philosophy and psychology of creativity

[Ivo Banaco]

Hi Adam,
Very interesting. I know you are familiar with the work of A. Whitehead. One
contemporary approach that I am finding particularly useful is the work of
Eugene Gendlin, namely his Focusing approach and Thinking at the Edge.
Behind those techniques are a very robust philosophical work that includes
the book "Experiencing and the Creation of Meaning" and "A Process Model".
As far as I understand it, Gendlin has a pretty good way of finding not just
in theoretical terms but in his therapeutic practice creativity. Concepts
and experiences like "the Edge", "felt sense", "the implicit", "carrying
forward" and so on are essential in his work. Above all, his practice, as I
understanding it, always goes beyond the typical pre-ego material, but opens
the space to a creativity process that is inherently post-ego. Should be
interesting to explore the bridge between your own work with Gendlin's.

Ivo





On Mon, Jul 13, 2009 at 4:15 PM, Adam Blatner <ablatner at verizon.net> wrote:

>  The philosophy of creativity is radical, because it requires a fine
> tuning of a particular variable.
>     To be spontaneous, one of the components that gives rise to creativity,
> one must open, and believe that there is something to which one opens, a
> kind of "there," a muse, a god, a spirit, an unconscious that can be
> creative, whatever it's called, it's trans-personal, beyond the ego and its
> controls or even the capacity to talk about or define what is opened to.
> It's a kind of surrender.
>
>     And yet there is a tendency in the psyche to grasp that which one has
> opened to, to name it, try to define it, language it (language here being
> used as a verb!), know what it is. Yet as soon as one crystallizes that
> which one opens to, it becomes a bit of a cultural conserve, and interferes
> with further opening.
>
>     So the trick is to "believe" enough to open, to allow that connection
> with whatever mysterious source it may be to operate; yet not to believe so
> much that you begin to believe that you know what you're believing in,
> because whatever you think it is, it's more, and it's different from your
> limited understanding.
>
>       My tentative solution is to cultivate imagination as an intentional
> act, to know you're playing, imagining, to have that extra surplus reality
> "frame" around it, to put it into virtual parentheses, a working model, a
> scaffold for intuition. Yet, though you use it, you're more than ready to
> deconstruct the scaffold in the service of building another one, a different
> possibility, allowing for creative deconstruction and re-construction,
> re-opening.
>
>      Still, this model itself is tentative, and I'm open to feedback as I
> wrestle with what seems to me to be some paradoxes of creativity.
>
>     Warmly, Adam
> Adam Blatner, M.D.
>    website: www.blatner.com/adam/
>
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>
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