Creativity (56 page)

Temperamental differences may be responsible, however, for why two persons exposed to the same domain will choose different aspects of it to work in, or why one will approach it in a reductionistic mode, while the other will have a more holistic approach.

Pierre Bourdieu.
The influential notion of “cultural capital” was developed by this French sociologist (Bourdieu 1980).

In the 1960s.
The changes in the kind of personality that art teachers thought was appropriate for art students, and the effect this had on art students, are described in Getzels and Csikszentmihalyi (1976).

The personality of artists
(and creative individuals in general). Scholars (including the present one) have tried to describe the personality traits peculiar to creative people, and some of their conclusions are to a certain extent valid, at least within our particular historical context. It is likely that such traits as sensitivity, openness to experience, self-sufficiency, lack of interest in social norms and social acceptance, and—for artists—a tendency toward manic depression might be useful in increasing the likelihood that the person will try to innovate in his or her domain (e.g., Albert
and Runco 1986; Andreasen 1987; Barron 1969, 1988; Cattell and Drevdahl 1955; Cross, Cattell, and Butcher 1967; Csikszentmihalyi and Getzels 1973; Getzels and Csikszentmihalyi 1968, 1976; MacKinnon 1964; Piechowski and Cunningham 1985; Roe 1946, 1952). However, I am now convinced that such unipolar traits are less accurate in describing the personality of creative individuals than the dialectical notion of complexity.

Complexity.
The concept of complexity is central to many of my previous writings, especially
The Evolving Self
(Csikszentmihalyi 1993). In this context I am using the term in a similar but much more
restricted sense, without the extensive theoretical implications I usually intend it to convey. The flexible, adaptive personality style it describes shares similarities with other traits described by psychologists, but it is not identical with any of them. For example, Jack Block’s concept
of ego resiliency
(Block 1971, 1981), which includes a tendency toward adaptability and resourcefulness, could be seen as very similar; however, ego-resilient people are strong on one-dimensional traits such as integrity, dominance, and self-acceptance, which might not be the best way to d
escribe creative individuals who are also prone at times to insecurity and self-doubt.

Previous researchers have often attributed seemingly contradictory traits to creative people, such as “openness to experience” and “preference for challenge and complexity” (e.g., Russ 1993, p. 12). But these traits are seen as separate, or orthogonal to each other, instead of representing variations along a continuum. Closer to my notion of complexity is Dennett’s (1991) view of consciousness, and Ornstein’s (1986) concept of “multimind,” or the brain’s tendency to integrate separate and often conflicting neural sequences, thus often producing incongruent or contradictory thoughts
and actions within the same person. Perhaps creative individuals, for whatever reason, are more prone to accept and to leverage this feature of the mind.

Carl Gustav Jung.
See, for instance, Jung (1969, 1973).

Longitudinal studies.
The first longitudinal study of exceptionally gifted children was conducted by Lewis M. Terman at Stanford University, who followed the vicissitudes of one thousand children with very high IQs throughout their lives, a study that is still being continued. See, for instance, Terman (1925), Oden (1968), and Sears (1980) for the outcomes of these investigations.

Later studies.
Jacob W. Getzels and Philip Jackson (1962) were the first to compare children who scored high on IQ tests but not on creativity tests with children who scored high on creativity tests but not on IQ tests; they found that the two groups were quite different. For example, the high IQ children were more conventional and extrinsically motivated, while the highly creative ones were more rebellious and intrinsically motivated. As one might expect, teachers preferred the first kind. More recent work on this topic is summarized by Westby and Dawson (1995).

Howard Gardner
(1993) studied seven exemplary creative geniuses of this century.

The distinction between
convergent
and
divergent
thinking was first made by J. P. Guilford, the pioneer in the modern psychological study of creativity, who claimed that divergent thinking was peculiar
to creativity, and who developed the first tests to measure it, which are still being used (Guilford 1950, 1967). Paul Torrance subsequently contributed greatly to the measurement of divergent thinking (Torrance 1988); for recent reviews of the relationship between divergent thinking and creativity, see Baer (1993) and Runco (1991).

