The Creative Person as Maverick

Creativity is a topic that captures the interest and enthusiasm of a wide audience as witnessed by the fact that the Academy of Psychoanalysis chose it as the theme of its winter meeting. This attraction, however, is not universal inasmuch as there are some persons who do not value creative pursuits. On the other hand, those who aspire to be creative, and I believe the majority of psychoanalysts do, are usually fascinated with the creative process and the creative personality.

Recently, there has been an awakened interest in play, as these meetings also attest. Many authors have viewed playful activity and creative accomplishment as interrelated. This leads to some difficulties in defining a creative act, because if playful behavior, which we believe originates in the transitional space, has a creative factor or is, in itself, creative, how is this behavior related to the expansion of reality that occurs when a novel contribution or discovery is made that is the outcome of creative endeavor? From a developmental viewpoint, can the acquisition of the capacity to play and the construction of the transitional space and object and what Winnicott (1953) called primary psychic creativity be thought of as true creative acts?

If we adhere to a strict definition of creativity as the construction of something novel, either a product, a concept, or a solution to a heretofore unsolved problem, then what occurs in infancy, as the child constructs a transitional space in order eventually to be able to discover and move into the external world, cannot be considered creativity. Still, rigid categorization seldom enhances our understanding and rarely leads to clarification. Through play, children discover new methods of adapting to the external world. They are acquiring accretions of psychic structures that enable them to relate to and discover new facets of the external world. In that sense they have created something novel, although it is not novel to the world in general. Neverthel