You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
The stereotype of the scientist, so different from how a creative artist is usually perceived, is perhaps one of the factors that hinders the study of creativity in the field of science. Features such as rationality, skepticism, and obsession for accuracy and objectivity seem in fact far removed from both creative and psychotic activity. The real scientific innovator, however, does not base his task on the features named above—which can be criticized as belonging to “scientificists” rather than to scientists—but rather on a series of special cognitive processes that transform or substitute conceptualizations of reality, which up to then had been universally accepted.
Early descriptions of some of these processes are the work of Freud, who classified them into primary and secondary processes. The primary process, the oldest from the ontogenetic perspective, operates by means of displacement, condensation, and substitution. The action of this process prevails in dreams, psychopathological conditions such as psychosis, and during the early stages of normal cognitive development. Secondary processes overlap and tend to substitute for the primary ones early on, and constitute the so-called conceptual thought, which follows the rules of logic and of inductive and deductive methods.
Arieti (1964) adds to the above the tertiary process, which he considers specific to creativity, and it consists of special combinations of primary and secondary forms of cognition. The function of creativity, according to this author, is to allow the individual to transcend, in an adequate and desirable way, his usual ways of feeling, understanding, relating, and doing things. The activity of normal people tends to follow fixed, repetitive, and predictable patterns governed by the laws of logic and custom, whereas the creative process allows one to break free from such rigidness. Creativity is not merely originality and liberty, but it imposes its own restrictions. To begin with, even if its cog