Where is the home for creativity?

I suppose that once we start wondering what creativity is, we are forced to start thinking about where it is? As I said before, not only that psychology doesn’t really know how to define creativity as a phenomenon, there is also no consensus about where to look for it. If it sounds weird, let me explain.

If we followed the line of psychological research, the first assumption on creativity was that it is something extraordinary artists possess. They are born with it, they use it, it is part of their persona, some sort of “happy accident” of mother nature that gave a gift to some and left out the most. Well, thanks to this perspective, quite a lot of studies were done to understand what separates these creative geniuses from everyone else. From this research psychology later moved on to examining personality traits, looking for something that would indicate “creativity” in a similar sense we understand intelligence. Despite numerous testing mechanisms that have been developed since the early 20th century, neither of them truly measures what we call creativity. They do measure something, often that something is in one way or another related to creative thinking or expression, but it's not quite there yet.

The question of whether creativity is indeed found in individuals as separate entities has been raised in the 60s. When it became obvious that creativity is heavily dependent on the social context in which it unfolds. So instead of creative persons, psychologists started to measure creative products. (not going into details, but basically, a committee decided whether some outcomes are or aren’t creative based on their education and experience within a certain culture).

Well, that didn’t really seem to solve the dilemma either. People like Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi began to pay more attention to what is actually happening between the individual and the social environment and started studying creative manifestation as a process.

The trouble is, not all process is inspired by creative ideas or results in a creative product, so where is creativity? Is it the environment, the person, the process or the product? Or maybe all of them?

There are areas of psychology that consider the idea that the mind is not limited to the human body. It is much more than that. There have been several concepts and attempts to describe this, and I think when it comes to creativity we are actually up to something here. It doesn’t fully exist in any particular element but as a dynamic interaction between them. We can call it a collective mind, psychodynamic process or use a metaphor of a muse or daimon that is not quite in one's head but inhabits a space in between the worlds and brings inspiration and courage to execute the idea from the unknown dimensions into the material reality.

What a beautiful, beautiful thought!

I took this photo on my way home… It just made me very happy with all the orange and green in the middle of a busy road. A little bit in-between worlds.