Figure 12
Opposing traits in creativity
No one is easy to live and work with who has as many contrary characteristics and implicit tensions as does the creative person. Consequently, he may not be able to achieve his creative goals unless he learns to adopt or at least simulate the prevailing norms of civilized behavior. The scientist soon discovers that his colleagues expect him to follow a certain code of social behavior. We observe, in Stein's summary of this code, something of these expectations. They, too, carry their own intrinsic contradictions. My own pragmatic side has to agree with all of them.
The researcher is expected to be assertive without being hostile or aggressive; he must speak his mind without being domineering; he is to be aware of his superiors, colleagues, and subordinates as persons, but he is not to get too involved with them on a personal basis; with superiors he is expected to know his place without being timid, obsequious, or acquiescent. He may be a lone wolf on the job, but he is not to be isolated, withdrawn, or uncommunicative. If he is any of these, he had best be so creative that his work speaks for itself. On the job he is expected to be congenial but not sociable; off the job he is expected to be sociable but not intimate. On the job, as he tries to gain a point, more funds, or more personnel, he can be subtle but not cunning; in all relationships, he is expected to be sincere, honest, purposeful, and diplomatic, but not unwilling to accept short cuts or to be inflexible and Machiavellian; finally, in the intellectual area he is to be broad without spreading himself thin, deep without being pedantic, and "sharp" without being over-critical." It seems unlikely that any strong personality would ever succeed 100 percent in all of these areas, for if he tried, he would be busier than a chameleon in a kaleidoscope, far too occupied to be fully creative.
Hallucinogenic drugs have become so much a part of our present culture that no look at creativity today would be complete without passing mention of their pros and cons. The cons outweigh the pros by a wide margin, because the medical reasons for not using drugs are impressive enough to deter even the most curious."' Experiments in certain subjects, however, have given results that seem germane to creativity, and the findings should be noted. For example, relatively low doses of LSD or mescaline have been given to stable, responsible professionals whose usual occupations involved problem solving." These subjects were not representative, then, of habitual drug users in the usual street-scene drug culture. The volunteers were carefully prepared for the experiment and began their "trip" with a positive air of expectancy. While on the drug, their visual performance improved objectively and their ideas increased in fluency. Moreover, their subjective reports showed improvement in many other key areas essential to creativity. Inhibition and anxiety were reduced, the ability to see the whole problem and its solutions in larger perspective was increased, and new ideas poured forth. There was an increased capacity for visual imagery and fantasy, improved concentration, and enhanced empathy with other persons, external processes, and objects. Forgotten data in the unconscious became more accessible, dissimilar elements were associated in meaningful new ways, and there was a heightened appetite for elegance. Moreover, problems solved under the influence of the drugs proved to be of practical use, and the subjects reported a long-lasting plateau of enhanced creative ability for at least two weeks afterward.
On the other hand, in a different study, subjects given LSD improved only in their ability to give unique responses on word association tests, but did poorly on other tests requiring visual attention.12 Although LSD made them more open to unique associations, it did not help them narrow their attention on a more delimited perceptual field. The authors concluded that if LSD were used indiscriminately in a relatively unselected group of people, it would not be likely to enhance creative ability. Krippner concludes that psychedelics do tend to create a strong subjective feeling of creativeness, and may seem more effective in those persons already highly creative to begin with. However, while artists are still under the influence of drugs, their self-critical faculties suffer and so does their technical control.'
Certainly, no one familiar with all the other dismal escalating liabilities and uncertainties of the drug scene would wish to use LSD or other hallucinogens to enhance creativity outside of an experimental format. Few, indeed, would volunteer nowadays even in such a format. Not only do we have ample evidence that hallucinogens can, in fact, shift the perceptual performance of many subjects on tests in a direction consistent with "brain damage,"'-' but there is still no single coherent explanation of exactly how and where the drugs work in the complex circuitry of the brain.' In the interim, the actions of someone who would repeatedly use a drug to tamper with the fantastic transmitter chemistry of his own brain seems not far removed from the behavior of a person who would shoot a high voltage pulse of electricity into the wiring of his expensive color television set hoping to get a more interesting and meaningful image. The results might be more interesting for a moment, perhaps, in that they would be novel and, indeed, rapidly changing. But as a message, the results would be confusing to interpret, obscured by static, and the set might never work quite the same thereafter, for it could lose some of its fine-tuned circuitry in the process. The challenge to us, individually, and to our society, is to lead more creative lives without drugs.
The creative personality, as far as our present understanding of it is concerned, has many facets, some polished, others rough, some superficial, others deep. In a sense, the many traits considered above may be viewed as the individual brush strokes and local colors in a painting. They will define the edges and the substances of the trees, the grasses, and the clouds. But let us now turn to some deeper and more basic motivations underlying the creative temperament. For they have shaped the overall subject matter, mood, and composition of the painting from the beginning, and they will suggest its symbolic meaning.
