Psychologist Rollo May explains the classic Greek conception of the “daimonic” or darker side of our being (unlike the demonic, which is merely destructive) is “as much concerned with creativity as with negative reactions.

“The daimonic model considers both creativity on one side, and anger and rage on the other side, as coming from the same source. That is, constructiveness and destructiveness have the same source in human personality. The source is simply human potential.”

[From his foreword to psychologist Stephen A. Diamond's book "Anger, Madness, and the Daimonic: The Psychological Genesis of Violence, Evil, and Creativity," from my interview with Dr. Diamond: The Psychology of Creativity: redeeming our inner demons.]

The archetype or character of the Evil Genius is enduring in both real life, of course, and in literature and movies, such as the animated feature Megamind (2010), about a supervillain who battles society and the ‘good’ superhero Metro Man.

The Wikipedia page on Mad Scientist notes, “Though the archetypes often overlap, a mad scientist need not be an evil genius. Some mad scientists are simply scientists who have become obsessively involved with their studies and so have begun to develop eccentricities beyond normal standards and tolerances; evil geniuses, on the other hand, are geniuses that use their gift for clearly expressed consciously evil purposes.”

Creativity researcher James Kaufman notes that creativity and intellect are not simply “pure” and only virtuous.

He asks : “Is Hannibal Lecter creative? Was Adolf Hitler creative? How about Ted Bundy, Voldemort, Charles Manson, Vito Corleone, Jesse James, Lizzie Borden, or that guy who used to pick on you in the sixth grade?

“If creativity is seen as having an inherent moral component to it, then these people cannot be creative. If to be a creative person is to be a good person, then it’s hard to argue that Josef Stalin or John Wilkes Booth were particularly creative.”

He adds, “Indeed, Robert Sternberg has written about how both Stalin and Hitler still have followers today, showing that their ideas have ‘lived on’ and borne the test of time – one hallmark for determining if someone is ‘Big C.’ It is the lack of morality needed for lasting creativity that has led Sternberg to argue for the equal importance of wisdom.”

Kaufman says that in discussing mental illness and creativity, “the ‘creativity’ part is often assumed to be good – indeed, some of the evolutionary work argues that creativity is the reason why mental illness persists; being imaginative is supposedly enough of an advantage to outweigh the detriments of mental illness.

“Yet malevolent creativity (and emotional intelligence) can be harmful and evil in their own right.”

From his post: Gandhi, Bill Gates, and… Hannibal Lecter?: Creativity and Emotional Intelligence in all the Wrong Places.

Malevolent creativity and negative creativity

In a newer piece about his book The Dark Side of Creativity, Kaufman writes he was thinking about the difference “between malevolent creativity and negative creativity. Negative creativity, a concept by noted industrial/organizational psychologists Keith James and Karla Clark, can also encompass creative acts characterized by bad intents.

“But it can also refer to bad outcomes that come out of good or neutral intent. It is one thing to have someone be creative about how to kill someone; it’s another thing to have someone creatively cut corners to make a cheaper house – and then see it collapse and kill someone.”

[From his post Too much novelty, not enough appropriateness.]

Author Jonathan Plucker comments about The Dark Side of Creativity: “Indeed, in this age of corruption, financial meltdowns, and technological advances that outstrip our ability to understand them, are there more important topics in the study of creativity than ethics, unintended consequences, and potentially negative outcomes of creativity and innovation? I think not.”

James C. Kaufman and Jonathan A. Plucker are authors of Essentials of Creativity Assessment.

Other books by Kaufman include: The Psychology of Creative Writing and Creativity 101.

[Photo: Anthony Hopkins as Hannibal Lecter - from The shadow self : page 2.]

developing creativity, creative potential, creative personality type, creative experience characteristics, psychology of creativity, creative mind

In the movie Black Swan, the ballerina Nina Sayers (played by Natalie Portman) is asked by the director to “lose herself” in the role of the black swan in the ballet Swan Lake.

During the course of fully immersing herself in the role, she experiences visual hallucinations, lesbian sexual fantasies that she thinks are real, and paranoid delusions.

Many of the hallucinations involve images of her self, as she represents her self.

As Dr. Steve Lamberti notes, Nina experiences a number of risk factors that may have tipped her over the edge, especially if she already had a genetic vulnerability to psychosis (which it appears she had).

