What is creativity? - What psychology didn't get quite right (yet)

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The blessings and curses of psychology are, that everyone is a potential subject of a study and at the same time everyone can comment and openly disagree with whatever knowledge psychologists come up with. Just imagine how fun would science be if let’s say a biologist described what a nucleus is and how it behaves and the nucleus decided to disagree with him. Or if a botanist studying a population of orchids was reminded that she is missing the nuances in the unique expression of each plant? I mean, I’d love to live in a world like that, but that’s probably why I chose psychology in the first place. 

Why am I saying this? The trouble with any psychological phenomenon is, that it is not quite as easy to isolate, define, describe and examine as it is with let’s say a rock specimen. And creativity is in this sense particularly tricky. Possibly, that is one of the reasons why it has always been somewhere on the periphery of psychological interests. 

It hasn’t been until the 1960s that creativity research truly took off. I blame the zeitgeist and the power of flowers on this one. However, it became rather obvious, that we don’t exactly know what creativity is and every attempt to measure or study it in some way just touched on one of its aspects. Paradoxically, when psychology was scratching its imaginary head, everyone else seemed to know what creativity was. Common sense recognizes it, the science is never quite sure. After several decades of changing definitions, psychology finally agreed on one. Are you excited to hear it? Well… Creativity is the ability to create something new and efficient. 

That falls flat right on the belly of disappointment, right? The main argument behind the definition is, that creativity can be understood by its final product (whether material or not) and that such product needs to be not only original but also in some way useful. I could find about two hundred reasons to go on a long rant about why this definition is lazy and why we need a new one. But I will spare you for now. Instead, I will share what thoughts were going through my head when I was writing my psych. undergrad dissertation. 

Creativity is not just what you think, it is what you do. And vice versa. A creative idea in our society is called inspiration. And inspiration is maybe an element of creativity, but not creativity itself. Inspiration needs to be followed through and fulfilled in the cleanest form possible to become creativity. At the same time, just an action, let’s say building a house, or painting a portrait does not necessarily need to be creative. Similarly to intelligence, you can work on mathematical problems following pre-defined formulas without particularly engaging any intelligent thoughts, you can paint hundreds of paintings following youtube tutorials, but that doesn’t mean that you made good use of your creativity. (Just think about how we teach art at schools. How much room for inspiration do we leave for children and why do those who follow the instructions most closely get the highest recognition…) 

Creativity is not just what you think, or do, it is how you live. I know it sounds cheesy, but I’m not sure if there are better words. Creativity seems to be a way to relate to the world and you can’t just switch it off and on for the moment when you are in your studio or doing something so-called creative. Again, like intelligence, it does follow you everywhere you go. Just sometimes is more in our awareness. Now, you can surely choose not to act on inspiration (and that would be a whole long story as I suspect this choice is not particularly healthy in the long run), but you can’t just stop creativity altogether. 

So what is it? And does everybody has it? 

No serious psychologist would accept the proposal that creativity is energy. But it makes sense to understand it that way. It is an energy that drops into our minds with new ideas, it is the drive to make those ideas happen, it is something that happens between people and in cultures, it is dynamic rather than fixed and it is social rather than individual. It is something that happens in the spaces in between and never looks the same. And if we access it, nurture it and share it, then it grows and transforms. It makes things happen.

Creativity is a metaphor for magic. 

(Well, and for any academic enthusiasts, let's ponder on this a little bit longer. I suspect the answer will be somewhere in the sphere of psychodynamic, even though Freud himself gave up on it at some point. But that is a story for another day...)