Creative Genius Research Articles

Mishima: Writer of body, life and death

On the basis of a longitudinal study, the aim of this paper is to examine the life and work of Yukio Mishima (1925–1970) in an attempt to understand the creative genius of this renowned Japanese author who took his own life by committing seppuku. Does the key to understanding Mishima lie in his work, in his life, or in his suicide? Was he a manic-depressive? An exhibitionist obsessed with beauty, death and glory? A terrorist? A megalomaniac? Attempts have been made to pigeonhole him into different categories, but he remains an enigma. How can clinical psychologists understand the entangled complexity of all this? What can be deduced from the kaleidoscope of possible diagnoses?

The Motif of Death in Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Short Poems

In the early 19th century poetic tradition, there was a great emphasis on the poet as the creative genius, and subjectivity was cherished more than ever. As a poet of the Romantic Era, Percy Bysshe Shelley conveyed his emotions, philosophical beliefs, and religious convictions, as well as his fears and motivations, through his literary works. Death was an omnipresent theme in Shelley’s life, and he used poetry as a means to express his thoughts and feelings about it. The passing of those close to him, such as his wife Harriet and children Clara and William, confronted him with his own mortality. He responded to the death of his beloved ones by composing poems. In addition to expressing his grief over these losses, he also voiced the decrease of his life instincts and his death wish. This paper will examine Shelley’s short poems (“Death”, “On Death”, “To William Shelley”, “Stanzas Written in Dejection, near Naples” “Ode to the West Wind,” “To Night,” and “O world! O life! O time!”) through the lens of Sigmund Freud’s concepts of mourning and melancholy, as well as death wish. The chosen autobiographical poems reveal Shelley’s mourning process and his journey towards accepting death, showcasing his death drive, and reflecting his genuine emotions as well as his Neoplatonic philosophy.

Early science and colossal stone engineering in Menga, a Neolithic dolmen (Antequera, Spain).

Megaliths represent the earliest form of monumental stone architecture. The earliest megalithic chambers in Europe appeared in France in the fifth millennium BCE. Menga is the oldest of the great dolmens in Iberia (approximately 3800 to 3600 BCE). Menga's capstone #5 weighing 150 tons is the largest stone ever moved in Iberia as part of the megalithic phenomenon and one of the largest in Europe. The research presented here proposes a completely innovative interpretation of how this colossal monument was built. It comprises a geoarchaeological analysis encompassing three major components: (i) the angles of the planes of each stone, (ii) the stratigraphic polarity of each structural element, and (iii) the depth of the foundations. Our results show that Menga is a unique example of creative genius and early science among Neolithic societies. It was designed as a completely original engineering project, for which we know of no precedents in Iberia.

TANBURİ CEMİL BEY AND HIS MUSIC: GENIUS AND MELANCHOLY

Tanburi Cemil Bey is considered one of the greatest geniuses who grew up in the classical Turkish music tradition. However, his place in the history of national culture cannot be understood only through his actions and works in the musical field. To accurately determine its location, the conceptual apparatus of a comparative and multidimensional perspective is needed. For this reason, this study discusses the concept of genius attributed to Cemil Bey and investigates the possibilities of evaluating it as a form of historical subjectivity through the structure-agency tension in sociology. While doing this, the concept of melancholy, which has accompanied genius since ancient times, is also included in the analysis. These concepts have a deep-rooted unity that frames the medical, epistemological and philosophical norms of the Western tradition of thought. The closeness between these two concepts, which were mainly established on a medical and philosophical level in ancient Greek thought, is discussed in a wide range of symbols within the framework of the Saturn myth in Renaissance cosmology. By revising the ancient belief that the planets have a certain influence on the character and moral qualities of people, the personification of the melancholic genius is added to the myth of Saturn in the astrological context of Renaissance cosmology. Thus, it paves the way for the maturation of a separate poetic experience of melancholy that focuses on the existential dimension of melancholy as well as its physical symptoms. Romanticism intensifies the perception of melancholy as a sign of self-reflexivity that allows contemplation on the deepest aspects of existence and often symbolizes creative genius. It creates a context in which Cemil Bey can be read, like C. Baudelaire and W. Benjamin, who see themselves as residents of this unique field of subjectivity.