24
Motivations Underlying Creativity
Some split between the inner world and the outer world is common to all human beings; and the need to bridge the gap is the source of creative endeavour.
Anthony Storr
It takes more than a certain kind of engine in a certain kind of chassis to make your automobile move forward; you constantly need fuel in the tank. So it is with creativity. It helps to start with a good brain and diversified experiences, but thereafter, some high-octane psychic fuel is essential. These psychic roots underlying creativity are perceptively examined by Anthony Storr, who blends psychoanalytical insights and common sense in a compelling way.'
Storr observes that we are each frustrated by the constraints of infancy and early childhood. Our dissatisfactions soon evolve into a rich fantasy world. This is not something to avoid, for from this inner world will spring the divine discontent that will compel us later to seek our symbolic satisfactions in creative achievement. Our creative efforts will help us not only to master our external world, but also to come to terms with our inner world. Children deeply imprinted by earlier experiences may well be the ones later impelled toward creative outlets.
As a young child, I was forever asking "why?" Many questions a child asks can be satisfactorily answered to some degree or other, but when I asked the question, "why is a color colored?," there were no satisfying answers. I was hung up on this question for well over a week, and I remember passionately asking others about colors at every opportunity I could get. My parents didn't know; my teachers didn't know. Nobody really knew. There was a huge information gap about colors. This lack of completeness in my knowledge made a strong imprint on my young imagination-one of the strongest I can remember.
Now shift the scene to New York City twenty years later. The fellow in neuropathology at Columbia is seated at a library table reading about how a blue dye changes color when it meets an unknown substance in tissue. At that moment, I was not aware of any connection at a conscious level between the two episodes. But while writing these lines decades later, it finally has occurred to me that the two events are lin
ked at some deeper level. Moreover, when the gap connecting the child with the neuropathology fellow was closed, the result was a high voltage circuit in terms of psychic energy. Such a moment of closure is usually unforgettable.
Motivations depend on a lot of activity blended in from many neuronal circuits: the amount of "drive" from the hypothalamus, the degree of general arousal coming from the reticular core of the brain, the "push" from internal signals that signify something is lacking, and the "pull" of external incentive stimuli.
Creative endeavor serves as a remarkably useful way to express each of our motivations even though we differ widely in temperament. It can be not only a way for us to sublimate, and a means to fulfill wishes, but also a defense against our internal anxieties. Creative activity defends against anxiety if we are introverted and of schizoid temperament, distressed by our feelings of alienation and a lack of meaning. (Einstein serves as a prototype in this regard.) If, for example, you are an introvert, and bury yourself in solitary creative activity, you relate in this way to something meaningful both to yourself and to society. At the same time, you can avoid the many problems caused by direct interpersonal relationships. In creative work, you can finally communicate on your own terms, because your work will establish your own kind of private world, one in which your own inner reality becomes more important than that of the external world. Moreover, you can overcome your own sense of the unpredictability in life through creative expressions that help structure a rational, established order of things.'
Suppose you are of manic-depressive temperament. Creative efforts provide you both recurrent boosts of self-esteem and outlets for submerged aggressive feelings which cannot be openly expressed. Indeed, a creative achievement may also help atone for the guilt involved in this type of aggression. A new work may also give you a legitimate way to rebel against parents and other authoritarian figures both in the past and present.
If you are an obsessive person, creative activity may represent a vehicle by which you can transcend tight obsessional control and escape from other rigid personal limitations. Problem solving will also afford you a constructive way to displace internal hostility. Because you have a particular need for order, logic, and symmetry you will be well equipped to discern the imperfect, to formulate better hypotheses than now exist. You, in particular, will savor the refreshment of your spontaneous, inspired moments, contrasting so sharply as they do with your other endless hours, so full of willed working over as to seem contrived. Indeed, your delight, as well as your need is to "stay loose." To you, even the need for tidiness can facilitate creativity if it serves as an introductory, ceremonial function to the task ahead and not as a time-wasting compulsion.'
Whatever our temperaments, we can be reassured that a satisfying sexual life and creative activity are not mutually incompatible, because the one does not necessarily substitute for the other. The creative adult is still impelled to create even when he enjoys a happy, fully satisfactory heterosexual relationship. He is driven to do so, in fact, because he still carries a passionate residue of dissatisfaction from his childhood, one that will not be resolved in his adult life except in symbolic ways. "It is not the suppression of adult sexuality that leads to creativity, but of its childhood precursors."' Whereas genuine love between mature adults does not interfere with creativity, a childish infatuation that promises a deceptively complete answer to life might make creative pursuits seem superfluous for a while.
Storr disposes of the notion that creativity necessarily involves a substantial love for power, fame, or honor. To him, the desire for fame is but one part of an artist's motivation; the motive is linked with the success of the art itself and not with fame for its own sake.
