- Email: [email protected]
DISCUSSION AND COMMENTS ON THE PSYCHOLOGY OF CREATIVITY
DISCUSSION AND COMMENTS ON THE PSYCHOLOGY OF CREATIVITY
Phyllis
Greenacre~ M.D.
It is a rare pleasure to have Mrs. Rank and Dr. Kaplan communicate observations and theoretical questions from their wealth of experience and the delicacy of their perceptiveness. I remember very well the conference of 1949, in which I was a member of an audience so spellbound as to seem uncommunicative. It proved for me, not entirely a one-way affair, but a real communication, since much of what I heard then has germinated since, and though I am slow "on the other end," I do try to give back eventually. The present discussion brings my own recent work and interests clearly into focus. My ardent interest in developmental problems of childhood has emerged gradually and used as its medium analytic therapeutic research with adults. This of course, presents many pitfalls, but presents also a chance for a rare series of condensed longitudinal studies, which cannot be found elsewhere. During the last twenty years especially the longitudinal developmental studies of infancy and childhood on a direct observation basis have added enormously to our knowledge. It is my belief that these two avenues of approach, both longitudinal but viewed from opposite directions, well supplement each other and that neither can stand alone. One might postulate that through gradual integration of the child's own body awareness into a sense of total self he becomes the more capable of recognition not only of his own needs and wishes but of those of the people around him; and that true communication can so develop. Speech becomes usually the primary and economical means of communication, often enhanced and sometimes replaced by 129
130
Phyllis Greenacre
earlier methods through gesture, vision, bodily discharge, and other means. The communication of the markedly creative person, the artist, may be primarily in words or in other media, but I think characteristically the greatest communication achievements are felt in their unconscious and preconscious effects. It is further significant that artistic creative communication, in whatever medium, involves, I believe, always an object relationship, sometimes with some special individuals but always with the larger audience of the world. Even when the personal relationships are at the most primitively incomplete object-relationship level, the world audience for whom the creative artist presents his work is not sought primarily for exhibitionistic and narcissistic value, but is a real love object to whom the creative artist is making an obligatory offering. Perhaps I might next speak briefly of my own ideas regarding certain elements in creativity, and their relation, as I see the situation, to Kris's and Hartmann's theories of neutralization and sublimation, which were especially presented by Kris and have been referred to by Mrs. Rank and Dr. Kaplan. I have always had some difficulty in accepting the term "neutralization" and what seemed to me the implied concept. Perhaps my difficulty is largely a semantic one. By definition, a state of neutralization of energy seems to me to mean a state of inertness or ineffectiveness, and to require again a special process to unneutralize the energy and make it available for investment. If it is only meant that the amount of energy involved in and assigned to conflictful goals has been reduced, and that the general fund of energy available and unassigned is therefore increased, I can agree with this. Such an increase in available energy may then become integrated into the individual's activity and increase the strength and range of secondary autonomy. Further, I can think that when a new conflict arises, reminiscent of an older mastered one, the turning of the energy may be in the direction of some related activity but in such a way as to accord with the goals of personal love (or social approval) and with the eliciting of a reciprocal response. This would seem to me like putting a last phase to the mastery. Under such circumstances then, the nature of the created love product might conceivably be determined by the nature of the original and repeated conflict, and be converted through love into a constructive developing activity suit-
The Psychology of Creativity
131
able to please and sometimes to identify with the loved ones. The object created is in a lovable form and capable of giving pleasure both to the creator and to the loved audience. This would seem the case in Kris's case Evelyne (Kris, 1955). My own problem concerning neutralization is further complicated, however, by a certain "unneutralized" awe of the work of Hartmann, Kris, and Loewenstein from which I have not yet been wholly freed. It was due to the insistent pressure of Ernst Kris, however, that I finally became involved in a statement of my own tentative views concerning certain essential developmental factors and problems in people with capacity for marked creativity; and here I want to emphasize that I was scrutinizing cases of a high degree of creativity in contrast to what one might think of as creative productivity. But I will return to this later. Kris's stimulation brought about my own article on "The Childhood of the Artist" (1957), only three months before his death. In that time I had had a chance to talk about my ideas with him a few times and had in fact arranged a week end with the Krisses in which we might discuss some aspects of these problems, when death suddenly intervened and took away this possibility forever. Dr. Kris, Mrs. Rank, and probably the majority of workers consider that the potential of creative ability is also more or less influenced by what is described as "innate equipment." In my own investigation, I