might open up doors now closed by custom.

Barron (1968) reports that creative persons find other ways to deal with impulse than suppressing it. Who has not found inspiration in the unexpected valuing of himself by another? Indeed, this phenomenon and the power release that accompanies it is one of the great sources of energy in group therapy sessions or in Rogerian basic encounter groups.

In saying that stages 3 and 6 are those in which the I-thou relationships and creativity are particularly emphasized, I do not mean to imply that creativity is completely absent at other stages of development. It is just that the developmental process naturally emphasizes these factors at these times. Love and hence creativity may enter our lives environmentally at any time, and to the degree that one is found in abundance the other is likely to be present. In these instances, something personal has occurred - some vivid experience or significant relationship not predicated in the developmental sequence and it is this personal good fortune, rather than the developmental syndrome, which has released creative power.

If latency stages 1, 4, and 7 may be described as "cool" and the identity stages of 2, 5, and 8 are introspective, then stages 3 and 6 may best be characterized as loving, spontaneous and joyful. Here affectional impulses are at their height; here one gives the identity one has just discovered to another; here the world and the self become fused in the wonder of the beloved - the up phase when all goes well and one is comfortable and sure of one's beloved, results in great happiness. But when one is alone, and things are scary, without one's beloved (who may be paying too much attention to a younger sibling or a rival lover), then one is consumed with jealousy and lives in the depths of despair.

The key question of both the third and sixth stages is, "Am I in control of my environment through the aegis of my beloved or is my environment in control of me?" Developmental tasks of different periods have a different flavor, however, even if they refer to the same basic issue. The possessive jealous oedipal love of a son for

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his mother in the third stage is different from the heterosexual genital intimacy of a young man in the sixth stage. Both of these stages give creativity an extra impetus, but the two kinds of creativity have different flavors and characteristics. This fact has led many researchers to note that the child's creativity is not the same as the creative production of young adults. The creativity of the third (initiative) stage is exhibitionistic, dramatic, often repetitive and generally fragmentary. The creativity of a young adult is characterized by more unity, coherence, daring and brilliance. It is truly novel, and often displays scope, mastery, and vigor. Whether the one develops into the other depends, of course, on environmental conditions. A good start helps the growing child to a more open style of life. Environmental deprivation, however, may force him to become destructive or hostile or fall by the wayside. Even too much success in the initiative period may give his creativity a "kooky" turn which does not allow him to integrate it into future development or come to grips with the disciplinary skills of the industry period.

Another youth may blossom in late adolescence without the benefits of narcissistic creativity because, having learned his basic skills and formal operations well, he has somehow been able to break through into the creative ground. Longitudinal research may eventually show that form prevails in general and that a good start in the third stage is the best assurance of another successful round in the sixth stage. Incidentally, this kind of longitudinal follow-up is badly needed research. One becomes creative as a by-product of the inspiration of the beloved. One strives to please, and in pleasing the loved one, pulls things out of the preconscious that one hardly knew were there. Or alternatively, because one's mental health is improved, one finds the preconscious teeming with treasure to share with the beloved, and these goodies often bubble forth without conscious effort.

Just as one finds in the horizontal variable in the Mendeleev periodic table of the elements a basic explication of nature in the number of electrons in the outer shell, so one would expect to find similar basic properties in the column headings of our periodic table of developmental process. It is evident from several sources that this is so. What has been disclosed here depends, however, on one's frame of reference. A semanticist or grammarian would note that we are dealing with the personal pronouns: first person, the self; second person, the other; third person, the World. A religiously oriented individual, noting that our column heads can be described as egopresence, creative-love, and thing-latency, would naturally think of the Trinity: Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. From a psychological point of view, the validity of these theological terms is not so important as that they are an early attempt, necessarily clothed in religious language, to approximate three fundamental aspects through which man's mind apprehends reality. The three developmental thrusts are

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continuous, but with different emphases recurring periodically in elaborated and elevated forms.

Development is escalation away from the tyranny of percepts. Weil (1972:124) catalogues the characteristics of "straight" thinking as "a tendency to be attached to the senses and through them to external reality." It is necessary that the ego discover itself by a figure-ground relationship to this material universe, but it is also necessary to transcend this relationship. Patanjali (Hewitt, 1968: 114) calls this movement away from the regnancy of sense data "pratyahara" meaning"gathering inward" and defines it as: "a detaching of the mind from the sense-organs." "It checks the outgoing powers of the mind and turns the mind inward. In pratyahara one frees oneself from the thralldom of the sense organs." Steps along this developmental process include the ability to decenter found in the child at stage two, the discovery of the subjunctive in stage five, and the psychedelic transcendence of sensual reality in stage seven. (See Table IV.)

The process of existence may be conceptualized as an accretion of various strengthening aspects of the ego during the first five periodic developmental stages (see Table II), culminating in the identity crisis. Following the fifth stage, each new stage results in a kind of ego-diffusion in constantly enlarging quality, but with the accompaniment of an emergent "glory" or spectacular new characteristic. The sixth stage has to do with the physical body which is glorified in sexual ecstasy on the affective side and in creativity on the cognitive. The seventh or psychedelic stage sees the development of the second vehicle (known as the astral, etheric, or desire body) with its concomitant psychic powers. The eighth stage (ego integrity-illumination) sees the development of the third vehicle with the extinguishing of the ego, and the bliss (or nirvana), the hypothetical ninth stage (which is nameless), sees the development of the fourth vehicle.

Remarkably enough, as the Tibetian Book of the Dead (EvansWentz 1960) tells us, the Bardo (after death experience) is an inverse recessional of the life stages just described, wherein the first happening is the dawning of the clear light of the ninth stage, then the dawning of the lesser light of the eighth stage, with karmic overtones, then the seven hallucinatory aspects (or deities) of the stages one to seven done in reverse order, which as the Book plainly tells us, are emanations of our own karmic thought processes. There are first seven benign (affective) aspects, then seven wrathful (cognitive) aspects, all looking more and more like the "not-me" of Sullivan. If the ego is daunted or awed by any of these hallucinations, it flees back into a rebirth cycle. The goodness of fit between the western psychology and the eastern mysticism is remarkable.

Progression through the developmental stages consists of two phases, interiorization and exteriorization of the ego. The

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interiorization phase by increasing the separateness and distinctness of the ego builds up to the fifth stage (identity - formal operations) in which the ego is at its apogee of self-centered separateness. There then ensues an exteriorization or diffusion of the ego by degrees and stages first in blending with another in love and psychological intimacy, then in children, and finally in altruism. In this process the self-concept successively travels outward from the body image to "my loved one, my children, my interests, my associations, my creations, my world." This increase in altruism, however, is accompanied by an increase in autonomy and the higher aspects of the ego, and it is these escalations which lead to a series of spectacular emergent characteristics on both the affective and the cognitive side, for which there are no better words than the "power" (cognitive) and the "glory" (affective).