Pedagogical Perspectives in the Filmography of Lucian Pintilie

Model for an entire generation Lucian Pintilie, a creative genius, takes on the role of revealing the world as it is, with all its shadows and ambiguities, as depicted in his films through absurdity, grotesque or farcical elements. The artistic approach of director Lucian Pintilie becomes redemptory, aiming to foster responsibility and awaken a collective consciousness. Lucian Pintilie’s intellectual preoccupation provides solid study material for the creators of the New Wave in the Romanian cinema, both through his films and through the volume Bricabrac, which includes his directorial poetics.

Creative Challenge-Based Learning Model via Digital Co-Learning Space to Develop Creative Genius Innovator

Creative Challenge-Based Learning Model via Digital Co-Learning Space to Develop Creative Genius Innovator

CREATIVITY, GENIUS AND PSYCHOPATHOLOGY

The first part of this conference is a revision of the actual status of the scientific literature related to the concepts of genius, creativity and their association to psychopatology. The current con­cepts will be analyzed trying to explore the relevance and the real meaning of these concepts. In a second step we will analyze new empirical evidence that sustain a specific relationship between creativity, genius and psychopathology. The second part of the conference is dedicated to the most important pathographical studies of one outstanding creative genius. We will start this second part of these studies with the exploration of the life and the multiple artistic expressions of Vincent van Gogh. The Dutch genius left a huge amount of paintings and letters that has been analyzed from diferent perspectives, including biographical explorations, psicological studies and psychiatric approaches. The analisis should help us to understand in what way the psychopatological experiences can influence the development of outstanding artistic creativity.

A spark of genius and a flash of madness: Nikola Tesla and his struggles with mental illness

IntroductionAn example of the unification of the contrast between artistic creativity and discipline of science, Nikola Tesla engineer and physicist, was also a prolific inventor that contributed to the transformation of modern society. Having resurfaced in the mainstream culture as a mythical figure, he appears to be enjoying a renaissance of posthumous recognition and praise. Throughaccounts available directly from his autobiography and descriptions offered by those who worked with him, the existence of the inventor´s eccentricities appear to reveal the existence of mental health disorder.ObjectivesThe authors explore Tesla and the psychopathology that accompanied him throughout his periods of brilliance and as well as hardship.MethodsThe authors conducted a brief non-structured narrative literature review. The keywords used during the research, alone or in combination, included: Nikola Tesla, psychopathology and mental illness. The works consulted included: news articles, autobiographies and biographies. Of these, those that were written in the English language and deemed most pertinent to the explored theme were chosen for review in this work.ResultsThe popular image of the mad scientist, which describes a brilliant but solitary and eccentric individual focused on their work is one that could be applied to Tesla. Documents reveal that he suffered a nervous breakdown, as well as having symptoms that point to a probably presence of obsessive-compulsive disorder, of which included counting and cleanliness rituals, exacerbated by chronic insomnia.ConclusionsThere appears to be anecdotal evidence pointing to an eventual relationship between creative genius and mental pathology. Although not formally evidenced through the scientific literature, exploring the life and accomplishments of Tesla serve as a significant example of a spark of genius perhaps ignited by mental illness. Tesla demonstrated suffering associated with his symptoms especially when considering the end of his life. At the time, adequate mental health interventions and treatments were not widely available, with his diagnosis probably being considered the quirks of genius and not the symptoms of disease.Disclosure of InterestNone Declared

Adopting or Dodging the Heroic Model: Professional Trajectories of Estonian Women Architects

