Creativity, Self Psychology, the Modern Dance Choreographer, and Transformative Education

From the perspective of psychoanalytic self psychology, a healthy individual engages the world with exploration, self-assertion, vitality, and reciprocity, to creatively, and productively, nourish sense of self, other, and community. The relation between the experiences of exploration, self-assertion, vitality, and reciprocity, and the ability to be productive, holds many keys to understanding creativity, why it mystifies us, and why it is valued by society. One's vitality is nourished and supported by exploration and self-assertion, for to be vital is not just to be authentic to self, but to feel a direct connection between one's subjective sense of self and one's actions into the world. Through action one feels the exhilaration of truly being alive, of finding competency and meaning, of feeling that one's intersection with the world sustains, and develops, one's nature. At the same time, this intersection is dynamic and one's vitality is reinforced and expanded by the mutual influence of one's environment. Productivity demonstrates this reciprocal exchange between sense of self and one's surrounding world.

Through such experiences individuals find people, places, things, ideas, and activities that serve what self psychologists call “selfobject functions”—psychological support systems that enhance an experience of self as whole and cohesive. Prevalent throughout our lives, these selfobject functions change and adapt to our psychic progression. In health the young selfobject needs of the child transform into the more mature selfobject needs of the adult. In art-making, the medium of the art form serves vital selfobject functions, deeply influencing the creative process. Throughout life creativity involves exploration and self-assertion, through a multi-leveled subjective relationship that serves significant selfobject functions through the construction of an ideal form that embodies and expands self-delineation, self-cohesion, and self-development, and that is ultima