was concerned only with those individuals whose work showed a high degree of creativity, possessing not only skill and workmanship from learned activities and practice but also originality and inventiveness. Studying the lives of such people who had already proved themselves in this way, and looking back with the searchlight of analytic therapy in the few cases of extremely gifted patients, I came to the conclusion that the "innate equipment" was indeed of great importance in determining the creative potential. This innate equipment might not show up in the appearance of a "topnotch" or ~agerly responsive young child, such as Joey or Inez appeared to be. This innate equipment consisted rather of a special degTee of sensitivity and empathy, together with perceptiveness, involving very early perception of rhythm and form, including the flexible registering of the organization of the various Gestalt patterns of experiences. My own belief is that this peculiar capacity of perception is inborn, but that
132
Phyllis Greenacre
the sensitivity may be increased by early traumata. A child having such potential ability does not always appear to be widely or eagerly responsive, and is frequently absorbed not only in the direct experience but in its overtones and related forms and patterns. This means an inherent richness of stimulation with corresponding responsiveness which may be confusing or even overwhelming but which leads later to a wealth and range of spontaneous symbolism and imagery. Personal relationships are also invested with interest in many alternate figures and forms, related in myriad ways through similarities and contrasts to the central personal experiences. These alternate forms and figures may appear in many media, whether as other human beings, as animals, cloud forms, odors on the breeze, the play of light and shadow, the contour of the landscape, the sound of a footfall, etc. All of these have a kind of reflected animation and meaning, perceived as alternates and derivatives of the original personal experiences. It is these alternate related forms which I have called the "collective alternates" of the artist. By collective alternates and the "love affair with the world" I do not at all mean merely an extended audience or an imaginary one which is used as a substitute for the personally loved one. In the markedly creative person, experiences are multidimensional, with a resonance of imagery. The reality of the artist is different from that of the less gifted person. I believe that neutralization and sublimation may be proportionately more important in the less or only moderately talented person than in one possessing a high degree of potential creativity. In any case, in my opinion, neutralization and sublimation are of greater importance in determining the direction of talent than in the production of creativity itself. To me it seems that extremely gifted creative people show rather a paucity of neutralized or quiescent energy and on the whole solve their conflicts poorly. I am also very much impressed with the extraordinary capacity of artists for a mobility and intensity of the cathexis-qualities which seem to me well worth studying in relation to sublimation. I would not see the artist "regressing in the service of the ego" quite as fully as Kris (1952) described-but would say rather that he has readily at hand and actively available elements of experience which in more ordinarily balanced people could not be reached except by regression. There are a few specific remarks and queries which I would like
The Psychology of Creativity
133
to make in regard to Joey and Inez. Of the two, perhaps Joey is the more promising. I would think of Inez that she is a bright child, who responds to being pushed and used exhibitionistically by her mother. Separated from her mother, jealous of her sibling, and confronted with new surroundings, Inez used this exhibitionism in the service of denial of her suffering, and has extended her conquests to a larger audience. I would emphasize again that this, however, is not the experience with the collective alternates at all. Actually, I think that this dependence on an immediate audience is exactly what the real artist must forgo, even when he longs for it, in the interest of a fidelity to the wider search for a harmony between inner and outer world expenences. I also would not agree that Joey lacked imagination because he was involved in the play with concrete objects. I would further think that his conquest of the world as representing the mother's breast is quite different from the collective-alternate response to the mother's breast in which the child would respond to many different forms, related to the perception of the breast. Also, I would point out that joey's creation and isolation of the world in miniature were done in order to possess and to dominate it in the interest of his own cheated self, and do not have the qualities of a love gift, which in a broad sense are frequently apparent in the product of a high degree of creative effort. Such love gifts may be instigated by a personal disappointment, but the peculiar positive relationship of the creative individual to the world at large permits him to turn to alternate love objects when he is frustrated or resentful in his own more circumscribed personal life. Moreover, in many instances, although the creative activity has been initiated in response to a disappointment or a hurt, the content of the creative work does not by any means uniformly contain the elements of the conflict, and often is a relief from but not a solution of the conflict. Regarding certain differences between the two children, I was impressed with how much these were in accord with frequently observed differences between the sexes. I think it has been observed that girls often talk earlier than boys, that they tend in fact to show more oral traits. Their imagination is more detached from concrete objects and is involved more in emotional relationships, and their fantasy is less subjected to reality testing. Boys, on the other hand, have more man-