The article focuses on gender-specific experiences of Estonian women architects in the late Soviet and post-Soviet Estonia. Architecture has been, and to a great extent still remains, a rather masculinist field, adhering to an image of heroic individualist creative genius and supporting a very demanding and uncompromising work culture. These preconceptions often make it complicated to forge different career paths or to appreciate alternative or more cooperational modes of practice. The article asks if and to what extent the unwritten rules and prejudices have affected Estonian women architects’ experiences in studying architecture, establishing their careers, combining the responsibilities of professional and private lives, and building up their image as (women) designers in a general sense. Based on in-depth interviews with 16 professional architects aged 33–92, the article also highlights the differences and similarities of practising architecture as a woman in the Soviet and post-Soviet social and economic contexts, mapping them onto findings of international feminist research in the context of both Western Europe and the former Eastern Bloc. Additionally, the article refers to the productive possibilities of oral history as a method to complement and challenge the conventional architecture historical writing as well as the intersubjective character of the narratives thus constructed.

Interrogating The Politics Of Anonymity Among The Writers Of Detective Fiction : A Study

If we go through the Bengali detective fictions which are greatly inspired by Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes's stories, we can notice an interesting fact. Stories like ''HarimotirHatyakando'', ''OdbhutHatyakari'', ''Sindhuker lash'', ''Jal Raja'' etc. have been published anonymously (SekalerGoyendaGolpo, ed. by Arindam Dasgupta) There is a possibility that these stories are written by women writers and like many women writers and artists they could not expose their name, which was a common picture of Victorian age in our country and also in Europe. The Bronte Sisters, Mary Anne Evans and many of the women novelists had to use pen names to pursue their creative genius. This problem has been addressed by Gilbert and Gubar in their work The Mad woman in the Attic" as "Anxiety of Authorship". I think the anonymity of the above mentioned detective fictions calls for a thorough research. Who are these anonymous writers? Can this identification open a new room or Bengali women writers? This paper would try to address these questions.

From Creative Genius to Entrepreneurial Spirit: Architectural Mediations in the Formation of the Brazilian State

From Creative Genius to Entrepreneurial Spirit: Architectural Mediations in the Formation of the Brazilian State

Satyajit Ray’s Versatile Creativity in Children's Literature and His Persistent Impact on Young Minds

"Pather Panchali" and "Charulata" are two of the most significant contributions that the creative genius Satyajit Ray has made to the film industry. On the other hand, he has not restricted his creative abilities to the area of film; rather, he has been a prolific writer and a storyteller in the realm of published works for children. Through the creation of a fictional and engaging character, Ray eventually became a well-liked figure among young minds. Readers of all ages were kept interested by the numerous mysteries and the smart plot throughout the entire book. The brilliant author introduced the thrill of solving crimes, the beauty of travel, and a brilliant scientist with an unquenchable curiosity about the universe through the adventures of Feluda and the beloved character Professor Shonku. These adventures have not only ignited his young readers' interest in scientific exploration, but they have also entertained them. It is clear that Ray is a skilled writer since he is able to take young minds to a magical world that is filled with wonder, creativity, and fantasy. It is via his narratives that a rich tapestry is created, one that resonates with people of all ages and that leads to a realm of magic. The study underlines Ray's tremendous impact on Indian children's literature, which has kindled young minds with inspiration and love for reading and storytelling. Ray's work has been credited with a number of remarkable accomplishments. In addition, the paper discusses Ray's unique dual position as an author and illustrator, which provides a powerful visual representation of his story and leaves an impression on the minds of the readers. His literary prowess is a talent that will never go out of style for any reader, and it will continue to motivate future generations to invent stories and discover new worlds.

Între un topos folcloric şi un mit cultural. Câteva glose pe marginea baladei „Meşterul Manole”

Between a Folkloric Topos and a Cultural Myth. A Few Glosses on the Ballad “Master Manole” The folkloric topos of the walled-up woman, present in several variants in South-Eastern Europe, has a special status in the Romanian culture. The “Legend of Master Manole” from which it originates, along with “Miorița”, has become a canonical literary text. Considered by G. Călinescu as a “cultural myth”, one of the four essential Romanian myths, in the interwar and communist period, it was intensively exploited ideologically and politically. Interpreted by writers, either as a sample of Romanian creative genius, or as an example of dedication to the work of building the new world, the topos has long overgrown its initial condition as a simple motif of popular culture.

