New Psychological Approaches to Creativity

IN THE TOIL OF OUR EXISTENCE, we all confront daily our basic needs, aspirations, and troubles. In one way or another, we are all mendicants for love, searchers for new crumbs of truth, for a taste of softness and serenity, or for a patch of beauty. We do the best we can in our own petty, customary ways.

Although each of us tries to retain his autonomy and originality, all of us are very much influenced and to some extent molded by the environment in which we live. Although not conditioned like Pavlovian dogs, we are relentlessly subjected to repetition of stimuli, persuaded to follow beaten paths, to adjust to a routine.

A combination of chance events and of my own choices has made me become intensely involved with two groups of people who confront their basic needs, aspirations, and troubles in completely different ways, that is, by attempting to transform reality. These two groups, the schizophrenics and the creative persons, are both fugitives from the daily reality in which they feel prisoners. The ones and the others are shaken by what they feel is terribly absent in this world, and they send us messages of their own search, and samples of their findings, that is, of the transformations which they themselves have put into effect. But, some of you may object, the transformations of these two groups of people are quite different. The creative person wants to change reality in order to beautify it, or to enlarge the field of human knowledge or experience, in order to provide usefulness, understanding, and predictability, or to evoke a universal response. The schizophrenic instead is terribly afraid of this planet, of remaining close to the soil, this soil which will eventually bury all of us; but he has no wings to fly into high space. His flight from reality is a way that fits his private, incommunicable feeling, his strictly individualistic, bizarre, strange behavior which does not evoke consensus but may even become destructive to the