WHEN WE examine the psychological studies and writings on creativity over the past fifty years, the first thing that strikes us is the general paucity of material and the inadequacy of the work. In academic psychology after the time of William James and during the first half of this century, the subject was generally avoided as unscientific, mysterious, disturbing, and too corruptive of the scientific training of graduate students. And when some studies of creativity actually were made, they dealt with areas so peripheral that creative people themselves felt they had next to nothing to do with real creativity. Essentially we have come up with truisms or irrelevancies at which the artists and poets smile and about which they say, “Interesting, yes. But that’s not what goes on within me in the creative act.” Fortunately during the last twenty years a change has been occurring, but it is still true that creativity is a stepchild of psychology.
And in psychoanalysis and depth psychology the situation has been little better. I well recall an incident of some twenty years ago that brought vividly home to me the over simplification and inadequacy of the depth-psychology theories of creativity. One summer I was traveling with a group of seventeen artists through central Europe, studying and painting peasant art. While we were in Vienna, Alfred Adler, whom I had known and whose summer school I had attended, invited us all to his home for a private lecture. In the course of his lecture, in his parlor, Adler touched upon his compensatory theory of creativity—that human beings produce art, science, and other aspects of culture to compensate for their own inadequacies. The oyster producing the pearl to cover up the grain of sand intruding into its shell is often cited as a simple illustration. Beethoven’s deafness was one of the many famous examples Adler cited, showing how highly creative individuals compensate for some defect or organ inferiority by their creative acts. Adler also believed that civilization was created by human beings to compensate for their relatively weak position on this unfriendly crust of earth as well as for their inadequacy of tooth and claw in the animal world. Then Adler, having entirely forgotten he was addressing a group of artists, looked around the room and remarked, “Since I see that very few of you are wearing glasses, I assume that you are not interested in art.” The oversimplification this theory of compensation is subject to was thus dramatically exposed.
The theory does have some merit and is one of the important hypotheses that must be considered by students in the field. But its error is that it does not deal with the creative process as such. Compensatory trends in an individual will influence the forms his or her creating will take, but they do not explain the process of creativity itself. Compensatory needs influence the particular bent or direction in culture or science, but they do not explain the creation of the culture or science.
Because of this I learned very early in my psychological career to regard with a good deal of skepticism current theories explaining creativity. And I learned always to ask the question: Does the theory deal with creativity itself, or does it deal only with some artifact, some partial, peripheral aspect, of the creative act?
The other widely current psychoanalytic theories about creativity have two characteristics. First, they are reductive—that is, they reduce creativity to some other process. Second, they generally make it specifically an expression of neurotic patterns. The usual definition of creativity in psychoanalytic circles is “regression in the service of the ego.” Immediately the term regression indicates the reductive approach. I emphatically disagree with the implication that creativity is to be understood by reducing it to some other process, or that it is essentially an expression of neurosis.
Creativity is certainly associated with serious psychological problems in our particular culture—Van Gogh went psychotic, Gauguin seems to have been schizoid, Poe was alcoholic, and Virginia Woolf was seriously depressed. Obviously creativity and originality are associated with persons who do not fit into their culture. But this does not necessarily mean that the creativity is the product of the neurosis.
The association of creativity with neurosis presents us with a dilemma—namely, if by psychoanalysis we cured the artists of their neuroses would they no longer create? This dichotomy, as well as many others, arises from the reductive theories. Furthermore, if we create out of some transfer of affect or drive, as implied in sublimation, or if our creativity is merely the by-product of an endeavor to accomplish something else, as in compensation, does not our very creative act then have only a pseudo value? We must indeed take a strong stand against the implications, however they may creep in, that talent is a disease and creativity is a neurosis.
When we define creativity, we must make the distinction between its pseudo forms, on the one hand—that is, creativity as a superficial aestheticism. And, on the other, its authentic form—that is, the process of bringing something new into being. The crucial distinction is between art as artificiality (as in “artifice” or “artful”) and genuine art.