Each stage starting with the sixth, presents a successively spectacular power and glory as follows:
 
STAGE
6th
7th
8th
POWER
creativity
psychic power*
**
GLORY
sexual ecstasy
mystic rapture
**

*such as clairvoyance, precognition and psychometry.
**there are corresponding graces here which have no names.

It is to be noticed that:

1) these activities are occasional, not habitual;
2) they deplete energy,
3) they are exceedingly pleasant to those in this stage,
4) they involve altered states of consciousness,
5) they involve some kind of union,
6) they involve the Pankhe criteria of mystic experience as:
a) unity, b) objectivity, c) transcendence, d) sacredness, e) positive mood valence, f) paradoxicality, g) transiency, h) ineffability.


Christian and other mystics often talk about the rapture of religious ecstasy in almost sexual terms, and this curious predilection has been the occasion of a number of reasoned explanations by later commentators. But if one looks at sexual ecstasy as the affective glory of the sixth period and satori as the corresponding glory of the seventh (psychedelic) period, it is easy to see why the properties of one stage are similar to the properties of the other.

One could enlarge on this correspondence with a like analysis of the cognitive powers. Creativity, the cognitive power of the sixth stage is akin in its intuitive, innate aspect to the psychic precognition, clairvoyance, and psychometry of the psychedelic stage.

It is provocative of thought that the number "eight" is seen in Eastern mysticism as well as in Western psychology in reference to the eight stages of development toward self-actualization. Not only is the "eight-fold" path the way of this development, but a boddhisattva

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TABLE II: GROWTH AND DIFFUSION OF THE  EGO DURING DEVELOPMENT  STAGES

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or enlightened individual is represented as having eight arms in Tibetian sculpture. The development of the self concept outward from body image to creativity during the developmental stages, is an analogue of the development of the larger self from a self concept in the flesh to self concept in the higher vehicles of consciousness. What seems difficult for the average man to realize is that what he considers "normal" adult development is badly arrested, and that adults should aspire to much higher powers than those which they usually possess. Imagine if you will, an individual who grew to adult stature without sexual maturation or the secondary physical and mental characteristics which go with it. We would describe him as a child or worse. Yet when most adults do not take on the power and the glory of the psychedelic stage, they are equally regressed, although few of us realize it.

Wilson (1971:385) puts it well:

 
From birth until the age of twenty-one we grow physically and in every other sense. Changes take place inside us without our volition. Then it stops. We are so used to the changes taking place automatically, that we find it difficult to stop expecting automatic growth to continue. It doesn't, and most people slowly ossify. If growth is to continue, unusual efforts must be made . . .


A puzzling property of the periodic developmental stage table is illustrated in Table III. It indicates that when an affective task is begun during a given stage, its completion is held in abeyance through three successive stages, and comes to full fruition only in the fourth stage ahead. Thus TRUST begun in stage one, integrates and gives rise to autonomy in stage two, is fulfilled and enjoyed in a thrusting initiative in stage three, is reconfirmed as industry in its columnar renaissance in stage four, and is completed as the adolescent learns to trust his identity to his peers in stage five. AUTONOMY, begun in stage two is finally accomplished when the young adult becomes fully autonomous by growing independent of peer sanctions in stage six. INITIATIVE, begun in stage three is finally completed in the parental and psychedelic activities of stage seven, and INDUSTRY finally has its perfection and reward in the self-actualization of ego integrity in stage eight. One might point out the similarity of the Bloom material (Bloom and others, 1954; Krathwohl and others, 1964; Simpson, 1966) on the taxonomy of educational objectives in the cognitive, affective, and psychomotor domains, which also involve five levels:
 

1) knowledge-receiving-perception
2) comprehension-responding-set


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TABLE III:  DEVELOPMENT OF ERIKSON STAGES

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3) application-valuing-guided response
4) analysis and synthesis-conceptualization-mechanism
5) evaluation-internalizing-complex overt response.
 
In each of these changes there is escalation from level to level, although the taxonomy was not conceived in terms of individual development. The taxonomy also suggests that there may be a third set of psychomotor developmental stages which should be integrated with the others in our Periodic Developmental Stage theory. Finally, we should notice the similarity of the Bloom set to the operations category of the Guilford Structure of Intellect.

One of the unnoticed consequences of the periodic nature of developmental stages is that the first barriers to the accomplishment of the tasks of a given developmental stage are the negative polarities of the previous stage in the same column (the stage three back from it). Thus, for the child in the fourth stage (industry), mistrust is the barrier to concrete operations; in the fifth stage (identity), shame and doubt plague the young adolescent in his identity crisis; in the sixth stage, (intimacy) it is guilt and immobilization which keeps him from happiness in sex or joy in creative performance; in the seventh, it is inferiority which makes him feel inadequate for the grandeur of generativity and psychedelia, in the eighth, it is role confusion which prevents ego-integrity, etc.

There is an interesting relationship between ego-development and control of the perceptual field which is explicated in Table IV. In this developmental stage syndrome, the ego growth seems measured by the degree of control it can exert on the perceptual field of nature, initially using it as a hold on reality but eventually rising above the need so to employ it, as the ego first becomes creative and then psychedelic and finally illuminative. Such a table suggests the figure-ground relationship of the ego to the world of experience, as if the ego is an eigenvalue useful (as are percepts) for the accomplishment of a given task, namely, the bringing to rational consciousness of the Spirit of Man, but less and less necessary, after that task has been accomplished.

2.2 ESCALATION AND DYSPLASIA

Developmental stages are characterized by escalation, which involves five separate but interrelated aspects known as succession, discontinuity, emergence, differentiation, and integration: the concept of developmental dysplasia arises from a failure to escalate.

The construct of escalation is helpful in understanding the process of development. "Escalate," a recently coined word, means to raise the level of action by discrete jumps; it derives from moving up an

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TABLE IV: THE RELATION OF THE EGO TO THE PERCEPTUAL FIELD

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escalator, a flight of stairs, or a ladder. When one shifts gears in an automobile, one escalates; this is not just a matter of going faster; more properly, one engages a different service of power.*

Escalation is used in this chapter as a concept embracing five different although interrelated aspects of development: succession, discontinuity, emergence, differentiation, and integration. Each of these characteristics defines a different facet of escalation, and these will then be used to analyze concept formation in the developing child and the interrelations between cognitive and affective developmental systems in producing mental health and the possibility of creativity. (The cognitive system refers to the rational development of the mind and is covered by Piagetian developmental stages; the affective system covers emotional development and is covered by Eriksonian developmental stages.) The components of escalation are summarized in Figure V.

2.21 Succession

The term "succession" implies that there is a fixed order or hierarchy among developmental processes. The ordered hierarchy in turn implies a continual rise in the level of action at each stage. The order is invariant, although the time sequence is organismic and not strictly chronological. Piaget (Pinard and Laurendeau, 1969, p. 125) calls this property hierarchicization, an accurate although awkwardly translated term, and points out that this attribute at once leads to the concept of decalages (or developmental spread) which depend on personal and cultural idiosyncrasies.

