CREATIVITY, THE MAGIC SYNTHESIS
The stages of creativity:
A. Primary: (Right brain) - a non-judgmental, non-disciplined playing with images, symbols, inner expressions of our inner lives. (Memory, traces of past perceptions, subjective experiences and impressions). Images are the "first germ of creativity" and give birth to intuition and empathy.
B. Secondary: (Left brain) - corresponds to conscious cognition or to Aristotelian logic - a process of choosing, deciding and putting order and form into our imaginings.
C. Tertiary: The marriage - the sum of the other processes which is greater than the sum of the parts; and the ability to differentiate SIMILARITIES from manifold experience.
D. Fourth: The artist knows he is an artist when another person says honestly "You have touched me" or "You have named my experience". In this way all energy becomes connected again and the artist's ultimate vocation, to return energy to the universe by way of transformed matter, is accomplished.
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A classical creativity description is the following 4 stage process (source: Joseph Wallas):
Preparation - all the preliminary analysis,
thinking;
Incubation - letting the project 'cook', sleeping
on it (maybe for years);
Illumination - the insight/hunch/intuition and feeling (perhaps seeing inductive similarities to other processes or systems which could work);
Verification - critical evaluation by the innovator
and others of his work.
(Jung would suggest that, in the 3rd stage - for the visionary, the "solution" does not originate in the lessons of life but from timeless depth - the collective unconscious).
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Nine
socio-cultural creativogenic factors:
1.
Availability of cultural means.
2.
Openness to cultural stimuli.
3.
Stress on 'becoming' and not just on 'being'.
4.
Free access to all cultural media for all citizens, without discrimination.
5.
Freedom (or at least minimal discrimination after earlier severe
oppression/exclusion).
6.
Exposure to different or even contrasting cultural stimuli.
7.
Tolerance for diverging views.
8.
Interaction of significant persons.
9.
Promotion of incentives and rewards.
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Twelve
basic characteristics of creative people
(source: Frank Barron)
1. They are more observant.
2. They express only part-truths.
3. In addition to seeing things as others
do, they see things others do not.
4. They are independent in their cognitive
faculties, which they value highly.
5. They are motivated by their talent and
values.
6. They are more capable of
holding many ideas at once, and comparing more ideas, hence making a richer
synthesis.
7. They have more sexual drive
and are more vigorous from a physical point of view, and more sensitive (Arieti
qualifies this point, noting examples of many creative people who were not robust).
8. They have more complex lives and see a
more complex universe.
9. They become more aware of
unconscious motives and fantasy life.
10.
They have strong egos that permit them to regress and then return to normality.
11. They allow the distinction between subject and object to disappear
for certain periods of time, as in love and mysticism.
12. The objective freedom of their organism is at a maximum, and their creativity
is a function of objective freedom.
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Attitudes
and conditions for fostering creativity:
1.
Aloneness: the ability to be alone for a few hours, so as to listen to
one's inner self, to come in contact with one's basic resources and with some
manifestations of the primary right brain process. (It is highly doubtful that an original idea came from a team).
2.
Inactivity: too much routine stifles mental activity. Periodic rest is
necessary.
3.
Daydreaming: a source of fantasy life that may open up the new realms of growth and discovery.
4.
Free Thinking: not free-association, but rather allowing one's mind to
roam in an unrestrained, unorganized way.
5.
One should Be in a State of Readiness for Catching Similarities -
"synectics" - the drawing together of different, apparently
irrelevant elements.
6.
Gullibility: similar as in brainstorming, ruling out self-criticism of
ideas and insights and suspending judgment for a certain period of time; a
willingness to explore everything; to be open, naive, innocent before
rejecting anything. One is gullible
only to the extent of not discarding insights indiscriminately. One's final acceptance or rejection
of an insight would depend on one's
secondary-process (left-brain) mechanisms.
7.
Remembrance and inner replaying of past traumatic events: the creative
person must be able to transcend his own subjective involvement or his work
will not have universal significance or general resonance. Conflict and its resolution are important as
motivation and for content. [An analogy to the Buddhist Vipassana process of
detachment of emotion from memory experience for insight.]
8.
Alertness and Discipline: to enable the individual to maintain
sufficient
awareness
to recognize the creative 'key'.
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Endocepts
(endo = Greek "inside") are cognitions which occur without
representation - not expressed in images, words, thoughts or actions of
any kind - an internal, private occurrence - distinguished from concepts (representations
which can be expressed to other people).
Endocepts are non-verbal, unconscious or preconscious cognitions - the
Primary process; concepts of everyday reality would be the Secondary process;
the Tertiary process could result, creatively, in accordance with Systems
Theory processes ("seeing" patterns/similarities, systematically).
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The
limitations of one's consciousness do not limit the severity of one's
conscience. Eg. Oedipus Rex can be said
to portray the relation between good and evil, or between truth and illusion
(or knowledge and ignorance). Oedipus
commits evil because HE DOES NOT KNOW: he does not know that he is the killer
of his father and he is the husband of his own mother - when he discovers the
truth, he has to pay the penalty - he gives up the throne and blinds
himself. Since he would not
"see" in a more abstract way, he feels he doesn't deserve to see.
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In
the case of major discoveries (Newton: apple/moon -- gravity), the concept of the new class is much more
important than the recognition of a similarity: but the a priori mental
grasping of the similarity is necessary to evoke the concept of class at the
conscious level.
Perception
is a mysterious phenomenon, inasmuch as it transforms a physical event (the
stimulus) into a subjective experience.
It permits a conversion of matter to psyche. Further, the psyche mirrors matter. In visualization imagery we have a related phenomenon even when
the stimulus is absent. The image is a
(creative) mirror of another mirror (perception).
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Three
basic modes of operation determine and structure our knowledge of the world:
1. determines
what IS and what IS NOT (it abstracts unities and groups from the manifold of
the universe).
2. identifies
by discovering similarities, or correspondences, and thereby permitting class
formation (it abstracts the similarities between different unities).
3. infers
the NOT-given from the given, and this inference (abstraction) leads to
symbolization. These modes (i.e. the
structures of time and space) have to be "learned" by evolution
itself from the external environment and then evolution transmits them from
generation to generation. The modes
happen to fit the world because the hereditary depositories of our mental
functions were selected for their evolutionary fitness. Whatever mutation or mental structure did
not fit was dropped from genetic transmission.
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The
creative person remains the keeper of the secret of what makes his personality creative
- a secret he cannot reveal to himself or to others. What is not a secret is
how it (creativity) unfolds, reaches conclusion, and what conditions facilitate
its occurrence.
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