Aspects of Creativity and the Learning Process

The obstacles to creativity in students of the arts and sciences are the concern of many teachers. Some teachers have been fortunate enough not to have had many obstacles to overcome themselves. Others have been helped by their teachers to greater creativity.

As one of the latter, I have been interested in trying to understand how I've been aided and to make the methods explicit in the process of working with my own students. I'm sure all teachers have experienced the feelings of frustration as promising students give one glimpses of creativity which never matures or is never fully realized. For the purposes of this discussion, I have defined creativity as—that kind of self-expression in one's own medium that results in constant growth and synthesis of experiences essential to the continual production of new and original work.

While I have been primarily concerned with the creativity which produces original thinking in my own specialty of psychiatry, and while my attention to the obstacles to creativity has been centered on my own students who show promise, I've also had the opportunity as a psychotherapist to work with several writers, painters, sculptors and photographers, where these obstacles have been of primary concern in the treatment. My own avocation of photography has widened