This is a distinction that artists and philosophers have struggled all through the centuries to make clear. Plato, for example, demoted his poets and his artists down to the sixth circle of reality because, he said, they deal only with appearances and not with reality itself. He was referring to art as decoration, a way of making life prettier, a dealing with semblances. But in his later, beautiful dialogue, the Symposium, he described what he called the true artists—namely, those who give birth to some new reality. These poets and other creative persons are the ones who express being itself, he held. As I would put it, these are the ones who enlarge human consciousness. Their creativity is the most basic manifestation of a man or woman fulfilling his or her own being in the world.
Now we must make the above distinction clear if our inquiries into creativity are to get below the surface. We are thus not dealing with hobbies, do-it-yourself movements, Sunday painting, or other forms of filling up leisure time. Nowhere has the meaning of creativity been more disastrously lost than in the idea that it is something you do only on week ends!
The creative process must be explored not as the product of sickness, but as representing the highest degree of emotional health, as the expression of the normal people in the act of actualizing themselves. Creativity must be seen in the work of the scientist as well as in that of the artist, in the thinker as well as in the aesthetician; and one must not rule out the extent to which it is present in captains of modern technology as well as in a mother’s normal relationship with her child. Creativity, as Webster’s rightly indicates, is basically the process of making, of bringing into being.
Let us now inquire into the nature of the creative process, and seek our answers by trying to describe as accurately as possible what actually happens in individuals at the moment of the creative act. I shall speak mostly about artists because I know them, have worked with them, and, to some extent, am one myself. This does not mean that I underestimate creativity in other activities. I assume that the following analysis of the nature of creativity will apply to all men and women during their creative moments.
The first thing we notice in a creative act is that it is an encounter. Artists encounter the landscape they propose to paint—they look at it, observe it from this angle and that. They are, as we say, absorbed in it. Or, in the case of abstract painters, the encounter may be with an idea, an inner vision, that in turn may be led off by the brilliant colors on the palette or the inviting rough whiteness of the canvas. The paint, the canvas, and the other materials then become a secondary part of this encounter; they are the language of it, the media, as we rightly put it. Or scientists confront their experiment, their laboratory task, in a similar situation of encounter.
The encounter may or may not involve voluntary effort—that is, “will power.” A healthy child’s play, for example, also has the essential features of encounter, and we know it is one of the important prototypes of adult creativity. The essential point is not the presence or absence of voluntary effort, but the degree of absorption, the degree of intensity (which we shall deal with in detail later); there must be a specific quality of engagement.
Now we come upon one important distinction between pseudo, escapist creativity on the one hand and that which is genuine on the other. Escapist creativity is that which lacks encounter. This was illustrated vividly to me when I worked with a young man in psychoanalysis. A talented professional, this man had rich and varied creative potentialities, but he always stopped just short of actualizing them. He would suddenly get the idea for an excellent story, would work it out in his mind to a full outline which could have then been written up without much further ado, and would relish and enjoy the ecstasy of the experience. Then he would stop there, writing down nothing at all. It was as though the experience of seeing himself as one who was able to write, as being just about to write, had within it what he was really seeking and brought its own reward. Hence he never actually created.
This was a fairly baffling problem to him and to me. We had analyzed many aspects of it: his father had been a somewhat gifted writer but a failure; his mother had made much of his father’s writings, but had shown only contempt for him in other realms. The young man, an only child, had been pampered and overprotected by his mother and often had been shown preference over his father—for instance, by being served special food at meals. The patient was clearly competing with his father, and faced a dire threat if he should succeed. All this and more we had analyzed in some detail. A vital link of experience, however, was missing.
One day the patient came in to announce that he had made an exciting discovery. The evening before, while reading, he had gotten his customary sudden creative flow of ideas for a story and had taken his usual pleasure in the fact. At the same time he had had a peculiar sexual feeling. He had then recalled for the first time that he had always had this sexual feeling at precisely such an abortively creative moment.