134
Phyllis Greenacre
ual skill, their imagination is much involved in plans, precise constructions involving reality and childish logic. I have myself considered that these differences might be patterned and determined in part by the difference in relationship to their own genital organs. I also want to note my experience with adult patients, who in the course of analysis gave rather detailed accounts of their childhood in regard to the question of dullness of the latency period. I had thought that in many patients, perhaps particularly in those who had an unusually poor settling of the oedipal conflict, there was a very marked tendency to experimental games, childish inventiveness, the making of plans for new buildings and towns, etc. These seemed to me to show lessened sexual pressure, although the stamp of sexual investigation is frequently discernible, and the activities are carried on with great aggressive energy. I had in fact thought that quite a bit of children's art was produced during the latency period, and I was reminded of the classes of Professor Cezek who worked entirely with children below the age of twelve. I have understood that although many of the children showed considerable promise, in most instances the appearance of talent went into eclipse with puberty. In this connection I would wish to inquire about the current age of Inez and Joey, and the duration of their continued creative productions. There are many other points which I would be interested to discuss, if I had more time in which to prepare for this specifically. Before closing this discussion, I would like to quote from a memoir of Dr. Ramon y Cajal, written by Sir Charles Sherrington. In this recollection, the unique animation of the surroundings of the creative artist is so well described, as well as certain qualities of innocence, directness and passionate responsiveness: He was strikingly simple in several ways. At dinner one evening whitebait was served. He could not be persuaded to eat the tiny fish whole although he saw the rest of us doing so. But he persisted in trying to dissect out the backbone of each one. We were delighted to find that at meals he would often manage to follow the general drift of talk at table and that he did not let the language disability deter him from joining in. . . . The climax he would emphasize with a final dramatic gesture for which his left hand had been preparing. That hand had been busily crumbling the bread beside his dinner plate. It would gather the crumbs into a high pyramidal heap and then, to stress his closing words, sweep them
The Psychology of Creativity
135
with cupped hand from the table to the carpet, accompanied by a challenging look round, to the dismay of the maid servant. . . . A trait very noticeable in him was that in describing what the microscope showed, he spoke habitually as though it were a living scene. This was the more striking because not only were his preparations all dead and fixed, but they were to all appearances roughly made and rudely treated, no cover glass, and as many as half a dozen tiny scraps of tissue set in one large blob of balsam and left to dry. . . . Such scanty illustration as he vouchsafed for the preparations he demonstrated were a few slight rapid sketches of points taken here and there, depicted, however, by a master's hand. The intense anthropomorphism of his descriptions of what the preparations showed was at first startling to accept. He treated the microscopic scene as though it were alive and were inhabited by beings which felt and hoped and tried even as we do. It was a personification of natural forces as unlimited as that of Goethe's Faust, Part II. We must, if we would enter adequately into Cajal's thought in this field, suppose his entrance through his microscope, into a world populated by tiny beings actuated by motives and strivings and satisfactions not very remotely different from our own. He would envisage the sperm cells as activated by a sort of passionate urge in the rivalry for penetration into the ovum cell. Listening to him I asked myself how far this capacity for anthropomorphizing might not contribute to his success as an investigator. . . . [Sherrington also describes with considerable poignancy Cajal's consuming love of country, not to praise or boast of it, but often to muse upon and regret some defect which he detected in Spain as contrasted with elsewhere. Cajal's love of the world had as its foreimage his native Spain.] This solicitude for his country's repute deserves explicit mention here, it was perhaps the most powerful driving force in the make-up of his whole scientific character. It lifted him altogether above all personal vanity. His science was first and foremost an offering to Spain, a spiritual motive which added to the privilege of knowing the man. [Such was Sherrington's estimate.] And what manner of childhood did this man have? Born the oldest child of a father who was bright, ambitious, persistent, and obdurate, and a mother of whom little is said except that she was extremely beautiful and that none of her children inherited her beauty, he saw life first in a tiny isolated mountain village in the north of Spain. The father, who had a passionate ambition to become a doctor, was still hardly beyond the stage of being a barber and bloodletter when his son was born, but with great sacrifice of himself and deprivations to his growing family succeeded soon in obtaining real training.