The concept of succession implies that the track of development is fixed, in that a given stage follows and never precedes another. The rate of succession through stages and the extent of development at any stage, however, is flexible since these are influenced by the nature of the organism and its environment. Man likes to think of himself as a free animal wandering over a large range, able to go wherever he wishes and to do whatever he likes. By discovering that we cannot do what we please, we find that modern research suggests that this model is not appropriate to the facts. A better example would be that of a powerful locomotive set firmly on the tracks with few possibilities of switching to other lines. Speed and destination are dependent upon the engineer's decisions and the available fuel. The main degree of freedom lies in his ability to accelerate or slow down the speed with which the engine goes down the track.



*This and the next 25 paragraphs are from pp 37-43 of The Development of the Creative Individual, by permission.

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TABLE V: THE COMPONENTS OF ESCALATION
 

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2.22 Discontinuity

The concept of discontinuity parallels that of succession. One cannot imagine a flight of locks in a canal as other than a succession of discontinuities, each with the water level at equilibrium. The order is invariant. One could not have the first lock, then the fifth, then the fourth, third and second. As a flight of locks contains water at various stages of equilibrium whereas a waterfall does not, so this discontinuity of ordered sequences allows for equilibrium at various stages as a smooth growth curve does not. The term applied by Piaget (Pinard and Laurendeau, 1969, p. 145) to this phenomenon is equilibration (an ordered succession of differing levels of equilibrium).

The concept of discontinuity implies that there is available an additional input of energy to escalate development from one level to the next. This extra increment, as indicated in chapter 2, is similar to the latent heat of fusion in that it is necessary to transform the state and properties of the operand. Just as shifting an automobile into higher gear allows for more efficient use of available power, additional energy is transformed to the freer properties of a new and higher state. Any teacher who has observed a child emerge as an adolescent through the process of sexual maturation has recognized the vast increase in intellectual power and scope wrought by the developmental change. New and complex motivational patterns may also appear as outcomes of this discontinuity.

2.23 Emergence

Emergence, or the debut of new powers, is the third aspect of escalation. As the child progresses from one stage to another in the developmental sequence, qualities which were implicit or covert in a previous stage become explicit or overt in the next or following stage. This bringing out or manifestation of emergent characteristics, some of them unexpected or unrecognized at the earlier level, is seen in many phases of development as the budding or preparation for the next phase.

Each phase contains not only the full explication of qualities which were inchoate previously, but also a prototype bud or other preliminary indication of those which will later become manifest. An example is the intuitive conservation of volume perceived by the child in the third stage (initiative) versus the actual conservation of volume during the fourth (industry) stage. As Piaget observes, the child in the earlier stage will often be able to conserve volume but cannot tell you why, whereas later he can do both. Piaget calls this attribute '"consolidation" (Pinard and Laurendeau, 1969, p. 129), in that a given stage is simultaneously a summation of the accomplishments of the

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previous stages and a preparation for the tasks of the next stage.

The elaboration of an attribute that previously had been only a trace is more than just the cognitive spelling out of an intuition. The explication denotes permanency in development. Earlier, the promised attribute is a "sometime thing," now appearing, now disappearing. For it is a rule in developmental sequence that powers are possessed in a hierarchical order - first, in tenuous form or only at intervals; later on, to be more permanently apprehended. As when a friend comes to visit us, he calls us first on the phone, and we have cognition of him through one sensory channel; we think of him off and on. Soon he arrives in the flesh, and we experience him fully through all sensory channels at once. The Portuguese proverb distinguishes "A trace, a path, a lane, and a highway"; and in a similar manner do we - spasmodically, intuitively, iconically, and finally symbolically, apprehend new concepts.

Bruner's sequence of enactive, iconic, and symbolic representation of experience hence constitutes an example of emergence (1966, p. 11). What has been a trace at one time becomes more clearly a path at the next level, a lane at the succeeding, and a highway at last.

This process of escalation could not occur if there were not at every stage the preparatory process we call "budding." Budding refers to the implicit appearance at every early stage of the growth potential of the succeeding stages. At each stage, development not only unfolds and differentiates the characteristic properties of that stage, but it displays in bud form the epigenesis of the next stage. This aspect of escalation cannot be explained by the history of the individual but by inherent developmental tendencies of the species. It seems ludicrous that the four-year-old boy will form an oedipal attachment toward his mother, but this prepares him, much later in the intimacy stage, for a true genital approach to the beloved person of the opposite sex.

Erikson (Evans, 1967, p. 21) suggests that the rudiments of character emerge in the autonomy stage and "develop further in each stage as shown on my epigenetic diagram. . . . They become more complex and differentiated, and therefore undergo renewed crises." Erikson used the word "epigenetic" to mean "upon emergence" in very much the same way that we have employed "escalation" to signify that one item develops on the shoulders of another. Erikson later remarks (Evans, 1967, pp. 40-41) about the one-stage-after another approach: "It misses the nature of epigenetic stages in which each stage adds something specific to all later ones, and makes an ensemble out of all earlier ones."

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2.24 Differentiation

Differentiation refers to the escalatory attribute which clarifies, "fixates", and modifies the emphasis in developmental processes. It resolves or fixates in the sense that "focusing in" on an object by a zoom camera lens clarifies the optical field. Perhaps due to translational difficulties, Piaget (Pinard and Laurendeau, 1969, p. 124) does not find a word which exactly fits this definition. The nearest is "integration" by which he means restructuring and coordination, which would be much like our change of emphasis. Differentiation, however, has been well delineated by Bower and Hollister (1968), and its contribution to concept formation receives fuller treatment in "Concept Formation and Conceptualization" of this chapter.

Fixation as an Aspect of Developmental processes

Developmental processes which are loose and inchoate at early stages tend to become bound, defined and fixated at higher stages. The increase in specialism and specificity results in part from the accumulation of habits and conditioned responses. Fixation is more complex, however, than mere conditioning; it involves selection of tempos, pacing, and the development of likes and dislikes of objects and processes. Experiences become organized into value systems which determine choice into similar patterns. A girl at the heterosexual stage of development will be attracted to boys in general; later she will love a particular boy. Fixation not only means that the attribute will be held more tightly, but that it will be apprehended in the same manner each time. The habituation of response tends to put an end to creative play variations on that response; we learn to do something well in a certain way, and it becomes more certain that we will do it in that way without variation. The process is analogous to "type casting" in the theater.

Differentiation as a Shift of Emphasis or Metamorphosis

A striking aspect of developmental sequence is the sudden switch in emphasis from one stage to another. Almost without warning between stage three (initiative) and stage four (industry) the six-year-old child stops valuing his behavior in terms of bad and good, love and hate, reflecting strong affection for his parents, and literally "cools it" by beginning to start making things instead of "making people."