Dornach: In the Footsteps of Rudolf Steiner

When the New Age philosopher Dr Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925) arrived at the Dornach hill, a short tram ride from Basel, Switzerland, it offered virtually a tabula rasa for his creative genius. Over the next little more than a decade (beginning 1913), Steiner populated this landscape with a multitude of new buildings in his unique organic architecture style. Having settled on Dornach as the site for his Anthroposophy headquarters with its centrepiece structure, the Goetheanum (the name came later), a colony of adherents, devotees, seekers, disciples, artists and artisans were drawn to Dornach. The integrity of the precinct has been maintained for a century and a visitor treading the hill will be in the footsteps of Rudolf Steiner and seeing his Anthropop colony much as he witnessed it in his own time. The buildings of the precinct range from the grand (the Goetheanum), the bold (Haus Duldeck), the curvaceous (the Glass House), the quaint (Haus Vreede), the ugly (Haus de Jaager), the utilitarian (the Schrenerei), the basic (the Atelier), the fanciful (Transformatorenhaus), the phallic (Heizhaus), and the monastic (Eurythmiehaus). Many tastes (and budgets) were catered for as Rudolf Steiner explored and invented his organic architectural style. Nearly a century after his death there are now more than 180 Anthropop buildings within the greater Goetheanum precinct, including the nearby villages of Dornach and Arlesheim. The present paper presents 21 views of the greater Goetheanum precinct. The building start dates are specified. Many of the buildings were designed by Rudolf Steiner (those are asterisked).

“The stiff Heart questions–:” Decoding the Legend of Emily Dickinson

Emily Dickinson’s shockingly raw poetry, which mirrors her enigmatic brilliance through the use of unprecedented wordplay and structural defiance, represents one of the most dynamic radicalisms in American literature. However, within her narrative, remains a gaping biographical hole that scholars perpetually try to fill. Through a close reading of her poetry and letters, I have explored the complexity of Dickinson’s legend, in order to better understand the origins of her creative genius, as well as her poetic motivations. In my research, I have drawn parallels between Dickinson’s writings and family dynamic, while investigating her supposed agoraphobia. In a further attempt to evaluate the extent of the poet’s involvement in her community, I analyzed Dickinson’s “Master Letters” to examine her theorized romance. This paper asserts that Dickinson’s poetry was shaped just as much by her increasing isolation as it was by her love-struck escapades.

I am a Genius! Influence of Virtually Embodying Leonardo da Vinci on Creative Performance.

Virtual reality (VR) provides users with the ability to substitute their physical appearance by embodying virtual characters (avatars) using head-mounted displays and motion-capture technologies. Previous research demonstrated that the sense of embodiment toward an avatar can impact user behavior and cognition. In this paper, we present an experiment designed to investigate whether embodying a well-known creative genius could enhance participants' creative performance. Following a preliminary online survey (N = 157) to select a famous character suited to the purpose of this study, we developed a VR application allowing participants to embody Leonardo da Vinci or a self-avatar. Self-avatars were approximately matched with participants in terms of skin tone and morphology. 40 participants took part in three tasks seamlessly integrated in a virtual workshop. The first task was based on a Guilford's Alternate Uses test (GAU) to assess participants' divergent abilities in terms of fluency and originality. The second task was based on a Remote Associates Test (RAT) to evaluate convergent abilities. Lastly, the third task consisted in designing potential alternative uses of an object displayed in the virtual environment using a 3D sketching tool. Participants embodying Leonardo da Vinci demonstrated significantly higher divergent thinking abilities, with a substantial difference in fluency between the groups. Conversely, participants embodying a self-avatar performed significantly better in the convergent thinking task. Taken together, these results promote the use of our virtual embodiment approach, especially in applications where divergent creativity plays an important role, such as design and innovation.