Lamberti is right. Nina Sayers does experience many risk factors, including the intense pressure of competition, a controlling mother, a fellow dancer who appears to be after her, and a flirtatious, aggresive director who encourages her to embrace her dark side and lose her self-control.

Add that in with a bit of ecstasy, and you have the recipe for psychosis.

As Nina drifts further and further away from reality, she is dipping deeper and deeper into her default network, unable to differentiate her self representations from actual others, and reality from fantasy.

She has become fragmented, losing touch with her protective mental functions.

From his post Black Swan, Creativity, and Artistic Expression at the Edge of Madness

~~~

The dangers of the creativity-madness conversation

When I added a link to the above post on my Facebook profile, performing arts educator Vivian Giourousis responded with these thoughtful comments about the main Scott Barry Kaufman article [used here with her permission]:

“This is an interesting article. But I am somewhat tired with the common pysch-oriented conversations which seem to express that creativity must be linked to madness. This idea (that genius and madness are one) can influence artists in a negative way.

“Linking artistic genius to madness over and over again, can have the potential of making artists believe they are inherently defective for being creatively gifted.

“Or on the other hand, an artist might feel they must some how push themselves over the edge (for example, through a destructive lifestyle) in order to create something of value. The artist, in whatever medium, is in his best form to create his absolute best work, when mind, body and soul are functioning harmoniously.

“If history provides examples of many madmen and madwomen who created genius works, we can only imagine the heights of artistic achievement they may have reached if their “madness” had been healed and health nurtured.

“I teach acting. Most of my students are very young. I do not instill this idea of “madness” in them – this idea that the greatest force of creative intensity comes through that channel. After viewing “Black Swan” in the theater, this is what I said to them: “Don’t be a black swan. Don’t be a white swan. Just don’t be a swan at all.” Great art comes when body, soul, and mind are unified and functioning at its healthiest peak.”

Vivian Giourousis :
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/i.am.VIV.G
Site: http://www.vivg.com/

Romanticizing illness is dangerous

In part of their review of the book Strong Imagination: Madness, Creativity and Human Nature (by Daniel Nettle), “Twilly” comments:

“I’m a writer with manic depression who is bothered by the way mental illness is romanticized within the writing community. So many people I know believe that writers with manic depression should not take medication because it will ‘kill’ their creativity.

“I find this attitude really offensive — not just because it is false — but also because it puts manic-depressive writers and artists in danger. I have found very few resources that adequately address this issue, very few books that explain why allowing full blown psychosis to develop is a bad idea, not just for the health of the person in question, but for his or her creativity as well. Daniel Nettle really hit this one on the head as far as I’m concerned.”

Follow the link above to the Amazon page for more interesting reviews and comments.

Another post of mine, in addition to those below: Do We Need to be Crazy to be Creative?

~~~~

See a number of related posts on TalentDevelop, in the Mental Health category, under the Psychology tab in the menu at the top.

Painter Robert Genn notes it can be “the confusion of imagination with memory, and/or the confusion of true memories with false memories.”

So what does this have to do with creativity?

Genn thinks, “Perhaps it’s only with the addition of confabulation that art delivers its wizardry and magic.”

Continued in The Creative Mind post Confabulation and Creating.

“You’ll never finish your novel.”

“You’ve wasted your life.”

“You’re too complicated. Who would ever want to be with you?”

Sometimes my inner critical voice is so clear I can argue with it. Most of the time, the negativity I wreak upon myself  is unconscious and harder to fight.

Lisa Firestone and Eric Maisel provide some tips on getting aware of and stopping the onslaught.

A threat to self-actualization

Lisa Firestone, Ph.D. describes the critical inner voice in very strong terms :

“[A]n internal enemy and may be thought of as a threat to self-actualization and self-fulfillment.

It tends to foster inwardness, distrust, self-criticism, self-denial and limitation, addictions, and a generalized retreat from one’s goal-directed activity.”

She is co-author of the book Conquer Your Critical Inner Voice

Here are some of the messages related in the book, collected in counseling sessions:

“You’re just a quiet creep — you’re second class. You’re just worthless. You’re not fit to be around people. You should be quiet and just stay in the background. What makes you think you’re different? You’re just a crazy, scummy person.”

The book presents a series of steps to help uncover and counter these kinds of criticisms:

Step One: Identifying What Your Critical Inner Voice is Telling You

In order to challenge their negative attacks, people must first become aware of what their critical inner voice is telling them.

They can do this by identifying an area of their lives where they are especially critical of themselves and then pay attention to what the criticisms are.