I shall not go into the complex analysis of the associations, which demonstrated that this sexual feeling was both a desire for comfort and sensual gratification of a passive sort and a desire for the unconditional admiration of any woman. I only wish to indicate that the upshot was clearly that his creative “bursts” of ideas were ways of getting admiration, gratification from his mother; that he needed to show mother and other women what a fine, gifted person he was. And once he had done that by getting the beautiful, lofty visions, he had achieved what he wanted. He was not really interested in this context in creating, but in being about to create; creativity was in the service of something quite else.
Now no matter how you may interpret the causes of this pattern, one central feature is clear—the encounter was lacking. Is not this the essence of escapist art? Everything is there but the encounter. And is not this the central feature of many kinds of artistic exhibitionism—what Rank calls the artiste manqué? We cannot make a valid distinction by saying one kind of art is neurotic and the other healthy. Who is to judge that? We can only say that in exhibitionistic, escapist forms of creativity there is no real encounter, no engagement with reality. That isn’t what the young man is after; he wants to be passively accepted and admired by mother. In cases of this kind it is accurate to speak of regression in the negative sense. But the crucial point is that we are dealing with something quite different from creativity.
The concept of encounter also enables us to make clearer the important distinction between talent and creativity. Talent may well have its neurological correlates and can be studied as “given” to a person. A man or woman may have talent whether he or she uses it or not; talent can probably be measured in the person as such. But creativity can be seen only in the act. If we were purists, we would not speak of a “creative person,” but only of a creative act. Sometimes, as in the case of Picasso, we have great talent and at the same time great encounter and, as a result, great creativity. Sometimes we have great talent and truncated creativity, as many people felt in the case of Scott Fitzgerald. Sometimes we have a highly creative person who seems not to have much talent. It was said of the novelist Thomas Wolfe, who was one of the highly creative figures of the American scene, that he was a “genius without talent.” But he was so creative because he threw himself so completely into his material and the challenge of saying it—he was great because of the intensity of his encounter.
This leads us to the second element in the creative act—namely, the intensity of the encounter. Absorption, being caught up in, wholly involved, and so on, are used commonly to describe the state of the artist or scientist when creating or even the child at play. By whatever name one calls it, genuine creativity is characterized by an intensity of awareness, a heightened consciousness.
Artists, as well as you and I in moments of intensive encounter, experience quite clear neurological changes. These include quickened heart beat; higher blood pressure; increased intensity and constriction of vision, with eyelids narrowed so that we can see more vividly the scene we are painting; we become oblivious to things around us (as well as to the passage of time). We experience a lessening of appetite—persons engaged in a creative act lose interest in eating at the moment, and may work right through mealtime without noticing it. Now all of these correspond to an inhibiting of the functioning of the parasympathetic division of the autonomic nervous system (which has to do with ease, comfort, nourishment) and an activation of the sympathetic nervous division. And, lo and behold, we have the same picture that Walter B. Cannon described as the “flight-fight” mechanism, the energizing of the organism for fighting or fleeing. This is the neurological correlate of what we find, in broad terms, in anxiety and fear.
But what the artist or creative scientist feels is not anxiety or fear; it is joy. I use the word in contrast to happiness or pleasure. The artist, at the moment of creating, does not experience gratification or satisfaction (though this may be the case later, after he or she has a highball or a pipe in the evening. Rather, it is joy, joy defined as the emotion that goes with heightened consciousness, the mood that accompanies the experience of actualizing one’s own potentialities.