136
Phyllis Greenacre
There is little information of the babyhood, but the young child was certainly harassed by recurrent disturbances similar to joey's and Inez's-for three younger children were born by the time he was eight, and with each child the struggling young country doctor moved from one village to a bigger one. From four to six, the child showed precocity in learning to read and write and already aroused great expectations. In the early part of the latency period, he became prankish and mischievous with boundless energy and curiosity, wandering the countryside exploring flora, fauna, and topographical curiosities with what was described as an inborn sensitivity to natural beauty and what Cajal himself was to describe as his exploration of "nature's gaudy festivals." I think we can see this same vivid, expectant, animated and animating attitude transferred years later to his anthropomorphizing of his explorations of the human brain. But the age of eight was a turning point, the year when his youngest sibling was born, when a move to still another village confronted him with a new and larger group of schoolboys to be won or conquered, and when Spain emerged from a long period of despair and celebrated glorious conquests in Morocco, reminiscent to the discouraged Spaniards of other past power. The little boy reacted to all this vividly-as his later productions were to show. But what is even more interesting is that two cataclysmic events appeared to shake his predominantly happy, though shy, naturalistic preoccupation: there was an eclipse of the sun, and a severe electrical storm struck the school, shattering it and electrocuting the village priest who was caught in the belfry by the lightning bolt and his body left dangling almost in midair. These events which one suspects at once as being screening experiences (I might even say-collective cosmic experiences) cover some of the fantasies or experiences connected with the other natural events-the births of the younger children. At any rate, these events seemed to initiate two trends of new activity, one of bursting "delinquent" behavior, stealing, leading a gang of youthful marauders in countryside depradations-and the other, the emergence of a need to sketch, draw, and paint. This in itself also took on the semblance of rebellion, since it was considered useless, frivolous, and wasteful by the child's stern father. What the mother's attitude was is unstated. But a kind of oedipal warfare, expanded to the community and the teachers, continued throughout latency, in which there was very destructive behavior, with secret learning, experiment-
The Psychology of Creativity
137
ing, writing, and painting. One gets the impression that these creative but secret pursuits were partly sublimated and "neutralized" masturbatory substitutes, but that he was pressured more by the innate creative ability and not so much by the real solution of a conflict. This state of affairs continued during late latency, resulting in the boy's being sent away to different schools but with worsening rather than improvement. Finally at eleven and twelve, his inventiveness and destructiveness reached a pitch in his construction of a homemade cannon which when ignited blew up the neighbor's garden and garden gate. The boy who was to become Spain's greatest scientist was lodged in the local jail as the only place strong enough to hold him. Cajal's war with his father continued even through adolescence, with a partial capitulation to the father's demands when the younger man began the study of medicine; but his rebellion flared again when the father tried to induce him to enter into practice with him. Cajal's dramatic development as Spain's greatest scientist and one of the greatest anatomists of his day was essentially an outcome of his oedipal struggle and ultimate victory. But it was not the first choice of creative channel for him. I have given this illustration of a man who already can be accepted as a person of superior creative ability, because I think it speaks for me regarding the intermingling of the personal and the collective attachments and problems in which the collective may both merge with and be a retreat from the personal. I want to make clear, however, that this outline of the forces at work in young Cajal presents a structure of relationship between creative and personal lives (and communication) which is only one of a number of different constellations of forces seen in different creative individuals. REFERENCES CANNON, D. (1949), Explorer of the Human Brain, the Life of Santiago Ram6n y Cajal, with a Memoir of Dr. Cajal by Sir Charles Sherrington. New York: Henry Schuman. GREENACRE, P. (1957), The childhood of the artist. The Psychoanalytic Study Of the Child, 12:47-72. New York: International Universities Press. HARTMANN, H. (1955), Notes on the theory of sublimation. The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 10:9-29. New York: International Universities Press. KRIS, E. (1952), Psychoanalytic Explorations in Art. New York: International Universities Press. - - (1955), Neutralization and sublimation: observations on young children. The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 10:30-46. New York: International Universities Press.