As a person discovers what the self-attacks are, it is valuable to articulate them in the second person, as “you” statements.

For example, instead of saying “I feel so lazy and useless,” a person would say “You are so lazy. You’re useless.”

When people utilize this format in voice therapy, they are encouraged to express their critical thoughts as they hear or experience them, and this often leads to them accessing the hostility that underlies this self-attacking system.

Step Two: Recognizing Where Your Voices Come From

After people verbalize their critical inner voices in this manner, they often feel deeply, and they have insight into the source of their voice attacks.

They have unusual clarity, as they begin to recognize that the content and tone of their voice attacks is old and familiar; their voices are expressing attitudes that were directed toward them as children.

They will often say things like, “That’s what my father used to say” or “That’s the feeling I got from my mother,” or “That was the atmosphere in my home.”

Recognizing where their voices originated helps people develop compassion for themselves.

From article Steps to Overcoming Your Critical Inner Voice, by Lisa Firestone, Ph.D.

It has to make sense

Eric Maisel, PhD says:

“In order to eliminate self-criticism, it has to make sense to you to eliminate self-criticism.

“As long as you hold it as sensible to criticize yourself for making this or that big mistake or for failing yourself in this or that big way, you will continue to criticize yourself.”

He adds:

“The alternative to self-criticism isn’t denial or a merry relinquishment of power and control.”

Continued in his article: Silencing Self-Criticism.

Eric Maisel is author of the book Toxic Criticism.

He is also author of The Meaning Solution Program.

Photo: 84/365: Resolutions. by practicalowl

~~

critical inner voice, dealing with self sabotage, self-awareness, using self-criticism

One of the things that intrigued me in the story below is the symptom of “word salad” – which the Wikipedia page on Schizophasia explains is “confused, and often repetitious, language that is symptomatic of various mental illnesses.”

[The image is a piece embroidered by a schizophrenic patient at the Glore Psychiatric Museum.]

But the page also points out that the phrase “Satan, oscillate my metallic sonatas” and the phrase “Acute does runs shaky lovely very” may be “authentic schizophasias (one grammatically correct, the other not) if they are produced as a result of mental disease or defect.

“In contrast, intentionally producing nonsense, as in the contrived palindrome ‘Satan, oscillate my metallic sonatas’ is not considered schizophasia.

“Schizophasia refers to a defect in processing and organizing language, as opposed to the ability to create a nonsense word which happens to conform to a very specific set of rules.”

Dada Poetry and nonsense literature like Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky” use words “for their sound, cadence, and alliteration; with no concern for meaning.”

And the constructions are made by presumably sane people.

So, my interest in word salad probably started in the 1960s as an undergrad psych student, when I had the experience of volunteering to visit a back ward (considered hopeless) of schizophrenic women at Boston State Hospital.

One woman in particular intrigued me, who spoke pretty non-stop (when she wasn’t preparing a cigarette from loose tobacco rolled in fresh toilet paper), in a stream of phrases that may have had meaning for her, but not to other people. She would pause sometimes when I asked her a question, but didn’t converse.

The following is a story from her book Pregnant Darkness: Alchemy and the Rebirth of Consciousness, by Jungian Analyst Monika Wikman [site].

As a young man, Andrew entered medical school in the 1970s with a freight-load of family expectations on him to become a doctor, like one of his parents. He went straight from college to medical school, unlike many of the other students. The difficulty of the family expectations and the intensity of the work, added to his being young and without much adult identity formed yet, led him to a breakdown.

The divorce of his parents when he was younger also had terribly split the family, and he suffered trying to keep love going with both of them.

When he got to medical school the pressure without the foundation of love and steadiness in his life pushed him near the abyss and when he fell, he fell hard and ended up in a psychiatric clinic for a time.

Having lost all words and registering nothing, he fell into an enormous silence. One of the social workers there, who had tremendous heart and soul, kept a special eye on this young man. When he began to speak in unintelligible “word salad” without coming back to normal connection and conversation, the red flags went up.

Would he ever make it back to himself and his life? The social worker took him outside for walks, kindly taking Andrew by the arm and walking with him along the garden path surrounding the facility. Late one night they went for a walk in the dark to a spot overlooking the freeway.

Andrew remembers the social worker telling him, “Andrew, there is something I have been wanting to show you. Here you see, we do things strangely, and when you return, you will as well.

“See the lights that go in lines, one after another, following the way of the road? The red lights form a line of the cars going that way, and the white lights form a line of the cars going this way.

