Creativity and the Stages of Development1

When we think about what permits a person to do creative work — and here I mean to make works of art, to develop scientific theories that peers and others consider original and worthwhile — we often think in terms of talent. We may think of opportunity, occasionally of luck — the fortune to be born into a life that permits exposure to the arts, for example, or access to and the support of others in one's area of endeavor. Some, especially in relationship to the arts, think of suffering as the sine qua non. Auden (1939), whether he thought this or not, wrote of Yeats, “mad Ireland hurt you into poetry” (p. 475). People used to think, and some, alas, still do, of psychopathology or madness as a prerequisite. Some think inspiration, for the Romantics a kind of breathing in of the divine, was paramount. Freud claimed to be mystified by creativity, while amply demonstrating his own.

I focus here on a different factor. It isn't the main one nor does it preclude others. Certainly talent matters — whatever that truly is, and whether it can be evaluated before one has worked at an endeavor for years. Opportunity matters. Whether support and optimum conditions matter would seem to depend on the individual because art, certainly, has been made under unspeakable conditions. Think of the art and music created in the concentration camp at Terezin or of Miklos Radnoti (1992), the Hungarian Jewish poet who wrote fine, moving poems while starving on a Nazi death march toward the end of WWII. (He died, but the poems, found in the pocket of his coat when the mass grave was exhumed, did not.)

What I am proposing as a significant factor in whether we can do creative work is how we negotiate and are helped (or not) to negotiate the stages of development. I refer to the stages delineated by Freud, Abraham, Erikson, and others. I do so in the belief that the stages are still relevant despite a tendency among some to see them as reductionist, too linear or rigid, or as outdated by Klein's inv