Phyllis
Greenacre~ M.D.
It is a rare pleasure to have Mrs. Rank and Dr. Kaplan communicate observations and theoretical questions from their wealth of experience and the delicacy of their perceptiveness. I remember very well the conference of 1949, in which I was a member of an audience so spellbound as to seem uncommunicative. It proved for me, not entirely a one-way affair, but a real communication, since much of what I heard then has germinated since, and though I am slow "on the other end," I do try to give back eventually. The present discussion brings my own recent work and interests clearly into focus. My ardent interest in developmental problems of childhood has emerged gradually and used as its medium analytic therapeutic research with adults. This of course, presents many pitfalls, but presents also a chance for a rare series of condensed longitudinal studies, which cannot be found elsewhere. During the last twenty years especially the longitudinal developmental studies of infancy and childhood on a direct observation basis have added enormously to our knowledge. It is my belief that these two avenues of approach, both longitudinal but viewed from opposite directions, well supplement each other and that neither can stand alone. One might postulate that through gradual integration of the child's own body awareness into a sense of total self he becomes the more capable of recognition not only of his own needs and wishes but of those of the people around him; and that true communication can so develop. Speech becomes usually the primary and economical means of communication, often enhanced and sometimes replaced by 129
130
Phyllis Greenacre
earlier methods through gesture, vision, bodily discharge, and other means. The communication of the markedly creative person, the artist, may be primarily in words or in other media, but I think characteristically the greatest communication achievements are felt in their unconscious and preconscious effects. It is further significant that artistic creative communication, in whatever medium, involves, I believe, always an object relationship, sometimes with some special individuals but always with the larger audience of the world. Even when the personal relationships are at the most primitively incomplete object-relationship level, the world audience for whom the creative artist presents his work is not sought primarily for exhibitionistic and narcissistic value, but is a real love object to whom the creative artist is making an obligatory offering. Perhaps I might next speak briefly of my own ideas regarding certain elements in creativity, and their relation, as I see the situation, to Kris's and Hartmann's theories of neutralization and sublimation, which were especially presented by Kris and have been referred to by Mrs. Rank and Dr. Kaplan. I have always had some difficulty in accepting the term "neutralization" and what seemed to me the implied concept. Perhaps my difficulty is largely a semantic one. By definition, a state of neutralization of energy seems to me to mean a state of inertness or ineffectiveness, and to require again a special process to unneutralize the energy and make it available for investment. If it is only meant that the amount of energy involved in and assigned to conflictful goals has been reduced, and that the general fund of energy available and unassigned is therefore increased, I can agree with this. Such an increase in available energy may then become integrated into the individual's activity and increase the strength and range of secondary autonomy. Further, I can think that when a new conflict arises, reminiscent of an older mastered one, the turning of the energy may be in the direction of some related activity but in such a way as to accord with the goals of personal love (or social approval) and with the eliciting of a reciprocal response. This would seem to me like putting a last phase to the mastery. Under such circumstances then, the nature of the created love product might conceivably be determined by the nature of the original and repeated conflict, and be converted through love into a constructive developing activity suit-
The Psychology of Creativity
131
able to please and sometimes to identify with the loved ones. The object created is in a lovable form and capable of giving pleasure both to the creator and to the loved audience. This would seem the case in Kris's case Evelyne (Kris, 1955). My own problem concerning neutralization is further complicated, however, by a certain "unneutralized" awe of the work of Hartmann, Kris, and Loewenstein from which I have not yet been wholly freed. It was due to the insistent pressure of Ernst Kris, however, that I finally became involved in a statement of my own tentative views concerning certain essential developmental factors and problems in people with capacity for marked creativity; and here I want to emphasize that I was scrutinizing cases of a high degree of creativity in contrast to what one might think of as creative productivity. But I will return to this later. Kris's stimulation brought about my own article on "The Childhood of the Artist" (1957), only three months before his death. In that time I had had a chance to talk about my ideas with him a few times and had in fact arranged a week end with the Krisses in which we might discuss some aspects of these problems, when death suddenly intervened and took away this possibility forever. Dr. Kris, Mrs. Rank, and probably the majority of workers consider that the potential of creative ability is also more or less influenced by what is described as "innate equipment." In my own investigation, I was concerned only with those individuals whose work showed a high degree of