“This is how thoughts work here among us humans; they go in lines, just like this, and follow a single road. When you come back, you will learn to do this, too.

“It is not necessarily better than where you are; in fact it may be less interesting. It is just something that happens here.”

Later that week, Andrew was in his bed when the team of psychiatrists and social workers stopped to visit. He had a pad of paper and wanted very badly to communicate. He began to write in word salad in a desperate attempt to communicate.

The social worker picked it up, with the team present, and said, “I can’t understand a word you are saying, but Andrew, you sure have great handwriting!”

With that embracing comment, the team laughed out loud, and as Andrew laughed out loud, too, and joined in with them, the spell broke and his linear thoughts returned.

He has communicated just fine ever since. Besides becoming a doctor, he developed a tremendous love for music and plays professionally – communicating movingly out of the nonlinear, passionate side of himself. He continued over the years to work with a caring psychologist to integrate his experiences and heal.

~~~

Lower photo: Greenpeace UK/Steve Morgan

mental health and talent, mental health and ability, talent and mental illness, self-actualization and mental illness

The Red Book is a new publication of Carl Jung’s journals and explorations into his soul and psyche.

More on that later, but first – two artists talk about using their subconscious for creative inspiration.

A magazine profile of the highly acclaimed cable series “Mad Men” and its creator Matthew Weiner describes how much he uses his inner life as inspiration for the show, as he did for his writing on “The Sopranos.”

“Whatever Weiner’s demons, they work for him,” the Vanity Fair article by Bruce Handy notes.

“To hear the show’s writers discuss Weiner’s creative process, it’s almost as if the Mad Men world and its ongoing narratives exist fully formed somewhere deep in the recesses of Weiner’s mind, tangible but elusive, like dreams half remembered upon waking.

“He retrieves fragments and shards and brings them into the writers’ room, to use as building blocks for larger dramas.

“There is some of it that is, frankly, mysterious,” said Lisa Albert, a writer-producer who has been with the series for all three seasons.

“Like, Matt will have an image in his mind, and he’s not sure why, and we sit around and talk about it and try and figure out why this thing keeps coming in his mind.”

“She and the other writers mentioned an image of a beautiful cracked glass that Weiner kept seeing, which eventually prompted a key moment in the second-season episode where Don, on a business trip in Los Angeles, takes off with some jet-setters for a seductive but unsettling lark in Palm Springs.

“In the recounting, it sounded as if nearly the entire episode grew from the seed of that initial image (with the added fertilizer of a book of Slim Aarons photos given to Weiner by someone he had met on a plane).

“I count on my subconscious to be consistent,” Weiner told me.

“And how that works I have no f***ing idea, and I don’t even want to investigate it. Because if I lose that I have nothing to say.”

From Don and Betty’s Paradise Lost, Vanity Fair September 2009.

An NPR interview reported that actress Lili Taylor “was diagnosed with bipolar disorder in high school, though she was not medicated.

Her therapist suspected Taylor’s symptoms might disappear once she found an outlet for her creative energies — which is exactly what happened, Taylor says.

“As her acting career developed, Taylor continued seeing a therapist. ‘I kind of look at it like an expensive conversation,’ she says. ‘I use my therapist a lot with my characters.’

“Taylor is particularly influenced by the work of Carl Jung. A founding father of modern psychology, Jung developed the theory of the collective unconscious, and proposed the existence of archetypal patterns that help shape personality.

“Taylor says she sometimes finds it helpful to think in terms of Jungian archetypes when she begins working on a part: ‘It’s another way of helping getting in there, because I have a whole wealth of literature to turn to if I have come up with the trickster, the villain or the great mother or the nag or whatever.’”

From Intersections: Inside the Mind of Lili Taylor – Actress Relies on Psychology to Create Memorable Characters, by Lynn Neary, NPR, 2004.

Carl Gustav Jung, the Swiss psychiatrist who founded the field of analytical or depth psychology, wrote in his book Memories, Dreams, Reflections: “In order to grasp the fantasies which were stirring in me ‘underground,’ I knew that I had to let myself plummet down into them.”

That quote comes from a New York Times article by Sara Corbett, which describes his work and the recent release of his journal The Red Book – Liber Novus, which includes many previously unknown writings and drawings by Jung, such as this one.

Corbett writes, “For about six years, Jung worked to prevent his conscious mind from blocking out what his unconscious mind wanted to show him.

