The Creative Instinct

Jung describes five basic instinctual groups which he calls in short; hunger, sexuality, the drive to activity, reflection, and last of all, a creative instinct.

As an instinct the creative is a necessity of life, and the satisfaction of its needs a requirement for life. In the human being , creativity, like the other instincts, requires fulfillment. And according to Hillman in Jung's view of man(woman), activity and reflection are not enough, there is a fifth component, as basic in man as hunger and sexuality, the quintessentia of creativity.

Hillman goes onto say Í know of no other psychologist who has so boldly and bluntly declared for the creative as the essence of man(woman) and - ‘'consequently we are led to state that Jungian Psychology is based primarily upon the creative instinct and in turn to infer that Jungian psychology is primarily a creative psychology’'. And according to Jung many of his clients or cases were not suffering from any clinically definable neurosis, but from the senselessness and aimlessness of their lives…the general neurosis of our age’. Thus Jung characterizes therapy, in the same passage, as the process in which ‘'we must follow nature as a guide, and what the doctor then does is less a question of treatment than of developing the creative possibilities latent in the patient himself’'.

We may also conclude says Hillman that the creative as instinct can not be limited to the few, to geniuses and artists. This would be to again confuse the artistic with the creative. If it is a basic instinct along with hunger and sexuality, activity and reflection, then like these, it is given to all. And later he goes on to say if it is given to