Creativity, the creative process, and cognitive style and state

Abstract

PSYCHIATRY we often come to conclusions about adaptive or nonpathological behavior and mental processes through the study of their maladaptive or pathological counterparts. Perhaps this understandable focus of our attentions has led to areas of darkness in our understanding of human behavior. I believe one such area is that of creativity. The creative process is one in which man goes beyond his accustomed ways of understanding and develops a new and original way of “seeing.” This ability, while present to some extent in everyone, appears in its fullest flower in only a few. The purpose of this paper is to present a formulation of the nature of the creative process and of necessary cognitive requisites to facilitate the process, and to suggest an experimental method for the study of certain aspects of creativity. Much of the early psychoanalytic thinking on creativity dealt with the formulation of psychological constructs that explained the process and emphasized its pathological aspects. Freud stated that creativity stemmed from conflicts originating from biological drives. The urge to create was seen as an attempt to solve these conflicts.’ Freud’s focus was on the motivation for, not the essence of, the creative process. The psychoanalytic literature also focuses on the mental processes involved in creativity. Kris2 stressed the importance of the primary process in mechanisms of creativity. His theory of “regression in the service of the ego” was an attempt to explain the use of primary process phenomena of displacement, condensation, and substitution in the creative process. Arieti3 views this not as a regression but as an “emerging accessibility or availability” of information normally unavailable. Arieti, in The Intrapsychic Self,.’ postulates a tertiary process in which elements of primary and secondary process mechanisms combine in such a way that a creative process (the tertiary process) emerges. There is also disagreement over just where in the mental “structure” creativity occurs, the unconscious, the preconscious, or the conscious. Kris2 and Kubie’ support the thesis that creativity is mainly a product of the preconscious. Jung, however, proposes that the “visionary mode” of creativity occurs in unconscious animation of primordial experiences while his “psychological mode” emphasizes the conscious and purposeful aspects of creativity.3A