Psychology of Creativity. Light, Dusk and Dark Night of Soul. Monograph

V.V. Kozlov

PSYCHOLOGY OF CREATIVITY. LIGHT, DUSK AND DARK NIGHT OF SOUL

Monograph

Moscow

IPR Media

2026

3

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank everybody whose energy helped me write this book.

First of all, I want to express my endless gratitude to my wife, Olga Lazaryants, who has already spent 25 years with me, and my children - Nadezda, Varvara and Vadim. They have always given me a feeling of rootedness, which is essential for any kind of work.

I am especially grateful to my research supervisor, Head of the Department of Social and Political Psychology, President of the International Academy of Psychological Sciences, Honored Scientist of Russia, Doctor of Psychological Science, Professor Victor Vasilyevich Novikov.

I am also grateful to Prof. Yuri Arkadievich Bubeev, Igor Pavlovich Volkov, Anatoliy Viktorovich Karpov, Sergei Mikhailovich Kashapov, Nadezhda Klyueva, Vladimir Markovich Lvov, Vladimir Aleksandrovich Mazilov, Gennady Mitrofanovich Manuilov, Haji Magomedovich Nazhmudinov, Valery Yemelianovich Oryol, Viktor Yanukovych Petrenko, Valentin Yevgenyevich Semenov, Nikolai Petrovich Fetiskin, Valery Philipovich Shevchuk for their friendly support and creating an atmosphere of understanding.

Special thanks to Galina Butenko, who has invested a lot of intellectual and emotional energy to the Russian edition of this book.

The most tender feelings of gratitude to my 70 students, candidates and doctors of science, for whom I was a research supervisor and consultant. No doubt, they have been making their own career, blazing their path of life. But their desire to understand the world of psychology has been like a Zen stick for me, it has always reminded me: "Do not sleep”.

I have been creating this text during my training sessions on integrative psychology, which took place all around the world. I am grateful to those who participated and those who organized them for sacralizing my personal space, as they did not bother me while I was working on the book. Special thanks to Konstantin Stolpovskih and Pavel Tarasenko from Novosibirsk, Mary Kuzubova from Almaty, Olga Frolova, Elena Bobrova, Irina Kaminskaya, Svetlana Radionova, Larissa Byzova, Olga Protopopova from Irkutsk, Dmitri and Svetlana Kirich from Chelyabinsk, Natalia Kachanova, Andrei Stepanov, Janna Dvornikova from Minsk, Margarita Barteneva, Alyka Sorokina from Riga, Andrei Sukmanyuk from Moscow, Elena Barkmann from Hamburg and Natalya Eliseikina from Israel.

Yaroslavl, June 2008

5

Chapter 1

Creativity and its Diverse Interpretations

Integrative psychology as a system of knowledge considers a human being to be an inseparable part of the world. Personality is the microcosm of reality, which is perceived and transformed by human mind. Human, in turn, being a part of reality, strives for transformation, development and growth (1).

A person is a field for integration of different projections of the diverse reality which includes natural, social and cultural characteristics at the same time. From the integrative point of view, personality is the unity of the material, the social and the spiritual, i.e. a living being, a spiritual and practical being and a sociocultural being at the same time (1,2).

Creativity is closely connected with self-actualization, which is a desire to discover and develop one's own personal abilities, peculiarities and potentials, and their further realization.

Philosophy and psychology abound in different points of view on the origin, dynamics and peculiarities of self-actualization.

Antique philosopher Zeno of Elea developed the notion of physis, which he defined as the power of nature which makes everything grow and develop.

Nicholas of Kues, a German philosopher, scientist and theologist of the 15th century, associated humanness with unity and eternity. According to him, it is characteristic of unity to develop things in existence from itself, to unfold it. He believed that a human is able to unfold everything from himself, to produce it from within the center of his potential.

Benedict Spinoza, a Dutch philosopher of the 17th century, believed in the perfection of human nature. A person does not see any obstacles in his way to understand his nature and therefore looks for means of attaining perfection. Anything that can serve as a means of attaining perfection is called the good; the highest good is the attainment of perfection together with other people, if it is possible.

The German philosopher of the 18th century Ludwig Feuerbach insisted that a person’s mission is the search of his predestination, which he has managed to choose for himself if he has been fortunate enough, basing on his nature, his abilities and desires. The one who does not choose the predestination for himself, cannot have it.

From the point of view of integrative psychology a human is an extremely complicated and controversial being, which belongs to a variety of spheres, environments and worlds at the same time.

Being a part of nature, he separates himself from it for the sake of self-transformation and growth through transformation of nature itself. Being a part of society, he strives for achievement and development of his unique individuality. He is a part of universal culture, but he has his own view on its transformation and definition of the main values. This is where his desire for innovation in all spheres becomes apparent.

