The Nature of the Creative Process in Art: A Psychological Study

No single factor determined the growth of this book. It may have been that as a novice researcher in Behavioral Psychology I experienced growing discontent with the direction of intellectual activity in which the accent was on methodology and measurement, with a distinct atmosphere of dogmatism, insecurity and defensiveness. The anathema of tender-mindedness was attached to any study of mental manifes- tations that avoided laboratory confirmation and statistical significance. Man in his uniqueness and unpredictable potentialities remained un- explored. Yet outside the systematic vivisection of variables and their measurement men of originality and genius were studying the mind in its complex yet natural interaction of aspirations, values and creative capacities. It was almost too easy for me to turn to them for the re- orientation of my psychological interest, and it was not difficult to find in Freud the most daring and penetrating representant of humanistic psychology. Furthermore, it could have been the fact that Freud's thoughts on creative processes appeared to me at once starkly original and yet incomplete and fragmentary, that led me to reconsider and expand on them. Freud's fascination with culture and creativity, although frank and serious, led him to a peculiar indecisiveness and overcautiousness which was radically different from the dramatic boldness of his thera- peutic methods and the depth of his personality theories.

Table of Contents:
I. Reality, Appearance, and the Creative Disposition.- Conventional Reality and Mental Organization.- Categorical, Collective, and Created Reality.- Evocative Function and Created Reality.- Contemplated Reality and Creative Appearance.- II. On the Conscious and the Unconscious.- Some basic properties of Consciousness.- The first two levels of organization: Pure experiences and Verballabels.- Freud’s basic approaches to the Conscious and Unconscious.- The origins of Emotionally charged Ideas and Repressive Functions.- III. On the Preconscious.- The “Pre-experiential” stage of Mental Organization.- An aspect of Preconscious: a Tacit Cognition.- The Problem of Double Significance: Articulated and Non-articulated elements.- The Origin of Poesis: Emotion and Preconscious.- IV. Some common Origins of Symbolic Functions and the Organization of Dreams.- Sleep, Dream and its Interpretation.- Censorship, Latent and Manifest Dream Work.- Symbol and Dream: Regressive and Progressive Processes.- The Dream as a Symbolic Narrative.- The Relation between Dream-work and Symbol-work.- Integration and Conclusion.- V. On Imagination and Symbolic Functions.- A Variety of Imaginative Functions.- Imaginative Inference.- Some Neuro-psychological Problems of Imagination.- Some Relations between Symbol and Imagination.- Ambiguity related to Imagination.- The Subjective and Radical Ambiguity of Imagination.- The Communicative Symbol, the Creative Symbol and the Contemplated Image.- Levels of Reaction to the Contemplated Image in Receiving Minds.- VI. On Style.- Inner disposition of style.- Overt stylistic expression.- Approaches to the history of art.- VII. Oedipus, Culture and Creativity.- General Orientation.- The Oedipus complex: Mental economy and Myth.- Creativity versus Neurosis.- ThePleasure and Reality Principles in Interaction: Neurosis and Culture.- Culture and Neurosis: The Father complex.- Archetypes and the Oedipus Myth.- The Dionysian and the Apollonian principles.- VIII. The Theory of Modes I: The Structure of Creative Intention and its Relation to Various Aspects of Mental Economy.- Introduction: On the Nature of Illusion.- Some Basic aspects of Intentionality.- Freud’s approaches to Creative Intentionality.- A further approach to the same problem.- The Reduction of Expenditure of Neural Energies.- Novelty and the Comic.- Creative Set and Curiosity.- Economy of Mental Expenditure as it relates to the Creative Process.- The Problem of Condensation.- Condensation and Emotion.- Conclusion about Intentionality and Condensation.- Regression and Mental Economy.- Childhood, Adolescent and Mature Imagination as it relates to Regression.- IX. The Theory of Modes II: The Tragic as Mental Function.- Three types of The Tragic.- Functions of Fantasy related to the Tragic.- The Relationship of Sublimation to the Tragic.- The Problem of the Uncanny.