Of a sudden, everything you have said to your child becomes as the blowing wind; he has simply left you and fallen under the evil influence of a neighbor's child. What this young monster says and does is gospel indeed. They wear the same clothes, eat the same breakfast cereal, watch the same TV shows, have secrets from you, and all at

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once your love and affection is displaced by hobbies, crafts, tree houses, secret clubs, a gang of boys, no display of affection and a general cool outlook toward the world which looks at facts instead of feelings. And he continually pesters you with "who," "where," "what," "when" and "why."

A similar switch of emphasis faces the parent of a teenager who seems to have outgrown the family and regards himself or herself as an unwilling hostage in prison with only a telephone as a lifeline to his age mates. These metamorphoses, while traumatic for parents, are necessary crises in the escalation of development from one stage to another. Were it not for the stress and strain of adolescence, growth would result not in an adult but simply in a monster-sized child. To become an adult, the reorganization and reemphasis of previous habits, attitudes, and values are essential.

The problems of differentiation are compounded by the fact that it is by no means certain that early success will help and forward individual developmental escalation. To be sure, failure will not; but too much success at a stage can result in fixation at the stage. Escalation is not simply accretion or more of the same thing; it is a metamorphosis which amounts to a new and different ball game. Often those most successful in one phase will wish to remain there, replaying their successes and refusing to get on with the tasks of the next stage.

An individual who has been only moderately successful in earlier stages can blossom out in a later stage. This is usually because he finds himself and gets personal "hang ups" straightened out. Change of emphasis insures a greater degree of freedom in the developmental pattern, therefore, since the race is not always toward the swift. The process of development is itself therapeutic, and so long as the thrust of development continues, there is also the possibility of self-actualization as well as the probability of improvement.

2.25 Integration

Integration, the final attribute of escalation, synthesizes the others. It is in some respects the mathematical integral of the previous aspects. A mathematical integral of an algebraic function is a related function of the next higher degree with the addition of a constant which must be determined by observation, thus giving two sources of extra freedom and one of greater complexity. It is not surprising that a higher synthesis, greater complexity, and new degrees of freedom are characteristic properties of the concept of integration.

Piaget (Pinard and Laurendeau, 1969, pp. 129-136) describes an attribute called integration, but fitting our scheme better is his term "structuring." The tasks of a stage are not simple accretions of the previous stages, but are interconnected to form a meaningful unit

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(like the rafters of a roof) which unites into a gestalt called by Piaget "structures d'ensemble." This is more characteristic of our concept than his "integration" which simply refers to reemphasis. Following are some familiar examples of integration:
 

(1) The child's interest in various parts of his body seen during stage two (autonomy) now becomes integrated in stage three (initiative) into a narcissistic love of his whole body. The energy of the parts becomes bound into energy for the whole.

(2) In the transformation from child to adolescent, there is increase in complexity of emotion, and such emergent qualities as genital sexual drives, greater capacity for tenderness and feeling, and more intellectual range, all of which form a newer synthesis of previously identified aspects and permit new degrees of freedom and choice.

(3) The enhanced ego concept of the third stage (initiative) over previous stages is an illustration of increased complexity. The earlier simple assertion of "me-ness" now takes on a new quality in terms of what "me" can do. (I am the person who can coordinate my body: I am so delightfully winsome that everyone will love me, pay attention to me and revolve their lives around me.) The production of emergent qualities is illustrated by that of creative fantasy in the four year old. Responding to the warm affect of the opposite-sexed parent, the child now dips deeper and deeper into the preconscious to produce creative products to show off to this charming adult with whom he is having his first love affair. The valence of the budding "I-thou" relationship is indeed something new.


Integration also embraces a higher synthesis of already delineated elements; hence it summates the concept of escalation. Who among us has not felt the thrill of driving a geared car on an open road and shifting into overdrive as the highway clears ahead? The car goes faster with less effort, because the gear ratio has been changed and the engine labors less per mile per hour traveled. We can do this and experience the consequent sense of freedom and elation at high speeds only on an excellent road. We feel this way even though there is no more potential power in the auto than there was at rest or backing up a steep grade. We are in a sense self-actualizing the automobile for we are using it at its utmost at the task for which it was built. This top efficiency at any stage of development is reached only through a harmonious psychic-biologic relationship resulting from excellent mental health on the part of the individual which enables him to integrate his total potential or, as we say in current slang, to "put it all together."

Developmental stage theory proposed by Piaget (1950) and Erikson (1963) and more recently by Gowan (1972a), draws attention to possible relationships between cognitive and affective developmental

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stages. These relationships are important as they may trace the outline of a unified developmental theory, as the present vogue of Piaget and Erikson indicates. A significant aspect of such a theory is concerned with the relative arrests of development in one area as compared with the other. The majority of these retardations appear on the cognitive side in the case of the average individual (such as the parent of below-average ability who, while nurturing his children, has not progressed to the Piagetian period of formal operations). In the case of gifted persons, it is possible that affective development may lag behind cognitive.

The concepts of escalation and developmental dysplasia (both absolute) with respect to age, and relative with respect to the cognitive and affective levels being in different stages, is fraught with tremendous practical implications for those attempting to deal therapeutically with children or young adults, especially pupil personnel workers, remedial teachers, and therapists. Because of the practical aspects of this work (some of which were noticed in Chapters 5 and 6 of The Development of the Creative Individual), further discussion of this subject should be accorded a separate chapter - Chapter V.
 

2.3. THE DEVELOPMENTAL CHARACTERISTICS OF CREATIVITY

Creativity is developmentally oriented and is in fact a characteristic of the third (initiative-intuitive) and the sixth (intimacy-creativity) stages.


2.31 Creativity as the Outcome of the Proper Functioning of Development

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 self-awareness.*

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 be aware and to respond; that is one's own creativity. To be creative means to consider the whole process of



*This and the next ten paragraphs are from pp 53-56 of The Development of the Creative Individual,bypermission.

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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, 1959, 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.

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2.32 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 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

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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 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. The 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.

2.33 Third Column Characteristics of Creativity

The key issue in human existence is increasing control of the environment - which is to say, the preconscious. The human infant starts in stage one with control of percepts, then in stage two he progresses to control of bodily functions, in stage three to control of intuitive forms of conservation (Piaget), in stage four to formal conservation in the concrete operations period (Piaget), in stage five to control of self, and identity-unity, in stage six to intuitive control of the preconscious through creativity, in stage seven to cognitive control of the preconscious in the psychedelic stage, and finally, in stage eight to full control of all aspects of the self-concept, including the environment. (See Tables III and IV.)