Now this intensity of awareness is not necessarily connected with conscious purpose or willing. It may occur in reverie or in dreams, or from so-called unconscious levels. An eminent New York professor related an illustrative story. He had been searching for a particular chemical formula for some time, but without success. One night, while he was sleeping, he had a dream in which the formula was worked out and displayed before him. He woke up, and in the darkness he excitedly wrote it down on a piece of tissue, the only thing he could find. But the next morning he could not read his own scribbling. Every night thereafter, upon going to bed, he would concentrate his hopes on dreaming the dream again. Fortunately, after some nights he did, and he then wrote the formula down for good. It was the formula he had sought and for which he received the Nobel prize.
Though not rewarded so dramatically, we have all had similar experiences. Processes of forming, making, building go on even if we are not consciously aware of them at the time. William James once said that we learn to swim in the winter and to skate in the summer. Whether you wish to interpret these phenomena in terms of some formulation of the unconscious, or prefer to follow William James in connecting them with some neurological processes that continue even when we are not working on them, or prefer some other approach, as I do, it is still clear that creativity goes on in varying degrees of intensity on levels not directly under the control of conscious willing. Hence the heightened awareness we are speaking of does not at all mean increased self-consciousness. It is rather correlated with abandon and absorption, and it involves a heightening of awareness in the whole personality.
But let it be said immediately that unconscious insights or answers to problems that come in reverie do not come hit or miss. They may indeed occur at times of relaxation, or in fantasy, or at other times when we alternate play with work. But what is entirely clear is that they pertain to those areas in which the person consciously has worked laboriously and with dedication. Purpose in the human being is a much more complex phenomenon than what used to be called will power. Purpose involves all levels of experience. We cannot will to have insights. We cannot will creativity. But we can will to give ourselves to the encounter with intensity of dedication and commitment. The deeper aspects of awareness are activated to the extent that the person is committed to the encounter.
We must also point out that this “intensity of encounter” is not to be identified with what is called the Dionysian aspect of creativity. You will find this word Dionysian used often in books on creative works. Taken from the name of the Greek god of intoxication and other forms of ecstasy, the term refers to the upsurge of vitality, the abandon, which characterized the ancient orgiastic revels of Dionysus. Nietzsche, in his important book The Birth of Tragedy, cites the Dionysian principle of surging vitality and the Apollonian principle of form and rational order as the two dialectical principles that operate in creativity. This dichotomy is assumed by many students and writers.
The Dionysian aspect of intensity can be studied psychoanalytically easily enough. Probably almost every artist has tried at some time or other to paint while under the influence of alcohol. What happens generally is what one would expect, and it happens in proportion to how much alcohol is consumed—namely, that the artist thinks he or she is doing wonderful stuff, indeed much better than usual, but in actual fact, as is noted the next morning while looking at the picture, has really performed less well than usual. Certainly Dionysian periods of abandon are valuable, particularly in our mechanized civilization where creativity and the arts are all but starved to death by the routine of punching clocks and attending endless committee meetings, and by the pressures to produce ever greater quantities of papers and books, pressures that have infested the academic world more lethally than the industrial world. I long for the health-giving effects of the periods of “carnival,” such as they still have in the Mediterranean countries.
But the intensity of the creative act should be related to the encounter objectively, and not released merely by something the artist “takes.” Alcohol is a depressant, and possibly necessary in an industrial civilization; but when one needs it regularly to feel free of inhibitions, he or she is misnaming the problem. The issue really is why the inhibitions are there in the first place. The psychological studies of the upsurge of vitality and other effects that occur when such drugs are taken are exceedingly interesting; but one must sharply distinguish this from the intensity that accompanies the encounter itself. The encounter is not something that occurs merely because we ourselves have subjectively changed; it represents, rather, a real relationship with the objective world.
The important and profound aspect of the Dionysian principle is that of ecstasy. It was in connection with Dionysian revels that Greek drama was developed, a magnificent summit of creativity which achieved a union of form and passion with order and vitality. Ecstasy is the technical term for the process in which this union occurs.