A person is able to exist and develop in different fields and spheres owing to the existence of human consciousness, which has the highest level of integration (1,3).

According to M. Bakhtin, a person never coincides with himself. He does not belong to human race because of the fact that he was born human, he has to "make himself a human". The result of such “making” is personality.

As far back as the beginning of the 20th century, the Russian philosopher N. Berdyaev stated that personality was the result of a long-lasting process, of choosing and excluding everything that was not one’s own “Self”. According to him, a soul is a creative process, it is an activity. Human’s spirit always has to transcend itself, to rise to something that is higher than human. And only then a human is not lost for himself and does not disappear, but instead realizes his potential. A human disappears when he seeks for selfaffirmation and self-satisfaction. He has to perform an act of creativity in relation to himself all the time. It leads to the creation of his personality.

According to the integrative point of view, openness to the world, the ability to self-transcend and orientation to something different than one’s own self are the fundamental characteristics of consciousness and personality.

In spite of the fact that a person is determined by natural and social world, he is able to transcend his own limits and to be a creator. By doing this, personality manifests its freedom and ability to transcend.

6

The ability to transcend as a possibility of getting beyond the limits of social and natural necessity provides him with the power to choose his mode of behavior, activity, emotional and intellectual reaction in different situations independently, i.e. it gives him freedom.

F. Nietzsche’s philosophy transforms the "freedom from something” into the “freedom for something”, which is manifested in self-affirmation and realization of the meaning of life. His superman is, first of all, a creator with a strong, indomitable, "genuine" will, a creator of one's self, of an independent and free personality.

M. Mamardashvili was right to think that all philosophical assertions which contain a term “human” always mean a possible human. It is not some preceding or future state of a human, but his actual state, which does not coincide yet with any of the existing ones.

“Every person has been created by his environment, and ... his existence in it is problematic in the sense that this environment cannot exist, be reproduced and continue its existence independently, all by itself. Every moment of its existence it has to be supplemented with human effort. If it is not, the world disappears. For the world to be reproduced, one has to reproduce the complicated self-development effort, i.e. investment in oneself, in one's aptitude, actions, imagination and thinking”(4).

The result of such investment is the “new” human, “not the one who exists now but the one whose existence is possible, the one who is capable of a fleeting effort similar to a flash of light”, transcending effort which corresponds to the ability or readiness to part with one's own self, with one’s actual state, to come out of one's own shell. ... Individual is always transcending, ... structures of personality contain the source of development which exists in the history of human development, in human culture”.

That is why human is “the only being in the world which is in the constant state of rebirth, and this rebirth occurs only when human manages to put himself inside his own thought, his aspirations, into a kind of magnetic field united by utmost symbols”(4).

Self-actualization is human’s aspiration for personality growth and development. It is a desire to understand the essence the world and , above all, to understand the essence of oneself and one’s predestination.

One of the qualitative features of self-actualization is the ability and intention to create. It is the frantic search of a person who achieved self-actualization, his ability to get into creative and heuristic states of mind that makes him different from other people.

It is characteristic of modern society to generate social demand for the creative personality, i.e. somebody who is able to set himself significant goals as well as suggest original and effective solutions.

The problem of creativity has been exercising people’s minds from the earliest times. And it is still actual because of its mysterious, unsolved character and gnosiological difficulty. The sources and ways of human creativity are inscrutable. I fully share Ushakov’s opinion about creativity. He writes: “Is the existence of laws, which would enable us to describe creativity, possible? If we see creativity as a process, the result of which is deduced from the initial state, than it seems that the answer is no. As only regular, reproducible and , therefore, determinate connection between phenomena, the consequences of which are deducible from its preconditions, can be described with the help of laws”(5). Our knowledge about creativity has esoteric character, it is secret, inner, personal, incomprehensible and hidden. There are no verbal forms of expression at the stage of its execution, i.e. nobody is able to describe what he is actually doing why he is in the flow of creative process.

The ability to create is the most intriguing and mysterious quality of human consciousness. It is an ability to acquire brand new knowledge about human, the world around us and the ways of its transformation, the knowledge which was not available for earlier generations, which is to be obtained and not to be gained cut and dried from our predecessors and contemporaries.

In my opinion, nobody will ever be able to say what sets the process of creative work going and what it really implies. Anything that is said in the attempt to define such a complex phenomenon often turns out to be a lie. It makes the challenge even more attractive. And human character is drawn to impossible tasks.

The significance of creativity is not only psychological. It is also social, economical and even evolutional, as the progress of humanity is directly connected with creative process and those who create. It is the insatiable thirst for creative work that contributes not only to the development of personality but also to the progress of society as a whole and to the development of the world culture. Products of heuristic activity in the form of artwork or highly artistic crystallized spirituality give people strength and lighten the way to new horizons, to the truth and perfection.

