The Nature of the Creative Process
Excerpt - Rosemary Gordon
I was attracted to Jung’s theories by the seriousness with which he treated man’s(woman’s) need to create and the importance he gave to this need. As early as 1929 Jung had actually classified creativity as one of the five main instincts characteristic of man, the other four being hunger, sexuality, the drive to activity and reflection.
What then is creativity? What might be its nature and quality? Before I go any further I want to make it quite clear that it is my belief that the process of creation will always retain an element of mystery; and I doubt that we shall ever fully penetrate into it. But we may gain more understanding of those conditions and circumstances—external and internal, personal and social—in which the mystery of creation can and may happen.
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Nor is it justified to identify the ‘creative’ with the ‘artistic’, for creativity can function in relation to many different activities, including the sciences, technology, a person’s relationship to others—human, animal and inanimate—as well as in his relationship to himself and in particular to his own growth and development. Thus it is important to keep in mind the difference between (a) the creative process, and (b) the product of the creative process. It is true that artists, probably more than anyone else, have been interested and concerned with the actual process and the actual experience of the process of creation and have thus provided many insights; furthermore, making ‘art’ involves perhaps a particularly large number of different mental activities such as making, forming, inventing, discovering, learning, experimenting, feeling, thinking and doing. Consequently much of the little we know about the nature of the creative process we owe to the self-examination and introspective work of artists.
Essential to and underlying the creative process is the search for meaning; and meaning, so it seems to me, evolves out of a synthesis of the process of differentiation and ordering on the one hand and the making and discovering of something new on the other. It is thus inseparable from the capacity for awe and wonder and from the courage to be genuinely available to any kind of experience, however unfamiliar, new, bewildering or unknowable it may be.
Engagement in a creative process depends, I believe, on a person’s capacity to mobilise contradictory but mutually reciprocal qualities: activity and passivity; consciousness and unconsciousness; masculinity and femininity; receptivity and productivity. The interaction and interdependence of these contradictory qualities emerge clearly when one looks at the stages of the creative process as these have been discovered and identified by researchers, artists and scientists. Nearly all of them seem to agree that there are four of them; but their relative importance or their relative duration may vary from one person to another, from one activity or discipline to another, or even from one particular creative act to another in the same person. What is more, the process may be a continuing one, so that the last stage in one work or one part of a work can lead on to the first stage in the next phase of a work, or to an altogether new work. In other words, these four stages have to be recognised as elastic and merely as schematic descriptions of the process of creation.