It is interesting to note that there is a parallelism between third column stage three and first column stage four, compared with third column stage six, and first column stage seven. In each case the ratio is intuitive control in the earlier stage versus formal or full cognitive control in the later stage. (The difference between intuitive and cognitive is that the child can operate the function on a spasmodic basis earlier but cannot tell you how or why he does it, whereas in the latter stage he can operate it at will and describe the how and why). The function being controlled is Piaget's conservation in the lower stages, and the preconscious in the higher stages. We may therefore write:

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III - Intuitive conservation control          VI - Intuitive preconscious control
-----------------------------------------  =  --------------------------------------------
IV - Cognitive conservation control       VII - Cognitive preconscious control

We have called column 3 (Stages three and six) "creative"; we could almost equally have labeled them "intuitive." For those aspects which will come to full rational conscious in the next stages (IV-VII) are now intuited, and seem to "leak" into consciousness as it were without the individual being able to explain why or wherefore they come. This is the very essence of the "Quelle" [spring] quality of creativity.

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

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strain which temporarily diminishes creative performance. This may explain why Torrance (1962, 1965) 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.*

2.34 Creativity and Some Auxiliary Variables

The relationship of creativity toward a) sexual function, b) socioeconomic status, and c) and development toward self-actualization deserve special attention here. Since all three auxiliary variables have important developmental implications, tracing their interrelationship with creativity tends to offer further support for the developmental stage theory just enunciated, in which creativity is seen as a characteristic of the third and sixth periods.

The first of these, sexuality, is the affective correlate of creativity as the cognitive aspect of the sixth stage; furthermore, oedipal creativity of the third stage is just developing when the oedipal phallicism of that period is at its height; consequently, there are close relationships, as our witnesses testify:

Greenacre (1971) feels that the course of creativity is determined by the course of infantile development prior to the development of the Oedipus Complex. She outlines these special endowments as greater than typical sensory responsiveness, awareness of relations among stimuli, empathy, and sensori-motor capacity for expression. Her reviewer, J. E. Gedo (1972:529) states:
 

Greenacre's investigations of creativity have shown the same awareness of the import of narcissism as in her description of the frequency of family romance fantasies in the highly creative.
 
Elsewhere, Greenacre (1957:2563) coined the phrase "the propulsive force" of fantasies in the creative child.
She also says (1957:262):
 
One gets the impression that the genius sublimations as distinct from those of talented persons rest mainly on phallic energy.


Neumann (1959:4), feels that contrary to Freud's views, "we find a fundamental but not pathological phenomenon of the dominance of the mother archetype (i.e. of a suprapersonal mother image) in the creative man (pp. 4-5). He says of the feminine archetype (pp. 15-16):



*From p 56 of The Development of the Creative Individual,by permission.

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It appears both as the all generative aspect of nature and as the creative source of the unconscious, from which consciousness was born . . . and out of which unceasingly in all times and in every man there arise new psychic contents that broaden, intensify, and enrich the life of the individual and of the community . . . Normal western development, which for this reason we shall call patriarchial, leads to a dominance of consciousness or of the father archetype to an extensive repression and inhibition of the related mother archetype. But in the creative man - and to a considerable degree in the neurotic - this reduction of the archetype tension between the First Parents is impossible or incomplete. In the creative man we find a preponderance of the archetypal in keeping with his creative nature. (p. 18) "But in the creative man this process remains incomplete. By his very nature he remains in high degree bisexual and the retained feminine component is manifested by his increased receptivity . . . he remains both more childlike and more womanly than the normal man.


While doubtless, sexual chastity contributes some measure to developmental progress, it is the feeling of this writer that the western world has enormously overrated the importance of the body and of sex as a negative factor in developmental progress. Let us remember that alone of the passions, sexual activity is a developmental task of the intimacy period (unlike war, violence, and greed - three much more tolerated activities in our culture). It often involves the individual in tender emotions which tend to move him out of egocentricity and into consideration for others; it is (if happily consummated) often the prelude to creative openings, and hence in some people serves as a kind of relaxing play which leaves the mind tranquil enough to come in contact with the veiled preconscious. The dangers of sexual activity in the modern world of contraception are small indeed in comparison with the dangers of thwarted sexual desire. Furthermore, sexual activity tends to be a cathartic, allowing in those not fully self-actualized the discharge of aggressive and even hostile emotions in the most acceptable form. The enhanced self-concept of a man who can thoroughly satisfy his woman in bed allows him the freedom to depart from the male stereotype in other rooms of the home. For these and other similar reasons, sexual activity, whether in or out of marriage, if accompanied by love, is one of the least culpable activities of the ordinary adult, and of ordinary acts the one most likely to contribute to his continued progress.

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2.35 Creativity in Individuals of Less than Perfect Mental Health*

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 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



*This and the next six paragraphs are from pp 68-70 of The Development of the Creative Individual, by permission.

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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.

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 their human relations, which in turn tended to preserve their creative energy. This increase of creativity appeared as an early dividend resulting from their increased mental health.

In a doctoral study using the POI and Torrance Tests on College students, Maul (1970:3) concluded:
 

That there appears to be a substantial widespread connection between self-actualizing and creative thinking processes ... It is possible that self actualization and creative thinking processes may be represented as a single integrated type of behavior, where either one set of behavior manifestations is found to be a subset of the other or where both behaviors suggest a larger underlying process.


Craig (1966) reviewed the literature connecting creativity and Maslow's self-actualizing behavior. He checked Maslow's trait lists with those used by Torrance to describe creatives. His comparison demonstrated an almost complete overlap between the personality characteristics of creatives (Torrance) and those of self-actualizers (Maslow). Garfield (1968), in doctoral research, found that subjects whose health and growth were improved by a psychotherapy treatment of fifteen weeks showed significantly greater gains in creativity than a control group.

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Creativity is not only an early dividend of progress toward mental health and self-actualization, it is also a necessary precursor of both psychedelia and illumination (as required by the theory of periodic developmental stages). Evidential in this regard is the fact that Maslow in his famous study of self-actualizing individuals found all of them to be creative. Without good mental health and the intuitive management of the preconscious that creativity brings, the individual is simply not ready for the openings of the psychedelic stage. And if the envelope protecting us from reality is broken prematurely before we achieve mastery of the creative stage, the result is often madness, not ecstasy. This warning is underscored by the "bad trips" from immature young people using drugs for quick entry into psychedelic realms which they are unable to control. We should learn to walk before we run.

It is interesting that both the affective task of the sixth stage (sexual function), and the cognitive task (creativity) should both be so particularly conducive to a sense of mental balance, content, and well-being. As Buber has so well shown, the former is the "I-thou" relationship and the latter is the "I-it" relationship, both being necessary for good mental health and progress toward self-actualization.