The topic of ecstasy is one to which we should give more active attention in psychology. I use the word, of course, not in its popular and cheapened sense of “hysteria,” but in its historical, etymological sense of “ex-stasis”—that is, literally to “stand out from,” to be freed from the usual split between subject and object which is a perpetual dichotomy in most human activity. Ecstasy is the accurate term for the intensity of consciousness that occurs in the creative act. But it is not to be thought of merely as a Bacchic “letting go”; it involves the total person, with the subconscious and unconscious acting in unity with the conscious. It is not, thus, irrational; it is, rather, suprarational. It brings intellectual, volitional, and emotional functions into play all together.
What I am saying may sound strange in the light of our traditional academic psychology. It should sound strange. Our traditional psychology has been founded on the dichotomy between subject and object which has been the central characteristic of Western thought for the past four centuries. Ludwig Binswanger calls this dichotomy “the cancer of all psychology and psychiatry up to now.”1 It is not avoided by behaviorism or operationalism, which would define experience only in objective terms. Nor is it avoided by isolating the creative experience as a purely subjective phenomenon.
Most psychological and other modern schools of thought still assume this split without being aware of it. We have tended to set reason over against emotions, and have assumed, as an outgrowth of this dichotomy, that we could observe something most accurately if our emotions were not involved—that is to say, we would be least biased if we had no emotional stake at all in the matter at hand. I think this is an egregious error. There are now data in Rorschach responses, for example, that indicate that people can more accurately observe precisely when they are emotionally involved—that is, reason works better when emotions are present; the person sees sharper and more accurately when his emotions are engaged. Indeed, we cannot really see an object unless we have some emotional involvement with it. It may well be that reason works best in the state of ecstasy.
The Dionysian and the Apollonian must be related to each other. Dionysian vitality rests on this question: What manner of encounter releases the vitality? What particular relation to landscape or inner vision or idea heightens the consciousness, brings forth the intensity?
We arrive finally in analyzing the creative act in terms of the question What is this intense encounter with? An encounter is always a meeting between two poles. The subjective pole is the conscious person in the creative act itself. But what is the objective pole of this dialectical relationship? I shall use a term that will sound too simple: it is the artist’s or scientist’s encounter with his world. I do not mean world as environment or as the “sum total” of things; nor do I refer at all to objects about a subject.
World is the pattern of meaningful relations in which a person exists and in the design of which he or she participates. It has objective reality, to be sure, but it is not simply that. World is interrelated with the person at every moment. A continual dialectical process goes on between world and self and self and world; one implies the other, and neither can be understood if we omit the other. This is why one can never localize creativity as a subjective phenomenon; one can never study it simply in terms of what goes on within the person. The pole of world is an inseparable part of the creativity of an individual. What occurs is always a process, a doing—specifically a process interrelating the person and his or her world.
How artists encounter their world is illustrated in the work of every genuinely creative painter. Out of the many possible examples of this, I shall choose the superb exhibition of the paintings of Mondrian shown at the Guggenheim Museum in New York in 1957–58. From his first realistic works in 1904 and 1905, all the way to his later geometrical rectangles and squares in the 1930s, one can see him struggling to find the underlying forms of the objects, particularly trees, that he was painting. He seems to have loved trees. The paintings around 1910, beginning somewhat like Cézanne, move further and further into the underlying meaning of tree—the trunk rises organically from the ground into which the roots have penetrated; the branches curve and bend into the trees and hills of the background in cubistic form, beautifully illustrative of what the underlying essence of tree is to most of us. Then we see Mondrian struggling more and more deeply to find the “ground forms” of nature; now it is less tree and more the eternal geometric forms underlying all reality. Finally We see him pushing inexorably toward the squares and rectangles that are the ultimate form of purely abstract art. Impersonal? To be sure. The individual self is lost. But is this not precisely a reflection of Mondrian’s world—the world of the decades of the twenties and thirties, the world in the period of emerging fascism, communism, conformism, military power, in which the individual not only feels lost, but is lost, alienated from nature and others as well as himself? Mondrian’s paintings express creative strength in such a world, an affirmation in spite of the “lostness” of the individual. In this sense his work is a search for the foundation of individuality that can withstand these anti-human political developments.
