McCully, Robert S. (South Carolina). ‘Contributions of Jungian psychotherapy toward understanding the creative process’; Centennial monograph, May 1976, distributed by Geigy Pharmaceutical House, No. 4 in a series of monographs on the topic ‘Creative psychiatry’.

This monograph looks at the origins of the creative process both in the ordinary creative individual and in the specially gifted.

McCully notices that in America, as in Britain, there is a proliferation of therapies, and he maintains that these therapies will not last unless they are of a kind to get in touch with man's internal life, his unconscious. Transformation depends upon the establishment of a good relationship between the ego and the unsonscious. A purely intellectual understanding does not bring about the release of energy associated with changes in the unconscious.

This energy has to be considered in relation to Jung's theory of archetypes, and the production of images or symbols from the unconscious.

McCully believes that recent neurological studies may give a neurological basis for Jung's theory, and he offers Bogen's demonstration that the left hemisphere of the brain may be concerned with thinking and the logical processes, while the right may have responsibility for what we know as symbol formation and creativity. The creative process itself is suggested to be the integrative result of the two hemispheres working separately.

A further contribution from Jung is his study of typology, and here McCully says that the more the individual can be put in touch, through therapy, with his inferior functions, the more energy can be released for creative use. Possibly the most valuable function, says McCully, is intuition, the irrational one, which helps to give the greatly gifted man, including Jung himself, that intensely original view of the world which is so different from that of the universal man around him.