“Between appointments with patients, after dinner with his wife and children, whenever there was a spare hour or two, Jung sat in a book-lined office on the second floor of his home and actually induced hallucinations — what he called ‘active imaginations.’

“He found himself in a liminal place, as full of creative abundance as it was of potential ruin, believing it to be the same borderlands traveled by both lunatics and great artists.”

The big red-leather book “detailed an unabashedly psychedelic voyage through his own mind, a vaguely Homeric progression of encounters with strange people taking place in a curious, shifting dreamscape. Writing in German, he filled 205 oversize pages with elaborate calligraphy and with richly hued, staggeringly detailed paintings.”

Journeys into the inner depths of the soul and psyche can be extremely challenging, as the article notes.

“About halfway through the Red Book — after he has traversed a desert, scrambled up mountains, carried God on his back, committed murder, visited hell; and after he has had long and inconclusive talks with his guru, Philemon, a man with bullhorns and a long beard who flaps around on kingfisher wings — Jung is feeling understandably tired and insane.

“This is when his soul, a female figure who surfaces periodically throughout the book, shows up again. She tells him not to fear madness but to accept it, even to tap into it as a source of creativity. “If you want to find paths, you should also not spurn madness, since it makes up such a great part of your nature.”

From The Holy Grail of the Unconscious, by Sara Corbett, The New York Times September 16, 2009.

Related:

Depth Psychology quotes

Depth Psychology books articles

The Shadow Self

Shadow self sites articles books

Dreamwork

article: Archetypes for Writers, by Jennifer Van Bergen

Myth & story

Inner Castles and Worlds – metaphors of self and psyche

post: Dancing with our unconscious

creative imagination, enhancing creativity, developing creativity, creative inspiration, creative experience characteristics, creative personality type, the inner artist

He points out, “Even the environment in which an organization operates is largely a function of its beliefs.

“When I do workshops for CEOs I tell them that the biggest barrier their organization faces is not in the world (competition, government, costs, etc.), but in the minds of their employees… employees will operate according to a reality consistent with their beliefs.”

From his article How To Create New Possibilities In Your Life.

Dilbert strip by Scott Adams from Dilbert.com

It isn’t a matter of freely acting on our urges or fantasies, of course. There are jails and ethics and other things to consider.

But as actor Kristin Kreuk once said, “Just because I don’t do bad things doesn’t mean I don’t have bad thoughts.”

To find our true potential, we need to know ourselves in depth, including our “bad thoughts.” One of the problems is trying to repress sides of ourselves that we think are unacceptable.

“Everyone carries a shadow,” psychologist Carl Jung wrote, “and the less it is embodied in the individual’s conscious life, the blacker and denser it is.”

In her article The Shadow Muse — Gifts of Your Dark Side, Jill Badonsky writes, “Oh, the energy we use in this society to suppress what we perceive to be our undesirable traits — our negativity, judgmental nature, and our other secret peculiarities and struggles.”

She explains, “The shadow side of a mortal provides an incredible amount of creative energy. Anger, jealousy, revenge, frustration, sadness, rejection have been conduits for so many triumphant works of writing, art, music and performance.”

The photo is Anthony Hopkins as Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs (1991). Hopkins commented about his character:

“We admire [Lecter] in a secret, perverse way. He represents the unspeakable part of ourselves, the fantasy, desires and dark areas of our lives that are slightly unacceptable to us, but actually healthy, if we only acknowledge them.

“Perhaps, we’d like to be as certain of things and as dare-devil as him.

“But admiring him doesn’t mean we’re deeply disturbed, sick people. It just means that we’re human. We’re all flawed, deeply damaged, imperfect beings. We’re corruptible, shabby, grubby, great, magnificent and all the rest of it.”

There are reverse or so-called negative aspects of many of our positive human qualities.

In her post titled The archetypes: addict, magical child, hedonist, therapist Isabella Mori provides excerpts from Carolyn Myss’ “gallery of archetypes.” Mori thinks that “most of us can recognize ourselves in one or more of these archetypes, or typical ways of being in the world” and thinks Myss “tells us about the positive as well as the shadow (some would call them negative) aspects of these archetypes.”

One of the archetypes is “Child: Magical/Innocent” — and Myss says (in A Gallery of Archetypes), “Baudelaire wrote that ‘genius is childhood recaptured,’ and in that sense the Magical Child is something of a genius too. The Magical Child is gifted with the power of imagination and the belief that everything is possible.