There are probably many reasons why research connects socioeconomic status with creativity. One of the reasons is that high SES minimizes "clan effect," which is very detrimental to individual development. Clan effect is the name for various kinds of group pressure from both kith and kin which conveys to the individual that it is wrong for him to try to rise above, or be different from, other members of the clan group. Clan effect therefore signalizes transcendence of the culture over the individual, who is immobilized into becoming a dependent reactive being controlled by and subservient to the group mores of his clan. Often seen as a negative force in crippling the potential creativity of a bright disadvantaged student, the clan cultural mores are often sought as a refuge in arrested adults. Clan effect prevents full self-actualization because one does not dare to be oneself; even at best one must become a George Apley rather than a Peer Gynt.

Among others who found high SES a factor in children's creativity was Saveca (1965) in a cross cultural study, and Feld (1964) who concluded after doctoral research that intelligence and age accounted for thirty percent of the variance in creativity scores and personality factors another thirty percent.

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2.36 Creativity as Evolutionary Development*

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 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 throw-forward 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.

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.



*This and the next eight paragraphs are from pp 70-71 of The Development of the Creative Individual,by permission.

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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.
 

2.4. THE PRECONSCIOUS

The stabilization and mental health of the preconscious is the key factor in creative output and developmental progress.

The 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 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

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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.

We note 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 (1953:161) describes similar functions as "bad-me," "not-me" and "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


*This and the following 13 paragraphs are from pp 62-67 of The Development of the Creative Individual, by permission.

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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 VI (adapted from Kubie, 1958) 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, 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

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FIGURE VI: DEVELOPMENT OF THE PRECONSCIOUS

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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 selfactualization, 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 (1958, P. 143): "Creativity is a product of preconscious activity. This is the challenge which confronts the education of the future."

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 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

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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 (1970:99) 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 (1970:180) 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 lose its energies 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.

There are many people who can testify to the usefulness of dreams in the creative production of daily life. Kilton Stewart (Tart, 1969: 159-68) tells how the Senoi, a Malayan tribe, use dreams to promote mental health, and gain control over the preconscious. Following Stewart's example, Alden Flagg (personal communication) of New York Society of General Semantics programs his sleep so that he will dream solutions to daily problems. Eileen Garrett (1968:135) tells of much the same thing: "I give my consciousness the task of finding the answer while I sleep, and in the morning at the threshold of awakening, I find the information I sought." Many creative people have learned this trick of using dreams.

But the best and most complete summary of the use of dreams for discoveries and inventions by scientists is by Krippner (1972) (see next):
 

2.41 Dreams and Creativity

There are records of many instances of artistic , scientific, and philosophical insights occurring during dreams. However, an important question has never been resolved: Does the creative dream represent a consolidation of ideas attained while one is awake (and in ordinary reality), or does it represent insights gained from

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experiences attained within the non-ordinary reality of the dream itself ?

"Robert Louis Stevenson (cited by Woods, 1947: 871-879) wrote that he learned early in his life that he could dream complete stories and that he could even go back to the same dreams on succeeding nights to give them a different ending. Later he trained himself to remember his dreams and to dream plots for his books. He wrote that his dreams were produced by "little people" who "labor all night long," and set before him "truncheons of tales upon their lighted theatre." Stevenson described how he obtained the plot for his short story, "The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde":
 

For two days I went about racking my brains for a plot of any sort; and on the second night I dreamed the scene at the window, and a scene afterwards split in two, in which Hyde, pursued for some crime, took the powder and underwent the change in the presence of his pursuers. All the rest was made awake, and consciously . . . All that was given me was the matter of three scenes, and the central idea of a voluntary change becoming involuntary . . ."


"Jean Cocteau (1952) dreamed he was watching a play about King Arthur; he later noted that it was "an epoch and characters about which I had no documentary information." The dream was so challenging that Cocteau was led to write his The Knights of the Round Table, He concluded, "The poet is at the disposal of his night. He must clean his house and await its visitation."

"Do these creative dreams of artists consolidate old material or do they find and explore a new reality? It appears that these dreams do both; they find and give expression to non-ordinary reality by giving better insight into people and events, and they do so by consolidating or integrating past material. Conversely, we can also say that by giving expression to a non-ordinary reality these dreams synthesize a great deal of material.

2.42 Dreams of Science

"Scientists, philosophers, and inventors also have creative dreams and use the content of these dreams either literally (directly) or analogically (symbolically) in their creative work. (It will be recalled that artists, musicians, and writers generally used the content in a literal manner.)

"Herman V. Hilprecht (cited by Woods, 1947:525-530) attempted to decipher two small fragments of agate which were believed to belong to the finger rings of a Babylonian and had cuneiform writing on them of the Cassite period in Babylonian history. After

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midnight he was weary and exhausted, went to sleep, and dreamed the following:
 

A tall thin priest of old pre-Christian Nippur, about forty years of age and clad in a simple abba, led me to the treasure chamber of the temple ... He addressed me as follows: "The two fragments which you have published separately on pages 22 and 26, belong together, are not finger rings and their history is as follows: King Kurigalzu (Ca. 1300 B.C.) once sent to the temple of Bel . . . an inscribed votive cylinder of agate. Then we priests suddenly received the command to make for the statue of the god Ninib a pair of earrings of agate. We were in a great dismay, since there was no agate as raw material at hand. In order to execute the command there was nothing for us to do but cut the votive cylinder into three parts, thus making three rings, each of which contained a portion of the original inscription. The first two rings served as earrings for the statue of the god; the two fragments which have given you so much trouble are portions of them. If you will put the two together you will have confirmation of my words. But the third ring you have not found in the course of your excavations and you never will find it." With this the priest disappeared. I woke up. . . .


"Hilprecht later verified this interpretation by actually putting the fragments together at the Imperial Museum of Constantinople, thereby showing that they had once belonged to one and the same votive cylinder.

"In his creative dream Hilprecht combined identically shaped "rings" (association by similarity) and thereby reconstructed the votive cylinder. He also combined other bits of information that agreed with this reconstruction. All this represents a process of consolidation. Hilprecht's dream thus integrated a great deal of material, but by synthesizing the material correctly the dream also gave him a picture of a non-ordinary reality - a past reality. It is conceivable, too, that Hilprecht's close contact with the "rings" helped give him imagery of the past events he saw in his dream in the same manner as the touch of an object purportedly gives a psychic paragnost accurate imagery of the past history of the object.

"The naturalist Louis Agassiz (cited by Krippner and Hughes 1970), attempted to transfer the image of a fossilized fish from a stone but found the image too blurred. He gave up the project only to dream a few nights later of an entire fossilized fish. He hurried to the laboratory the next morning, but the image was as obscure as before. The dream returned the next night. When he examined

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the slab the next morning, the vague image appeared unchanged. Hoping to have the dream a third time, Agassiz put a pencil and paper by his bed. The dream returned and he drew the image. The next morning when he looked at what he had drawn, he was surprised that he had produced so many details in total darkness. He returned to his laboratory and used the drawing as a guide to chisel the slab. When the stone layer fell away, Agassiz found the fossil in excellent condition and identical to the image he had seen in his dream.