Vasari.
The first set of biographical sketches of artists was written by this Florentine historian (who was also a decent artist himself). One strength of his work is that Vasari (1550) knew personally many of the Renaissance artists whose lives he chronicled.

A recent issue of
Newsweek
. For the article on John Reed, see Levinson (1994).

Extroversion and introversion.
This polarity is one of the oldest in personality psychology. It was initially adopted by C. G. Jung, and is now considered one of the five basic traits along which individuals differ. The major work on this concept was done by the German-British psychologist Hans J. Eysenck (1952, 1973), and current systematic studies of extroversion and introversion have been influenced by the research of Costa and McCrae (1978, 1984).

Teens who can tolerate being alone.
For a recent account of the difference it makes to the development of talented teenagers whether they ca
n stand solitude, see Csikszentmihalyi, Rathunde, and Whalen (1993).

Androgyny.
There is ample evidence that talented and creative individuals show traits usually associated with the opposite sex, and express the traits of their own sex less strongly than the average person. In my own work, such findings were reported in Getzels and Csikszentmihalyi (1976) and in Csikszentmihalyi, Rathunde, and Whalen (1993). See also Spence and Helmreich (1978). It is likely that this tendency is responsible for the currency of rumors about the homosexuality of creative individuals like Leonardo and Michelangelo. Such attributions are always difficult, because they rely heav
ily on interpretation and often project current meanings on behaviors that in the past had a very different significance. Although there might be a tendency toward homosexuality for creative persons in some fields under certain sociocultural conditions, the currently widespread belief that the two are linked is probably exaggerated.

Psychopathology and addictions
in artists and writers. See, for instance, the recent reports by Andreasen (1987), Claridge (1992), Cropley (1990), Jamison (1989), and Rothenberg (1990). Despite the clear relationship one finds nowadays between some forms of creativity and some forms of pathology, I am convinced that this is an accidental rather than an essential connection. In other words, if creative
musicians are often addicted to drugs and playwrights tend to get clinically depressed, this is more a reflection of the historical conditions in which they have to work than of the work itself. This was, to a certain extent, also the argument of the psychoanalysts Ernst Kris (1952) and John Gedo (1990). Certainly many great artists seem to have avoided psychopathology, and even enjoyed superior mental health: for instance, writers Chekhov, Goethe, and Manzoni; composers Bach, Handel, and Verdi; and visual artists Monet, Raphael, and Rodin.

C
HAPTER
4

The creative process.
As the statement by Galvin illustrates, the way in which creative results come about can be approached from two main directions. The first asks the “how” question (in this case,
anticipation
), which focuses on the mental, or cognitive, steps that lead to novel outcomes through the framing of new questions. Most research on creativity takes this approach. The second direction asks the “why” question (in Galvin’s terms,
commitment
), which deals with the affect and the motivation that drives a person to innovate. Outside of psychoanalytic writers, few scholars have taken this
approach, even though everyone agrees about its importance. I feel uneasy about drawing too sharp a distinction between the cognitive and the motivational aspects of creativity (or any other mental process). It seems to me that the two are so closely intertwined that to separate them sharply interferes with a real understanding of what is going on. This was the crux of my disagreement with Herbert Simon, who believes that a rational, computer-modeled sequence of thought adequately represents actual historical creative processes, which, in my opinion, are largely arational (e.g., C
sikszentmihalyi 1988b; Simon 1988).

The steps of the creative process.
The demarcation of the cognitive steps involved in the production of novelty (i.e., the “how” of creativity) was first clearly formulated by Wallas (1926). Some scholars recognize three steps (i.e., preparation, incubation, insight), while others mention as many as five (i.e., preparation, incubation, insight, evaluation, elaboration).

Another relevant concept is that of
intuition
, or the “vague anticipatory perception that orients creative work in a promising direction” (Policastro 1995, p. 99), a process that presumably takes place between the phases of incubation and insight.