Becoming a Creative Genius

The increasing complexity of society's sustainability issues requires new educational approaches that facilitate transversal skills and competencies suitable for the 21st century. Students must be equipped with discipline-specific expertise or technical skill; but also competencies to collaborate across disciplines in creating innovative solutions to complex problems. This paper explores whether a problem-based learning environment focusing on creativity facilitates transdisciplinary engagement and creative competencies and to what extent this manifests into transdisciplinary career paths and creative mindsets in a life-long learning perspective. An analysis of interviews with graduates from a transdisciplinary program, Creative Genius, at Aalborg University indicates that a pedagogical approach focusing on the embodiment of creative competencies helps prepare students to transition from student to professional and equip them to engage in transdisciplinary and complex problem-solving in industry and society. Based on the results, the paper proposes a model for creative transdisciplinary thinking and suggests a focus on creative self-efficacy as an essential learning outcome in transdisciplinary PBL environments.

Drama and Narration: The Architecture of Psychoanalytic Play

ABSTRACT Beginning with a fantasy interview with Donald Winnicott and William Shakespeare – one in which Winnicott espouses the essential nature of play in psychoanalysis – he then joins Shakespeare in finding a promising set of ideas for psychoanalytic play. These ideas arise out of Shakespeare’s theatrical, play-full world of drama and narrative. Both these sets of ideas then build upon an epistemology based on an information theory of change in psychoanalytic therapy – one which asserts that change is a constant in every living system, and therefore the field of every session of therapy. Thus, in every developing psychotherapy, there becomes an emerging, often unknown “architecture” involving what is ceaselessly changing. This quality of change preserves some basis of order in any treatment (e.g. 1st Order Change). In effect, it is responsible for “keeping the system the ‘same.’” 1st Order Change involves the often unwitting “premises” upon which aspects of both the treatment narrative and drama are organized. It contrasts to a different kind of change (2nd Order Change) which radically changes some of the organizing assumptions (“premises”) of the therapy. 2nd Order Change typically emerges in an unwitting, unpredictable manner, catching both analytic participants by surprise. In other articles over the past two decades, the author has described this in terms of theory about improvisation. Optimizing the creative genius of such moments of play, requires that therapists immerse themselves in the field, in a non-presumptive “bottom-up” phenomenological experiential manner in contrast to the historical “top-down” “prejudices” that the history of theory and practice – within psychoanalysis and from without – often dictate, in terms of what becomes searched for and interpreted. Two case illustrations examine what can emerge when unwitting, unpredictable, preconscious moments of improvising emerge, with unpredictable aspects in entities such as character, narrative, script and so forth. This broad coalescence of ideas leads to the creation of moments of the “heretofore unimaginable” rather than what seems more like the expectable and predictable 1st Order Change world orders most treatments.

Characterizing the visualization design space of distant and close reading of poetic rhythm.

Metrical and rhythmical poetry analysis is founded on the systematic statistical analysis and comparison of sonic devices (e.g., rhythmic patterns) that emerge from a combination of pre-established aesthetic and structural rules and the poet's abilities and creative genius to convey a given message adhering to the said constraints. These rhythmical patterns, which have been traditionally obtained by means of a careful close reading of the poems, in a process known as "scansion," can now be obtained and made visible by automatic means. However, the visualization literature is still scarce on approaches that allow an insightful close and distant reading of the rhythmical patterns in a poetry corpus. In this work, we report our initial efforts in characterizing of the visualization design space of distant and close reading of poetic rhythm. By employing a digital version of a corpus of 11,268 verses originally written by the Spanish poet and playwright Federico García-Lorca (1898-1936), we could craft several prototypical visualizations representative of the inherent complexity of the problem which we expect to employ in future user studies and that we share here with the rest of the community to foster further discussion around this interesting topic.

Orchestrating Human-Machine Designer Ensembles during Product Innovation

Product innovation increasingly involves both human designers (engineers, developers, lead users, creative geniuses, and other innovators) and machine designers (algorithmically organized software tools that autonomously collect and interpret data to make innovative design decisions). This article provides practical guidance about how firms can leverage different forms of machine designers in tandem with human designers to fundamentally change the way they engage in product innovation. It describes how successful companies have managed to optimally orchestrate the capabilities of human and machine designers to create both effective and ethical product innovations that were previously unthinkable.