"Agassiz' creative dream of the fossilized fish may have been induced by having perceived unconsciously a clue in the stone slab which he had ignored while awake. If so, the dream could have emphasized and drawn his attention to stimuli he had perceived subliminally while he was awake. Perhaps Agassiz also perceived the fossil fish clairvoyantly by extrasensory perception (e.g., Krippner, 1963). If this is true, subliminal perception and extrasensory perception helped Agassiz experience non-ordinary reality which quickly turned into ordinary reality once the slab was cut.

"The creative dreams of Hilprecht and Agassiz gave the solution to a problem literally or directly. One can cite as well creative dreams of scientists and inventors that gave the solution of a problem analogically or symbolically.

"The chemist, Friedrich August Kekule (cited by Koestler, 1964: 118) had a tendency to make theoretical discoveries in hypnagogic reverie states. Kekule wrote:
 

I turned my chair to the fire and dozed. Again the atoms were gambolling before my eyes. The smaller groups kept modestly in the background. My mental eye, rendered more acute by visions of this kind, could now distinguish larger structures, of manifold conformations; long rows, sometimes more closely fitted together, all twining and twisting in snakelike motion. But look! What was that? One of the snakes had seized hold of its own tail, and the form whirled mockingly before my eyes. As if by a flash of lightning I awoke.


"The dream image of a snake holding its tail in its mouth led Kekule by analogy to his discovery that Benzene has a ringlike structure (usually represented by a hexagon) and to his "closed chain" or "ring" theory which showed the importance of molecular structure in organic chemistry. The imagery granted Kekule a glimpse into a non-ordinary reality of molecular structure.
 

"In 1869, D. I. Mendeleev went to bed exhausted after struggling to conceptualize a way to categorize the elements based upon their atomic weights (cited by Kedrov, 1957). He reported, "I saw in a dream a table where all the elements fell into place as required.
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Awakening, I immediately wrote it down on a piece of paper. Only in one place did a correction later seem necessary." in this manner, Mendeleev's Periodic Table of the Elements was created.
 
"(Noting that hypnagogic and reverie states are frequently associated with theta brain wave rhythms, Green, Green, and Walters (1971) have instigated a biofeedback project to train individuals to enter these states through EEG brain wave training. The association between theta production and creativity will be explored among the subjects who can successfully produce the theta rhythm.)

"It can be seen that creative persons in their dreams sometimes appear to experience non-ordinary reality, and at the same time make different types of consolidations. Finding a new reality in a creative dream gives the person a novel slant or direction for consolidating his information, and the consolidation enables him to see the details and structure of the new reality more clearly. In some cases, finding a new reality not only gives the person a new direction for consolidating his information, but even involves finding additional information to be included in the consolidation."

2.43 A Theory About the Impersonal Collective Preconscious

Let us imagine an entity, impersonal and collective, powerful and complete, without specific characteristics, existing in a separate reality. Let us imagine that this vivency is removed from our normal state of consciousness by a veil of dissociation, so that generally we must dissociate somewhat to come in contact with it, while in our reality it appears to exist in an hypnotized and dissociated state, embedded in the psyche of each of us.

Because of its plenary and numinous quality, such an entity will create grandiose effects; because of its dissociative aspect these effects generally appear in prototaxic and parataxic form. Hence the giants, gods, genies, and other supernatural beings of archetype myth and fairy tale, and the enactive ritual, dance, and mimetic movements of primitive society.

These effects will also occur in the experience of individuals. Because of the fact that these effects occur at different developmental times, and under different circumstances, they are often not recognized as due to one underlying cause. There are at least four major manifestations. The first, occurring in the initiative period was identified by Harry Stack Sullivan (1953) as the "not-me." The second, having to do with the relation of the preconscious to creative function was identified by Kubie (1958). The third, namely dissociated and schizophrenic behavior, has been identified by numerous writers. Finally, psychedelic control of this aspect of the psyche has been explored in the psychedelic drug literature, and in various other

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writings, including this book. Let us start with the "not-me" concept. Sullivan, himself, defines the "not-me" as follows (1953:162-3):

 
The personification of the not-me is most conspicuously encountered by most of us in an occasional dream while we are asleep; but it is very emphatically encountered by people who are having a severe schizophrenic episode, in aspects that are to them most spectacularly real. As a matter of fact, it is always manifest . . . in certain peculiar absences of phenomena when there should be phenomena; and in a good many people . . . it is very striking in its indirect manifestation (dissociated behavior) in which people do and say things of which they do not and could not have had knowledge, things which may be quite meaningful to other people, but are unknown to them . . . This is a very gradually evolving personification of an always relatively primitive character, - that is organized in unusually simple signs in the parataxic mode of experience, and made up of poorly grasped aspects of living, which will presently be regarded as "dreadful," and which still later will be differentiated into incidents which will be attended by awe, horror, loathing, or dread.


It will be seen from this that Sullivan, the expert in the dynamisms of development, identifies the "not-me" as pertaining to that class of experiences which are dissociated and uncanny - outside the pale of rational explanation or control of the developing child. Seen in most children in childish nightmares and night terrors, and in adults in the dissociated experiences of schizophrenia, the "not-me" emerges as a scary, poorly-grasped construct evoking emotional horror, rather than rational understanding. It is the purpose of normal development to "tame" this "collective" aspect of the psyche, to supplant its parataxic archetypes with an intuitive "modus vivendi" with the preconscious-creativity, and more or less to fully control it in the psychedelic stage. Notice how well the careful observation of Sullivan refers to the "collective unconscious" in the second sentence, a property which evokes awe at this level, but later under the better control of later stages reveals its positive aspects as creative function.

If awe and dread of the uncanny (with which the concept is endowed as we first meet it in childhood) were not enough, the concept is further complicated by having no characteristics or form. It is fluidic, watery, reflective (like the "Smoking mirror" of the Aztecs), and, to use an often misunderstood term: void. Here "void" does not have its modern meaning (as in a bouncing check) of "without value"; rather it has the Biblical meaning of "without form" as "The Earth was without form and void." When the Buddhist speaks of "the Clear Light of the Void," he is talking about a substance which transcends

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form, and is without characteristics, but which is nonetheless real. It is the same concept which we find in the generalized preconscious within each one of us.

This concept is helpfully identified by Troward (1909) as "subjective mind" which he asserts has the dual properties of unlimited intelligence and power, but without personality, hence subject to the will of each of us when we are properly related to it. We prefer to identify the concept as "The Spirit of Man" indicating the species intelligence as imbedded in the preconscious of each of us. Strictly speaking, there is only one Preconscious (Jung's collective unconscious), and this same entity which we have called the spirit of man is the protector and maintainer of his health and vitality, and hence the source of his creativity and psychedelic experiences. Powerful as it is, it is within the conscious control of each of us, and the regnancy of man over nature resides in this potential control he may exercise over the genius of his species. Such a concept at one jump lifts man to a new level of thought and action and gives to him godlike qualities and responsibilities. It constitutes the next evolutionary advance and ushers in the psychedelic age.