1 percent inspiration.
European colleagues tell me that the quip about creativity being 99 percent perspiration was first made by the German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who died fifteen years before Thomas Edison was born. I could not substantiate this claim, but
even though Goethe has said many insightful things about creativity, it seems to me that this particular aphorism fits Edison’s mentality better.

Darwin.
Howard Gruber has written the classic account of the psychology of Darwin’s creative process, based on a close analysis of the notebooks in which Darwin recorded his thoughts as they unfolded throughout his active life (Gruber 1981).

Dyson’s role
in the development of quantum electrodynamics is discussed in the recent book by Schweber (1994), who argues that Dyson should have shared the Nobel Prize awarded to Tomonaga, Schwinger, and Feynman in 1965.

Notebooks.
It is not only writers who keep diaries and notebooks of daily experiences. Scientists also keep lab notes or other records that will help them to think through their findings and ideas. A perhaps extreme example is the virologist D. Carleton Gajdusek, who was awarded the 1976 Nobel Prize in physiology and medicine, whose notebooks cover about 600,000 single-spaced typewritten pages, a third of which has already been published (Gajdusek 1995).

“Do you know a novel about happiness?”
There is a good short story by Italo Calvino, “The Adventure of a Poet,” on the theme of how
difficult it is to write about happiness (Calvino 1985). It is true that the world literature is filled with tragedies, while the opposite of tragedy—i.e., the story of a deserving person getting his or her just dues—exists only in Horatio Alger-type narratives that fail to make the grade as great literature. (There are, however, great comedies.) My impression for why this is so is that the situation might be the opposite of what Tolstoy said, that happiness is repetitive and unhappiness unique. Happiness is such a private and idiosyncratic experience that it is almost impossible to communi
cate it, and the writer must resort to trite clichés to describe it. On the other hand, unhappiness is so pervasive and uniform that everyone can immediately recognize it, so the writer is freed up to use style and imagination to embroider on unhappy themes, confident that the reader will be able to empathize with the subject.

Studies of creative scientists.
Ann Roe (1951, 1953) was among the first psychologists to study creative scientists, mostly from a motivational perspective (the “why” question). Another classic investigator in the same vein has been Bernice Eiduson (Eiduson 1962). The French mathematician Jacques Hadamard wrote a classic account of the cognitive aspects of creativity in his domain (Hadamard 1949), and the biochemist Hans Adolf Krebs, whose research explained how living organisms produce energy, described the creative process in physiology and medicine (Krebs and Shelly 1975). Sev
eral scientists have left excellent accounts of their working methods, including some of
those who took part in this study; for example, Freeman Dyson, Gerald Holton, John Wheeler, and E. O. Wilson.

Wars are notorious for affecting the direction of science.
Dean Keith Simonton is the psychologist who has done the most extensive surveys of the relationship between historical conditions, such as wars and other forms of conflict, and creativity. His historiographical methods are based on the secondary analysis and compilation of thousands of historical facts on the one hand, and frequencies of creative productivity (e.g., books, musical compositions, inventions) on the other. See, for instance, Simonton (1990b). For a slightly different approach, which looks at the relation
between forms of political power and creativity, see Therivel (1995).

Twentieth century.
The history of creativity in the twentieth century is well illustrated by Howard Gardner’s biographical account of seven representative geniuses of our times (Gardner 1993).

Presented and discovered problems.
The psychologist Jacob W. Getzels, my mentor in graduate school, became impressed by the many accounts of creative individuals that emphasized the importance
of problem finding
—as opposed to
problem solving
—in the creative process. He then developed a model of problem formulation based on the distinction between discovered and presented problems (Getzels 1964). The model was further elaborated and applied to research with creative artists (e.g., Getzels 1975, 1982; Getzels and Csikszentmihalyi 1976). This perspective has become a useful one for studyi
ng creativity; see, for instance, the recent collection of studies edited by Runco(1994).