An important aspect of motivations is revealed in questions of scientific priority: who discovered it first? Bystanders tend to view this kind of concern solely as a personality conflict between two or more fame-seeking persons as to which will emerge with the glory in the eyes of their contemporaries or in those of posterity. This can be so obvious that it is easy to overlook another consideration. The fact is that the inner-directed creative investigator (like the composer or the artist) also defines his territory in order to establish who he is, so that he himself will clearly know. The territorial imperative in animals is clear enough, and it obviously also exists in man. But creative man is far more complex. I would propose that one aspect of what has been viewed as the territorial imperative may, in creative man, be focused as much at his internal boundary as it is externally.
The strong inner pressure to stand apart, to innovate, is exemplified by one physicist who said: "The only ideas that I will pursue are those I choose specifically because it is unlikely that anyone else would have approached them in the same way ... I'm not going to waste my time on a standard way. The other guy can do that. I'm always trying to do things in a way that's different or original.
Why should a researcher need such a clear sense of his own identity? Because, for one reason, no one functions well as a vague blur without a foundation, without some firm point of reference, some substance or outline. To act decisively in complex situations, it helps to be physiologically well-defined somewhere, unique in something, an actor in the spotlight center stage, not an extra in the shadow of scenery on the set. The issue is more than one of self-confidence in the psychological sense. It is one, indeed, of personal body image in the neurological sense. If you are going to enter into any form of stimulating contacts with your environment you first have to define quite literally where you leave off and your surroundings begin. A personal identity is a necessity for everyone, but it is more difficult for one who is not only various and multipolarized, but shifting. For, like the versatile actor who performs in multiple roles, an investigator, too, may have difficulty in figuring out "which one is the real me?" But if his work represents something definite and tangible, if its ambivalences and ambiguities are resolved, then so too will the researcher be resolved in the process. It is through his work that he becomes evident to himself. He will invest so much of his time and energy in it that he comes to identify with it in his own mind. It is this externalization of self in one's work that can make an assertion near the territorial boundary almost as much "that's what I am!" as "that's mine!"
I find it instructive when giving a seminar on a research topic to write nothing down in the way of notes but rather to use slides and improvise the words of the talk as I go along. This way I can find out, from my spontaneous remarks and improvisations, what I really have been thinking about. I understand myself much better when my thoughts are out where I can verbalize them and then listen to them.
Joseph Conrad expressed it this way: "I don't like work-no man does-but I like what is in work-the chance to find yourself, your own reality-for yourself, not for others-what no other man will ever know. They can only see the mere show, and never tell what it really means.""
But suppose someone else turns up with the same ideas or with exactly the same finding. Where is the researcher's unique sense of identity? Imagine the comparable situation in painting: two artists independently turn up with the same composition, same colors, same frame; the paintings hang side by side in an exhibit. For the inner-directed scientist, the central issue will not be so much the loss of time or of the drop in recognition from the outside. These are external layers. The problem, instead, will be the confusion and devaluation of self, the vague sense of floating adrift without a compass fix, the other face in the bathroom mirror asking: "who are you if you haven't created something unique in your work?" If the parentage of his creation, this "child" of his, is not only disputed but the child is adopted by someone else, then his intimate identity with his work becomes ambiguous, and his own inner sense of clarity is further blurred.
Selfhood has liabilities. Our sense of I, Me, and Mine creates many problems. Described elsewhere are the ways our usual "I-Mc-Mine" complex creates suffering, and how authentic Zen meditative training can help relieve the anguish linked w
ith this overconditioning. Often, our personal attachments (those projections attributable to the Mine) are the liabilities most difficult for us to recognize. In my experience, only the brief experience of kensho made obvious all these intrusive tentacles possessed by my prior sense of "Mine." Why was this? Because one's intellect alone does not appreciate their presence. Only as the result of entering this extraordinary state of selflessness does a witness experience, in the emptiness that prevails, what it actually feels like when such powerful, visceral conditioned graspings drop off.
Kensho also unveils a perspective of eternity. Thereafter, from the vantage point of this experience of timelessness, it seems easier to drop off any number of other previously discomforting problems that are time-bound and time-related. They include the fact that societies soon overlook, ignore, forget or misadopt one's own "child" (one's creative product). With respect to whatever novelty initially attended the discoveries and constructs narrated in these pages, my perspective is simple: all such priority issues will sort themselves out over time. Meanwhile, I have other priorities.
Let us be certain about one point: creativity need not imply neurosis. The passionate tensions that fuel creative expression do not necessarily constitute a sickness. In fact, the reverse is true, because true creative effort represents a constructive adaptation to our past experiences, an adaptation that becomes an integral part of our universal human heritage. Neurosis, on the other hand, clearly implies that this adaptation has failed." In brief, the best creative work represents passion fulfilled, whereas a neurosis may be thought of as passion thwarted." The liberal expression by creative individuals of obvious neurotic traits need not be taken too seriously, for in their very openness is implied the existence of a useful degree of freedom. True, psychological illness can coexist with creativity, and interact with it, but the role the malady plays (even if it lingers on) will differ from individual to individual.
Chase, Chance, and Creativity Page 15