7

There are different opinions on the qualities of creative personality. Researchers emphasize that it is impossible to consider creator’s activity in isolation from his personality, as “whatever artwork we consider, it is always inspired by individual experience, feelings and thoughts: they always incarnate the inner world of a person”(V.I. Andreev, 2006), and , consequently, the results of creative work are influenced not only by the character of creative process, but by the personality of the creator.

Creative personality has been studied by Russian and foreign scientists: S.L. Rubinshtein, V.I. Andreev, D.B. Bogoyavlenskaya, N.I. Kruglikov, A.N. Luk, I.M. Rozet, M. Arnaudov, P. Vaicvaig, K. Tailor, E. Lawrence, L. Hall and others.

The following qualities are singled out by different authors as characteristic of the creative personality:

1.Peculiarities of perception (extraordinary attention, perceptiveness, impressionability), intellectual peculiarities (intuition, imagination, inventiveness, the gift of prevision, extensive knowledge), peculiarities of character (ability to avoid commonplace, originality, persistence, high level of selforganization, great capacity for work) (Y.A. Ponomaryov);

2.Cognition as the primary motivation; research activity, which is manifested in the ability to discover something new and to set and solve problems; the ability to find original solutions, to predict and anticipate, to create ideal models of great aesthetic, moral and intellectual value (A.M. Matyushkin);

3.Intellectual activity, which integrates mental and motivational factors (D.B. Bogoyavlenskaya);

4.Ability to recognize problem tasks, ability to shorten the line of reasoning, integrity of perception, selective perception and memory, flexibility in thinking, ability to assess a situation, ability to generate new ideas easily, fluent speech, ability to rework, improve and complete, ability to find associations, a good sense of humor (A.N. Luk);

5.Motivational and creative activity along with a high level of creative abilities (V.I. Andreev);

6.Capability to take actions, which are beyond the boundaries of common phenomena, but do not contradict natural laws, ability to anticipate, rich imagination, intuition, showing interest to everything new and unusual (P.Torrence);

7.Independence, tendency to risk, vitality, curiosity, dissatisfaction with the existing state of things, original thinking, willingness to make decisions, desire to gain general acceptance, inner motivation, willingness to grow (K. Taylor, E. Row);

8.Ability to find and formulate alternatives, to show imagination, to phrase questions and avoid ambiguous,vague and superficial wordings, persistence, independence, willingness to take risks, a good sense of humor, showing active interest in the problem under study (A.Mateiko);

9.Aspiration for self-actualization, absorption in one’s work, personal authenticity, self-reliance, zeal and flexibility, critical mind and high level of reflection (A. Maslow);

Some people see creativity as a "blessing from above". Some believe that it is the God who guides the hand and mind of people when they create.

Others think that creativity is an exceptional natural aptitude, and there are those who consider creativity to be a particular state of consciousness.

There is no single true explanation of the essence of creative work. In psychological, philosophical and pedagogical literature we come across various definitions of creativity.

Hegel considered creativity to be a dialectical self-development of an individual.

According to the American scholar P. Hill, creative work can be defined as a successful flight of thought beyond the boundaries of the unknown. It supplements our knowledge and contributes to the creation of things which we have been ignorant of before.

The well-known Russian philosopher A. Mateiko believes that the essence of creative process is that existing experience is being reorganized and serves as a basis for new combinations.

The psychologist Y.A. Ponomaryov interprets creative work as “an interaction, which leads to development”(1976). He sees creative act as a part of intellectual activity. Considering it in the light of conscious and unconscious mechanisms, he suggests the following scheme: at the initial stage, the stage of problem setting, consciousness is active; then, at the stage of problem solving, it is unconsciousness that becomes active; the third stage, i.e. selection and verification stage, is again done by consciousness (6).

According to N.Y. Khryasheva (2000), creative ability, which has a specific character and leads to generation of something new, is one of the most important conditions for self-actualization and adaptation in the modern world. The inner source and potential, which makes this process possible, is creativity.

8

L.S. Vigotski wrote: "apart from the activity characterized by reproduction of the existing, one observes another kind of activity, i.e. activity characterized by combination or creative activity..." (1997). The ability to generate original ideas, to avoid traditional ways of thinking, to solve problem situation quickly has been singled out as a peculiar one in the course of experimental investigation. Such an ability has been called creativity (Tunik, 1997). Creativity is manifested in quickness, flexibility, exactness and originality of thinking, in rich imagination, a good sense of humor, cherishing aesthetic values, analytical ability. Self-control and self-reliance are important conditions for this ability to be demonstrated. Creative person is able to participate in the process of change, to reject conventional ideas and see the actual state of things, making it possible to realize his potential (Khryasheva). It emphasizes the essential role of creative activity of personality in the process of socialization in the changing world.

According to D.N. Zavalishnaya, creative act consists in "crossing the boundaries” of the initial level of psychic activity, in transforming the situation, in enabling (or forming) new “layers”or “planes” of mind.