creativity, possessing not only skill and workmanship from learned activities and practice but also originality and inventiveness. Studying the lives of such people who had already proved themselves in this way, and looking back with the searchlight of analytic therapy in the few cases of extremely gifted patients, I came to the conclusion that the "innate equipment" was indeed of great importance in determining the creative potential. This innate equipment might not show up in the appearance of a "topnotch" or ~agerly responsive young child, such as Joey or Inez appeared to be. This innate equipment consisted rather of a special degTee of sensitivity and empathy, together with perceptiveness, involving very early perception of rhythm and form, including the flexible registering of the organization of the various Gestalt patterns of experiences. My own belief is that this peculiar capacity of perception is inborn, but that
132
Phyllis Greenacre
the sensitivity may be increased by early traumata. A child having such potential ability does not always appear to be widely or eagerly responsive, and is frequently absorbed not only in the direct experience but in its overtones and related forms and patterns. This means an inherent richness of stimulation with corresponding responsiveness which may be confusing or even overwhelming but which leads later to a wealth and range of spontaneous symbolism and imagery. Personal relationships are also invested with interest in many alternate figures and forms, related in myriad ways through similarities and contrasts to the central personal experiences. These alternate forms and figures may appear in many media, whether as other human beings, as animals, cloud forms, odors on the breeze, the play of light and shadow, the contour of the landscape, the sound of a footfall, etc. All of these have a kind of reflected animation and meaning, perceived as alternates and derivatives of the original personal experiences. It is these alternate related forms which I have called the "collective alternates" of the artist. By collective alternates and the "love affair with the world" I do not at all mean merely an extended audience or an imaginary one which is used as a substitute for the personally loved one. In the markedly creative person, experiences are multidimensional, with a resonance of imagery. The reality of the artist is different from that of the less gifted person. I believe that neutralization and sublimation may be proportionately more important in the less or only moderately talented person than in one possessing a high degree of potential creativity. In any case, in my opinion, neutralization and sublimation are of greater importance in determining the direction of talent than in the production of creativity itself. To me it seems that extremely gifted creative people show rather a paucity of neutralized or quiescent energy and on the whole solve their conflicts poorly. I am also very much impressed with the extraordinary capacity of artists for a mobility and intensity of the cathexis-qualities which seem to me well worth studying in relation to sublimation. I would not see the artist "regressing in the service of the ego" quite as fully as Kris (1952) described-but would say rather that he has readily at hand and actively available elements of experience which in more ordinarily balanced people could not be reached except by regression. There are a few specific remarks and queries which I would like
The Psychology of Creativity
133
to make in regard to Joey and Inez. Of the two, perhaps Joey is the more promising. I would think of Inez that she is a bright child, who responds to being pushed and used exhibitionistically by her mother. Separated from her mother, jealous of her sibling, and confronted with new surroundings, Inez used this exhibitionism in the service of denial of her suffering, and has extended her conquests to a larger audience. I would emphasize again that this, however, is not the experience with the collective alternates at all. Actually, I think that this dependence on an immediate audience is exactly what the real artist must forgo, even when he longs for it, in the interest of a fidelity to the wider search for a harmony between inner and outer world expenences. I also would not agree that Joey lacked imagination because he was involved in the play with concrete objects. I would further think that his conquest of the world as representing the mother's breast is quite different from the collective-alternate response to the mother's breast in which the child would respond to many different forms, related to the perception of the breast. Also, I would point out that joey's creation and isolation of the world in miniature were done in order to possess and to dominate it in the interest of his own cheated self, and do not have the qualities of a love gift, which in a broad sense are frequently apparent in the product of a high degree of creative effort. Such love gifts may be instigated by a personal disappointment, but the peculiar positive relationship of the creative individual to the world at large permits him to turn to alternate love objects when he is frustrated or resentful in his own more circumscribed personal life. Moreover, in many instances, although the creative activity has been initiated in response to a disappointment or a hurt, the content of the creative work does not by any means uniformly contain the elements of the conflict, and often is a relief from but not a solution of the conflict. Regarding certain differences between the two children, I was impressed with how much these were in accord with frequently observed differences between the sexes. I think it has been observed that girls often talk earlier than boys, that they tend in fact to show more oral traits. Their imagination is more detached from concrete objects and is involved more in emotional relationships, and their fantasy is less subjected to reality testing. Boys, on the other hand, have more man-