The world of the preconscious is the inverse of the natural world with respect to the conscious mind. That is why the conscious mind tries to totemize fearsome elements of each. Both are frightening because they represent some alienated part of ourselves and yet something distinctly "other" than ourselves, some independent reality, some tie with all other life. This inverse explains the relationship of the preconscious to manipulating and controlling the natural environment, for since each mirrors the other, each is affected by the other. The natural world represents elements in association; the preconscious represents elements in dissociation. The natural world extends through time of which we apprehend only the present; so also does the preconscious.

The development and use of the preconscious is therefore the key factor in both creativity and psychedelia; in the former instance there is an intuitive development and use, and in the latter a full cognitive utilization. Many creatives who did not escalate to psychedelia nevertheless intuitively derived individual mechanisms for throwing themselves into this mode of knowledge.
Gerald Heard says (Weil and Others 1971:9):
 

To have truly original thought the mind must throw off its critical guard, its filtering censor. It must put itself in a state of depersonalization . . . The best researchers when confronting problems and riddles which have defied all solution by ordinary methods, did employ their minds in an unusual way, did put themselves into a state of egoless creativity, which permitted them to have insights so remarkable that by means of these they were able to make their greatest and most original discoveries.
 
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Lord Tennyson was accustomed to pass into "an ecstatic state" and had a formula for inducing it (Prince, 1963:144). Tennyson says in a letter written in 1794:
 

I have had . . . a kind of walking trance ... when I have been all alone. This has often come upon me through repeating my own name to myself silently, till, all at once out of the intensity and consciousness of the individuality, the individuality itself seems to dissolve and fade away into boundless being . . .
 
Prince (1963:174) similarly describes the inception of Uncle Tom's Cabin quoting from the biography of Harriet Beecher Stowe:
 
Mrs. Stowe was seated in her pew in the college church at Brunswick, during the communion service ... Suddenly like the unrolling of a picture scroll, the scene of the death of Uncle Tom seemed to pass before her . . . She was so affected she could scarcely keep from weeping . . . That Sunday afternoon, she went to her room, locked the door and wrote out, substantially as it appears . . . the chapter called "The Death of Uncle Tom" . . .


Prince concludes:
 

The writing of this chapter of Uncle Tom's Cabin has many analogies in authorship without conscious participation in the composition to the same with conscious effort, and yet such facility that it seems as though in the main, the material gushed up from a concealed spring.


Colin Wilson (1971:31) tells us that "there is a connection between creativity and psychic sensitivity," and again he glimpses the developmental concept (1971:542) in pointing out that "Human evolution is not an uphill slope, but something like a steep flight of steps."

For those graphically minded, Figure VII which utilizes the generalized preconscious as a common substratum for telepathic transmission, may be consulted. In this figure, this generalized substratum, with complete impersonal intelligence and memory (somewhat like a giant computer) underlies all of human kind, and each of our individualized lives, represents a projection of it into consciousness, much like a gigantic iceberg might push up spikes above the water. In order for us to experience free will, cognition, personality, and privacy, we are insulated from this preconscious mind by some kind of medium which gives us our sense of individual will and consciousness. This medium, however, is under some conditions permeable. In the transmission of telepathic messages for example, good visualization and strong motivation are very helpful. Ability to get into a state of revery may also be. When this juncture occurs the impulse is transmitted via this generalized substratum to

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FIGURE VII: METHOD OF TELEPATHIC TRANSMISSION

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the receiver, who appears to need some kind of "sensitivity" under most situations. Such an explanation for telepathy, also explains most other psychic powers as well. In conclusion it should be emphasized that our individual minds are much like radio sending and receiving sets, and very slight adjustments (or tunings) are apparently all that is necessary to complete the circuit from sender to receiver.
Huxley (1945:254) agrees, in saying:
 

Of this psychic medium an eminent contemporary philosopher, Dr. C. D. Broad, has written, in an essay on telepathy contributed to the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, as follows. "We must therefore consider seriously the possibility that a person's experience initiates more or less permanent modifications of structure or process in something which is neither his mind nor his brain. There is no reason to suppose that this substratum would be anything to which possessive adjectives, such as 'mine' and 'yours' and 'his,' could properly be applied, as they can be to minds and animated bodies."


It is important to insist upon the impersonal aspect of the collective preconscious, because this gives our concept of it a machine-like quality, (something like a giant computer), which stresses its latency (until acted upon by the conscious will), and also its accessibility (to any conscious will which gets to the computer terminal). This machine-like quality of "subjectivity" or carrying out of any suggestion impressed upon it contrasts with its numinous quality which evokes awe and dread in the archaic aniministic man which remains in each of us. That qualities ascribed to Deity and to a machine can reside in the same entity is a mind-stretching concept, but it will be helpful to remember that the phrase "deus ex machina" has had a history since classical times. It is also helpful to remember that this entity is also an aspect of the Eigenwelt or inner world of man, and hence we are looking at a much more humanistic view of cosmology, and to put it crudely a "machina ex deus."

Because we have tended to ascribe divinity or other numinous values to the generalized preconscious we have tended to overlook or miss the humane effect which the conscious human experience has in developing, forming, and channeling the apersonal elements of the preconscious into a humanistic value structure. It is a long way from the uncanny, hair-raising "not-me" qualities of the preconscious in early childhood (Sullivan, 1953) to the more controlled, humane, and useful ones seen in the psychedelic union of consciousness and preconsciousness at the seventh developmental (psychedelic) stage. The absence of control by the conscious mind in the earlier stages has been supplanted by much fuller control of the conscious mind in the

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psychedelic stage. We see the benefits as accruing to us as individuals; but in the larger sense it is also possible that this humanizing experience benefits the preconscious itself in its own development. Indeed, it may be in a final sense the ultimate reason for human existence, for each human life becomes a probe of the developing preconscious into full rationality from its hypnotic spell. It is just as possible to believe that man creates God as to believe that God creates man.

2.44 Summary

In this chapter we have been concerned with a reprise of the Erikson-Piaget-Gowan Periodic Developmental Stage Theory, which asserts four ideas:
 

a) that the developmental chart has a periodicity of three, and that the last three cognitive stages are respectively creativity, psychedelia, and illumination;
b) that developmental stages are characterized by escalation, and when that does not occur, open to developmental lags or dysplasia;
c) that creativity is a characteristic of the third and sixth developmental stages;
d) that the stabilization and mental health of the preconscious is the key factor in creative output and developmental progress.


Each of these theses has been dealt with in detail, both with quotations from the earlier book Development of the Creative Individual, and more recent emendations and glosses.

The implications of this developmental theory for psychedelia, the cognitive aspect of the seventh stage, are significant and profound; and we devote the next chapter to that analysis.