As a result, the process of work becomes multidimensional and flexible.

Z.Freud considered creative activity to be the result of sublimation, i.e. transferring sexual desire onto another field of activity. According to his theory, the basis of any creative act is an objectified sexual fantasy expressed in a socially acceptable form.

E. Fromm interpreted creativity as an ability to be surprised and to learn, to find solutions for nonstandard situations, as well as to aim at discovering something new and to analyse one’s own experience.

The American psychologist M.Henle believed that a decision was creative only when its novelty was a reflection of some aspect of the harmony of nature.

R. Assagioli considered creative work to be a process of attaining the “ideal Self”, or a means of selfdisclosure. One of the basic psychological mechanisms of creativity is a positive reorganization of one’s own experience. The process of creative work includes intuition, verbalization and formalization.

Unfortunately, modern psychology considers the process of creation only as a condition for selfdevelopment, self-improvement and moral dignity, as the “highest peak of spiritual living”. Such analysis is one-sided, and it leads to idealization. While creation, like any other processes, includes a great number of negative, destructive elements. Comprehensive analysis should imply revealing not only the positive sides of creative activity, but also its stagnation (or dusk) and destructivity (or its dark, seamy side).

Each discovery implies changing the usual order of things. Who said that the creator who had crossed the boundaries of the initial system of knowledge, understanding, perception or notion, had to be on "the highest peak of spiritual living"? He could easily find himself lonely, abandoned and desperate.

Traditionally, the notion of “creativity” has been used to designate the creation of a new, culturally significant product, as well as the discovery of new ways of setting and solving a problem (Gilford, 1967; Torrence, 1966; Maryushkin,1972).

According to the definition, generally accepted in Russian psychology, creative work is an activity which breeds something qualitatively new, original and socially and historically unique. It is said to be true for any sphere of creative activity, i.e. science, technology, art, etc.

There is a great number of contemporary psychologists and philosophers who treat creative state as an exceptional state, as a result of a special gift and uniqueness of a person.

I believe that it is existentially predestined that every moment of his or her life a person is creating, meaning that he or she is involved in the creation and semantic reconstruction of reality.

Human existence, his “being in the world” is connected with creative activity of human consciousness, i.e. creation of reality.

It is not “creatureliness” that is the fundamental characteristic of human, but "creatorliness", which expresses itself in creativity in thinking, emotions and behavior, - in playing, studying and working, in sport, art, science and language. Moreover, creation is the basis of life, it is the essential feature of functioning and development of any living system. Human not only creates the world around him, he creates himself in it.

Integrative cross-paradigm research involving psychology, philosophy, linguistics, art and physics can produce the most significant findings on the theory of creation. It is this fusion of disciplines that can provide the most effective solution for this problem.

I agree with the point of view of A.V. Brushlinski, who does not single out creativity as a peculiar element of psyche but considers it to be the fundamental characteristic of thinking. He argues that thinking plays the dominant role in the process of creation. “Thinking is always, at least to some degree, a search and

9

a discovery of something new (new to a particular individual), therefore it is always more or less productive, creative and independent"(7).

Human beings are doomed to “creatorliness” owing to the mere fact of their existence in the world: they are doomed to creating reality through sensations, emotions, images, symbols and sign systems.

The most important human game is the one of consciousness with reality. Human consciousness becomes a part of world structure, and objectified existence, in its turn, enters the inner world of a person. Creative process is always characterized by a complex object-subject relationship between human, his state of consciousness and the object of creation. It is a unity of cognition and transformation.

No doubt, reality is always subjective and it is always a result of the interaction between human and objectified environment on the cognitive level (introspection, reflection), emotional level (feeling, personification, animation) and motor behavioral level (cognition of the world and oneself through motor activity).

Creativity has an objective character in the sense that the real world which includes material, social and spiritual phenomena, tasks, social necessities, manifests itself in creation. And creation, to some extent, is stimulated, started up by social demand.

At the same time, experiments involving the use of hypostimulation and hyperstimulation methods, which induce altered states of mind, show that creativity can be indifferent to the objective reality, even to such fundamental characteristics as time and space.

Consciousness is an active, open , integral, self-developing, unstructured energetic space, which is able to fill the inner and outer reality with meaning, attitude, feeling and action. Consciousness is making our existence possible every moment of our life.

Eventually, it does not matter whether the objective reality exists or not. Society and material reality are important, but the one who creates is even more important. Here we can cite thousands of examples, but we will cite just one, a conversation between Newton and Conduit (his biographer).

Conduit: Could you please tell me how you created your telescope? Newton: I made it myself.

Conduit: But where have you got tools to make it?

Newton: I made them myself – if I had been waiting that somebody would make tools or something else for me, I would have never made anything...(8)

10