134
Phyllis Greenacre
ual skill, their imagination is much involved in plans, precise constructions involving reality and childish logic. I have myself considered that these differences might be patterned and determined in part by the difference in relationship to their own genital organs. I also want to note my experience with adult patients, who in the course of analysis gave rather detailed accounts of their childhood in regard to the question of dullness of the latency period. I had thought that in many patients, perhaps particularly in those who had an unusually poor settling of the oedipal conflict, there was a very marked tendency to experimental games, childish inventiveness, the making of plans for new buildings and towns, etc. These seemed to me to show lessened sexual pressure, although the stamp of sexual investigation is frequently discernible, and the activities are carried on with great aggressive energy. I had in fact thought that quite a bit of children's art was produced during the latency period, and I was reminded of the classes of Professor Cezek who worked entirely with children below the age of twelve. I have understood that although many of the children showed considerable promise, in most instances the appearance of talent went into eclipse with puberty. In this connection I would wish to inquire about the current age of Inez and Joey, and the duration of their continued creative productions. There are many other points which I would be interested to discuss, if I had more time in which to prepare for this specifically. Before closing this discussion, I would like to quote from a memoir of Dr. Ramon y Cajal, written by Sir Charles Sherrington. In this recollection, the unique animation of the surroundings of the creative artist is so well described, as well as certain qualities of innocence, directness and passionate responsiveness: He was strikingly simple in several ways. At dinner one evening whitebait was served. He could not be persuaded to eat the tiny fish whole although he saw the rest of us doing so. But he persisted in trying to dissect out the backbone of each one. We were delighted to find that at meals he would often manage to follow the general drift of talk at table and that he did not let the language disability deter him from joining in. . . . The climax he would emphasize with a final dramatic gesture for which his left hand had been preparing. That hand had been busily crumbling the bread beside his dinner plate. It would gather the crumbs into a high pyramidal heap and then, to stress his closing words, sweep them
The Psychology of Creativity
135
with cupped hand from the table to the carpet, accompanied by a challenging look round, to the dismay of the maid servant. . . . A trait very noticeable in him was that in describing what the microscope showed, he spoke habitually as though it were a living scene. This was the more striking because not only were his preparations all dead and fixed, but they were to all appearances roughly made and rudely treated, no cover glass, and as many as half a dozen tiny scraps of tissue set in one large blob of balsam and left to dry. . . . Such scanty illustration as he vouchsafed for the preparations he demonstrated were a few slight rapid sketches of points taken here and there, depicted, however, by a master's hand. The intense anthropomorphism of his descriptions of what the preparations showed was at first startling to accept. He treated the microscopic scene as though it were alive and were inhabited by beings which felt and hoped and tried even as we do. It was a personification of natural forces as unlimited as that of Goethe's Faust, Part II. We must, if we would enter adequately into Cajal's thought in this field, suppose his entrance through his microscope, into a world populated by tiny beings actuated by motives and strivings and satisfactions not very remotely different from our own. He would envisage the sperm cells as activated by a sort of passionate urge in the rivalry for penetration into the ovum cell. Listening to him I asked myself how far this capacity for anthropomorphizing might not contribute to his success as an investigator. . . . [Sherrington also describes with considerable poignancy Cajal's consuming love of country, not to praise or boast of it, but often to muse upon and regret some defect which he detected in Spain as contrasted with elsewhere. Cajal's love of the world had as its foreimage his native Spain.] This solicitude for his country's repute deserves explicit mention here, it was perhaps the most powerful driving force in the make-up of his whole scientific character. It lifted him altogether above all personal vanity. His science was first and foremost an offering to Spain, a spiritual motive which added to the privilege of knowing the man. [Such was Sherrington's estimate.] And what manner of childhood did this man have? Born the oldest child of a father who was bright, ambitious, persistent, and obdurate, and a mother of whom little is said except that she was extremely beautiful and that none of her children inherited her beauty, he saw life first in a tiny isolated mountain village in the north of Spain. The father, who had a passionate ambition to become a doctor, was still hardly beyond the stage of being a barber and bloodletter when his son was born, but with great sacrifice of himself and deprivations to his growing family succeeded soon in obtaining real training.
