Lesson 3: Historical Studies of Creativity

How has the study of creativity been approached in the past?

Early ideas about Creativity. The study of creativity has a long history in the Humanities with its roots in the mystical and spiritual. Early explanations of creative power focused on gods and demons whispering to, possessing, or entering the dreams of the creative person (see Sternberg & Lubart, 1999 for discussion).

In the ancient view, a creative person is not, in themselves, the source of the creative product but is instead a vessel for divine inspiration; Plato himself said that the poet only writes “what the Muse dictates” (Sternberg & Lubart, 1999, p.5). These muses, the 9 daughters of Zeus, presided over 9 different areas of human achievement including: love poetry, epic poetry, divine poetry, dance, music, tragedy, comedy, history, and astronomy. As a creator, your particular muse would come to you and inspire your creation to flow through you. Thus, the creative individual was viewed as a mere channel for the divine (Simonton, 2001). Similarly, the Greeks also attributed creative insight to the possession of benevolent demons (Becker, 2014).

As the field of psychology developed, psychoanalytic thinkers like Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung offered explanations of creativity based on subliminal wish fulfillment and symbolism from the unconscious.

For example, Freud analyzed several artists and innovators such as da Vinci, Dostoevsky and Michelangelo, attributing unconscious motivations to their extraordinary creativity (Irvine, 2010). According Freud’s analysis, da Vinci’s creativity could be explained as an “instinct to investigate” which is a sublimated response from childhood “sexual researches.” In addition to these researches, da Vinci’s impulse to create stems from an absent father figure in early childhood and over identification with mother, as evidenced by his many representations of the Madonna (Gay, 1989; Irvine, 2010). In another analysis, Dostoevsky wrote subconsciously about his abusive family and his death wish for his father according to Freud (Freud, 1928; Irvine, 2010). Michelangelo created his sculpture of Moses to keep his own rage in check (Irvine, 2010; The Scandinavian Psychoanalytic Review, 2014). Though these claims were important to shaping the field of Psychology, the current scientific community rarely accepts Freud’s analyses due to lack of evidence and the unfalsifiability of his claims. In Kaufman’s words “… we’re not talking heavy-duty psychological science” (pg. 3, 2009).

Another giant in the area of Psychoanalysis, Carl Jung, was introduced in Chapter 2. That section included a discussion of the difference between creating from the Psychological mode and the Visionary mode. As a psychoanalyst, Jung believed in the power of the unconscious, more specifically the collective unconscious. When an artist allowed his or her unconscious to ‘take over’ the process of creation, the result was a symbolic representation. For example, according to Jung, circles generally represent the psyche or self whereas squares represent the body, earth, and material world (Jung, & Franz, 1964). Jung was also fascinated by cryptomnesia, that is when a forgotten memory emerges without the subject’s awareness. He wrote about a section of Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra, which includes a reproduction from a book Nietzsche read as a boy of 11 (Jung, & Franz, 1964, van den Berk, 2012). For Jung, cases of cryptomnesia not only provide evidence for the unconscious, he also believed that artists experienced optimum cryptomnisia. Jung stated, “… a creative person … does not at first see the wealth of possibilities within him, although they are all lying there already. So it may easily happen that one of these still unconscious aptitudes is called awake by a ‘chance’ remark or by some other incident, without the conscious mind knowing exactly what has awakened,” (Jung, 1946, pg. 110). Thus, cryptomnesia, according to Jung, was thought to be a mechanism of creativity. Again, verifying Jung’s assertions scientifically proves difficult, so his conclusions are a subject of debate.

Modern Era of Creativity Research. Beginning in 1950, research on creativity took a more scientific turn with Guilford’s talk at the American Psychological Association conference. Since 1950, the scientific study of creativity has been important in the fields of Psychology and Education. Building on that historic talk, Guilford advanced the Structure of Intellect model (1967). According to this model, human intellect was organized along 3 cognitive dimensions

Contents: the general subject area. In the most recent model, Guilford advanced 5 contents: Visual, Auditory, Symbolic, Semantic, and Behavioral
Products: the actual products that might result from different kinds of thinking in different kinds of subject matters. Guilford advanced 6 products: Units, Classes, Relations, Systems, Transformations, and Implications
Operations: the mental processes needed to perform a Guilford advanced 5 operations: Cognition, Memory, Divergent Thinking, Convergent Thinking, and Evaluation

The most essential concept to our discussion of creativity is the operation divergent thinking, which means the ability to generate several possible solutions to a problem. This operation forms the basis of one of the most commonly creativity test, the Torrance test of creative thinking and is discussed at length below.

Another potential turning point in the study of creativity was the publication of Abraham Maslow’s Toward a Psychology of Being in 1962. Importantly, Maslow paved the way for the acknowledgement of “everyday creativity.” He writes, “the kind of creativeness I have been trying to sketch out is best exemplified by the improvisation, as in jazz or in childlike paintings, rather than by the work of art designated as ‘great’” (p. 145). Maslow, a leader in the Humanistic school of Psychology discussed previously, is famous for his hierarchy of needs (see photo below). At the top of this hierarchy is Self-actualization, or “… the desire for self-fulfillment, namely, to the tendency for him to become actualized in what he is potentially. This tendency might be phrased as the desire to become more and more what one is, to become everything that one is capable of becoming (1943, p. 382)” Maslow believed that creativity, or “creativeness” is a fundamental property of the self-actualization process and of self-actualized people in particular.

The impact of both Maslow and Guilford should not be underestimated in contemporary psychology. Maslow re-framed the connection of creativity to well-being which ignited an approach to psychology that would come to be known as Positive Psychology. Similarly, Guilford put the spotlight on the importance of creativity research as a part of Cognition. The rest of this chapter is devoted to condensing research that resulted after these 2 pioneers. Though there has been much progress, there are still extensive debates in this area of scholarship, beginning with the very definition of creativity itself. Is creativity one skill or many? Is there a difference in the cognitive processes underlying everyday creativity compared with the creativity engendered by genius? Must one be intelligent to be truly creative? In the next section, we will start by examining how creativity may be defined.

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Take 2 minutes to take some notes: Summarize the history of how creativity has been approached by thinkers:

The Greeks thought ________________________

Freud and Jung believed:________________________

Guilford advanced the idea(s) of:________________________

Maslow was important for: ________________________

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