“The shadow energy of the Magical Child manifests as the absence of the possibility of miracles and of the transformation of evil to good. Attitudes of pessimism and depression, particularly when exploring dreams, often emerge from an injured Magical Child whose dreams were ‘once upon a time’ thought foolish by cynical adults.”

She adds, “The shadow may also manifest as a belief that energy and action are not required, allowing one to retreat into fantasy.”

That is another caution about exploring and using our shadow side – powerful imagination can be dangerously seductive, even substituting for reality.

The shadow can also be threatening and frightening.

In my interview with depth psychologist Stephen A. Diamond, Ph.D., titled The Psychology of Creativity: redeeming our inner demons, he said, “Creativity requires making use of this existential anxiety. There are two fundamental ways of responding to anxiety: avoidance or confrontation.”

He adds that anxiety can be a signal that unacceptable (daimonic) impulses conflicting with consciousness are “threatening to break through their repression. These impulsions can be profoundly threatening to our sense of identity, our ‘persona’ as Jung called it, or our egos.”

Such “unacceptable” impulses come from the dark inner territory Jung called “the shadow” – and we typically dread looking “in there” or having impulses appear unbidden.

“But if we can stand firm without running,” Diamond says, “tolerating the anxiety these unwanted visitations, these ‘close encounters’ engender, we can begin to give them form and hear what it is they want of us.

“Creativity comes from this refusal to run, this willing encounter with anxiety and what lies beyond it.”

See more quotes, books and other material on The shadow Self (page 1 of 5).

find your true potential, developing creativity, shadow self, shadow side, the unconscious, psychology of creativity, the mind’s potential, creativity and madness

“The conscious mind has: – Limited processing capacity. – Short term memory (about 20 seconds) – The ability to manage 1 to 3 events at a time -Impulses that travel at 120 to 140 mph – The ability to process an average of 2,000 bits of information per second

“Your subconscious mind is actually much more spectacular. It is frequently referred to as your spiritual or universal mind, and it knows no limits except for those that you consciously choose.”

From his article Who You Are

>Related pages:
Buddhist psychology
Depth psychology
Spirituality

Jack Canfield on consciousness, subconscious mind, positive psychology

Is creativity a universal trait?

Is creativity possible for any of us? Yes, it is a pretty dumb question, but it can be all too easy to take on some form of belief that only kids or “artists” or “professionals” can use their minds in truly creative ways.

In one of his sermons, Reverend David Herndon argues, “Some people assume that creativity is a gift, bestowed or withheld by some capricious divinity.

“But I would invite us to consider another point of view, that creativity is a talent widely distributed among human beings, a talent which can be cultivated and developed, if one understands something of how creativity works.”

Born in the unconscious

He quotes three people who know from personal experience about developing creative talent: “Whence and how [my ideas] come, I know not; nor can I force them,” said Mozart.  “The role of this unconscious work in mathematical invention appears to me incontestable,” said Poincaire.  “Because the thing has already taken form in my mind before I start on it,” said Van Gogh. Leonardo da Vinci also attested to the role of the unconscious..”

Continued in article Creative Ability Development.

Many artists and psychologists acknowledge our shadow side, or unconscious, as a source and power for creativity.

Author David Richo, in his book Shadow Dance: Liberating the Power and Creativity of Your Dark Side, quotes Carl Jung: “The shadow is the negative side of the personality, the sum of all those unpleasant qualities we like to hide, together with the insufficiently developed functions and the contents of the personal unconscious…. [The shadow] also displays a number of good qualities such as normal instincts, appropriate reactions, realistic insights, creative impulses, etc.”

Also see the pages on Depth psychology and The Shadow Self.

Collaboration

Creativity also involves going outside of ourselves.

R. Keith Sawyer, PhD, a leading expert on the science of creativity, says in his article The Hidden Secrets of the Creative Mind that one of our cultural myths about creativity is that of the lone genius.

But, he notes, “Ideas don’t magically appear in a genius’ head from nowhere. They always build on what came before. And collaboration is key. Look at what others in your field are doing. Brainstorm with people in different fields. Research and anecdotal evidence suggest that distant analogies lead to new ideas—like when a heart surgeon bounces things off an architect or a graphic designer.”

Also see more Creativity enhancement articles, as well as many books, quotes and programs on this site on how to nurture creativity growth.

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David Richo, developing creativity, unconscious book, personal growth book