The Necessary and Sufficient Conditions of Creativity

The data regarding creativity now exist in the form of random, unrelated insights or as outright disagreements and contradictions. The disorganized state of this evidence prevails largely for two reasons. In the first place, a wide variety of disciplines have investigated the creative process and have tended to emphasize their separate interests. Philosophers, psychologists, scientists, artists, writers, engineers, and businessmen have contributed information, and this information reflects a particular concern. For example, the philosophers tend to discover the grounds for creative productions among the final powers operating in the universe; the psychologists, among the dynamisms of personality functions; the scientists, among the self-regulating forces of protoplasm or of matter; the artists and writers, among the products which they create; the engineers and politicians, among the externally defined needs which they confront; the businessmen and managerial officers, among the interpersonal relations of their organizations. In the second place, the structure of the creative experience itself is very complex and therefore can accommodate widely diverse approaches. It involves components which are unrelated to each other except in this one circumstance. They bear no necessary relations to each other in the external world, that is, outside the bounds of the creative process. To be sure, the creative act is a single event, a highly integrated movement involving the total organism such that during the experience all boundary lines fade, distinctions blur, and the artist experiences himself as one with his materials and his vision. Yet, the creative act is multifaceted as well. It includes psychological, environmental, cultural, physical, and intellectual aspects. The evidence clusters around one or another of these aspects or around one of the methodological approaches to the problem. For example, a large body of evidence has accumulated in connection with the effort to identify the particular personality traits which make for creativity. The assumption is that the creative process can be fully accounted for by providing an exhaustive list of such traits. The psychiatrist, the clinician, and the factor-analyst have shown great interest in explaining creativeness by means of