136
Phyllis Greenacre
There is little information of the babyhood, but the young child was certainly harassed by recurrent disturbances similar to joey's and Inez's-for three younger children were born by the time he was eight, and with each child the struggling young country doctor moved from one village to a bigger one. From four to six, the child showed precocity in learning to read and write and already aroused great expectations. In the early part of the latency period, he became prankish and mischievous with boundless energy and curiosity, wandering the countryside exploring flora, fauna, and topographical curiosities with what was described as an inborn sensitivity to natural beauty and what Cajal himself was to describe as his exploration of "nature's gaudy festivals." I think we can see this same vivid, expectant, animated and animating attitude transferred years later to his anthropomorphizing of his explorations of the human brain. But the age of eight was a turning point, the year when his youngest sibling was born, when a move to still another village confronted him with a new and larger group of schoolboys to be won or conquered, and when Spain emerged from a long period of despair and celebrated glorious conquests in Morocco, reminiscent to the discouraged Spaniards of other past power. The little boy reacted to all this vividly-as his later productions were to show. But what is even more interesting is that two cataclysmic events appeared to shake his predominantly happy, though shy, naturalistic preoccupation: there was an eclipse of the sun, and a severe electrical storm struck the school, shattering it and electrocuting the village priest who was caught in the belfry by the lightning bolt and his body left dangling almost in midair. These events which one suspects at once as being screening experiences (I might even say-collective cosmic experiences) cover some of the fantasies or experiences connected with the other natural events-the births of the younger children. At any rate, these events seemed to initiate two trends of new activity, one of bursting "delinquent" behavior, stealing, leading a gang of youthful marauders in countryside depradations-and the other, the emergence of a need to sketch, draw, and paint. This in itself also took on the semblance of rebellion, since it was considered useless, frivolous, and wasteful by the child's stern father. What the mother's attitude was is unstated. But a kind of oedipal warfare, expanded to the community and the teachers, continued throughout latency, in which there was very destructive behavior, with secret learning, experiment-
The Psychology of Creativity
137
ing, writing, and painting. One gets the impression that these creative but secret pursuits were partly sublimated and "neutralized" masturbatory substitutes, but that he was pressured more by the innate creative ability and not so much by the real solution of a conflict. This state of affairs continued during late latency, resulting in the boy's being sent away to different schools but with worsening rather than improvement. Finally at eleven and twelve, his inventiveness and destructiveness reached a pitch in his construction of a homemade cannon which when ignited blew up the neighbor's garden and garden gate. The boy who was to become Spain's greatest scientist was lodged in the local jail as the only place strong enough to hold him. Cajal's war with his father continued even through adolescence, with a partial capitulation to the father's demands when the younger man began the study of medicine; but his rebellion flared again when the father tried to induce him to enter into practice with him. Cajal's dramatic development as Spain's greatest scientist and one of the greatest anatomists of his day was essentially an outcome of his oedipal struggle and ultimate victory. But it was not the first choice of creative channel for him. I have given this illustration of a man who already can be accepted as a person of superior creative ability, because I think it speaks for me regarding the intermingling of the personal and the collective attachments and problems in which the collective may both merge with and be a retreat from the personal. I want to make clear, however, that this outline of the forces at work in young Cajal presents a structure of relationship between creative and personal lives (and communication) which is only one of a number of different constellations of forces seen in different creative individuals. REFERENCES CANNON, D. (1949), Explorer of the Human Brain, the Life of Santiago Ram6n y Cajal, with a Memoir of Dr. Cajal by Sir Charles Sherrington. New York: Henry Schuman. GREENACRE, P. (1957), The childhood of the artist. The Psychoanalytic Study Of the Child, 12:47-72. New York: International Universities Press. HARTMANN, H. (1955), Notes on the theory of sublimation. The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 10:9-29. New York: International Universities Press. KRIS, E. (1952), Psychoanalytic Explorations in Art. New York: International Universities Press. - - (1955), Neutralization and sublimation: observations on young children. The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 10:30-46. New York: International Universities Press.