Creativity is an Expression of Mental Health

Vincent Ryan Ruggiero in his book The Art of Thinking writes that one common image of the creative person is reinforced by a number of low-budget horror films. That image depicts a wild-eyed mad scientist, shuffling nervously around a laboratory (pronounced lab-or-a-try in an ominous tone of voice), rubbing hands together evilly and drooling. Many people really believe the image: They view creative person and lunatic as near synonyms.  Vincent says that they are – wrong!

In the following passage, Harold H. Anderson summaries a leading psychological view concerning the relative sanity of creative people. (Endorsers include such respected thinkers as Erick Fromm, Rollo May, Carl Rogers, Abraham Maslow, P.J. Guilford, and Ernest Hilgard).

“The consensus of these authors is that creativity is an expression of a mentally or psychologically healthy person, that creativity is associated with wholeness, unity, honesty, integrity, personal involvement, enthusiasm, high motivation, and action.

There is also agreement that neurosis either accompanies or causes a degraded quality of one’s creativity. For neurotic persons and persons with other forms of mental disease [who are, at the same time, creative] such assumptions as the following are offered: that these persons are creative in spite of their disease; that they are producing below the achievements they would show without the disease; that they are on the downgrade, or that they are pseudo creative, that is, they may have brilliant original ideas which, because of the neurosis, they do not communicate.”

In summary: Creativity is the expression of mental health. Rejoices!

Lord, Give Us Today Our Daily Idea(s)

The Use of Drug Hinders Creativity

Although many people seem determined to resist this fact, it has long been acknowledged by those who have studied creativity. If liquor and other drugs have been such a boon to original thought, one researcher ask, why hasn’t the corner saloon (or the backstreet) produced more creative achievers? No one, as yet, has answered this question satisfactorily. Nor is anyone likely to. The reason drugs harm creativity, Brewster Ghiselin explains, is that “their action reduces judgment, and the activities they provoke are hallucinatory rather than illuminating.” What is needed, he argues, is not artificial stimulation of the mind, but increased control and direction.

The use of drugs and liquor as stimulants is sometimes part of a larger misconception that might be termed the bohemian mystique. This misconception is the notion that a dissipated lifestyle somehow casts off intellectual restraints and opens the mind to new ideas. Eliot Dole Hutchinson offers an assessment that most researchers would endorse:

“Narrow streets, shabby studios, undisciplined living and artistic ballyhoo about local colour may all have their place in pseudo artistry, but they have little to do with genuine creation. Nor is the necessary creative freedom clearly associated with them at all. Bohemianism squanders its freedom, returns from its hours of dissipation less effective. Creative discipline capitalizes its leisure, returns refreshed, reinvigorated, eager.”

References:

§  Vincent Ryan Ruggiero’s The Art of Thinking: A Guide to Critical and Creative Thought, 8^th Edition (Pearson Education, Inc., 2007) page 89

§  Eliot Dole Hutchinson’s How to Think Creatively (Nashville: Abingdon-Cokesbury Press, 1949) page 79

Having control and direction increased creativity

Lord, Give Us Today Our Daily Idea(s)

Creativity Does Not Require Special Intellectual Talent or High IQ

The idea that highly creative people have some special intellectual ability lacking in the general population has been widely accepted for centuries. When the IQ test was devised, that idea was given new currency, and anyone who achieved less than a genius-level score (135 and above) was considered to have little or no chance for creative intellectual achievement.

However, when researchers began studying the lives of creative people and comparing IQ test performance with creativity test performance, they made two discoveries. They found that creativity depends not on the possession of special talents, but on the use of talents that virtually everyone has but most have never learned to use. In addition, they found that the IQ test was not designed to measure creativity, so a high score is no indication of creative ability, and a low score, no indication of its absence. In fact, they found that the great majority of creative achievers fell significantly below the genius level.

References:

§  J. W. Getzels and P. W. Jackson, Creativity and Intelligence (New York: Wiley, 1962) page 21

§  Torrance, Guiding Creative Talent, page 5 and 63

I’m glad I can still be creative even though I’m not genius

Lord, Give Us Today Our Daily Idea(s)

'Doing Your Own Thing' is Not Necessary a Mark of Creativity

“For many people,” George F. Kneller, author of The Art and Science of Creativity (1965) observes, “being creative seems to imply nothing more than releasing impulses or relaxing tensions… Yet an uninhibited swivelling at the hips is hardly creative dancing, nor is hurling colours a canvas creative painting.” Creativity does involve a willingness to break away from established patterns and try new directions, but it does not mean being different for the sake of being different or as an exercise in self-indulgence. It is as much a mistake to ignore the accumulated knowledge of the past as it is to be limited by it. As Alfred North Whitehead warned, “Fools act on imagination without knowledge; pedants act on knowledge without imagination.” Being creative means combining knowledge and imagination.

Lord, Give Us Today Our Daily Idea(s)