It is absurd to think of artists simply as “painting nature,” as though they were only anachronistic photographers of trees and lakes and mountains. For them, nature is a medium, a language by which they reveal their world. What genuine painters do is to reveal the underlying psychological and spiritual conditions of their relationship to their world; thus in the works of a great painter we have a reflection of the emotional and spiritual condition of human beings in that period of history. If you wish to understand the psychological and spiritual temper of any historical period, you can do no better than to look long and searchingly at its art. For in the art the underlying spiritual meaning of the period is expressed directly in symbols. This is not because artists are didactic or set out to teach or to make propaganda; to the extent that they do, their power of expression is broken; their direct relation to the inarticulate, or, if you will, “unconscious” levels of the culture is destroyed. They have the power to reveal the underlying meaning of any period precisely because the essence of art is the powerful and alive encounter between the artist and his or her world.
Nowhere was this encounter demonstrated more vividly than in the famous seventy-fifth anniversary exhibit of Picasso’s works, presented in New York in 1957. Broader in temperament than Mondrian, Picasso is a spokesman for his time par excellence. Even in his early works around 1900, his vast talent was already visible. And in the stark, realistic paintings of peasants and poor people in the first decade of this century, his passionate relationship to human suffering was shown. You can then see the spiritual temper of each succeeding decade in his work.
In the early 1920s, for example, we find Picasso painting classical Greek figures, particularly bathers by the sea. An aura of escapism hovers about these pictures in the exhibit. Was not the 1920s, the decade after the first World War, in reality a period of escapism in the Western world? Toward the end of the twenties and in the early thirties, these bathers by the sea become pieces of metal, mechanical, gray-blue curving steel. Beautiful indeed, but impersonal, unhuman. And here one was gripped in the exhibit with an ominous foreboding—the prediction of the beginning of the time when people were to become impersonal, objectivized, numbers. It was the ominous prediction of the beginnings of “man, the robot.”
Then in 1937 comes the great painting Guernica, with figures torn apart, split from each other, all in stark white, gray, and black. It was Picasso’s pained outrage against the inhumanity of the bombing of the helpless Spanish town of Guernica by fascist planes in the Spanish revolution; but it is much more than that. It is the most vivid portrayal imaginable of the atomistic, split-up, fragmentized state of contemporary human beings, and implies the conformism, emptiness, and despair that were to go along with this. Then in the late thirties and forties, Picasso’s portraits become more and more machinelike—people turned literally into metal. Faces become distorted. It is as though persons, individuals, do not exist any more; their places are taken by hideous witches. Pictures now are not named, but numbered. The bright colors the artist used in his earlier periods and which were so delightful are now largely gone. In these rooms at the exhibit one feels as though darkness has settled upon the earth at noon. As in the novels of Kafka, one gets a stark and gripping feeling of the modern individual’s loss of humanity. The first time I saw this exhibit, I was so overcome with the foreboding picture of human beings losing their faces, their individuality, their humanity, and the prediction of the robot to come, that I could look no longer and had to hurry out of the room and onto the street again.
To be sure, all the way through Picasso preserves his own sanity by “playing” with paintings and sculptures of animals and his own children. But it is clear that the main stream is a portrayal of our modern condition, which has been psychologically portrayed by Riesman, Mumford, Tillich, and others. The whole is an unforgettable portrait of modern man and woman in the process of losing their person and their humanity.
In this sense genuine artists are so bound up with their age that they cannot communicate separated from it. In this sense, too, the historical situation conditions the creativity. For the consciousness which obtains in creativity is not the superficial level of objectified intellectualization, but is an encounter with the world on a level that undercuts the subject-object split. “Creativity,” to rephrase our definition, “is the encounter of the intensively conscious human being with his or her world.”