ON CREATIVE EXPERIENCE

ERNEST G. SCHACHTEL
New York

It is only fairly recently, especially in the last twenty or thirty years,

that the words &dquo;creative&dquo; and &dquo;creativity&dquo; have appeared with in-
creasing frequency in books, in popular and professional magazines
and in newspapers. They have become popular especially in the met-
ropolitan middle class. There is a formerly unheard of demand and
longing for &dquo;creativity.&dquo; Higher and adult education try to meet this
demand by courses in &dquo;creative writing,&dquo; by poets and artists in resi-
dence at colleges and universities, by art courses for non-artists, and
by courses and seminars on creative living, creative encounter, spon-
taneous and/or creative behavior and the like. What is it that has

given rise to this sudden preoccupation with and thirst for &dquo;creativity&dquo;?
The answer to this question would require not only a psychological
analysis of the personalities and lives of those who feel this longing
and of those who do not quite know what they feel and are either
vaguely dissatisfied and seek a remedy or a promise in what also may
appeal to them as part of the current scene and fashion; but it would
also require a socio-psychological analysis of our whole society out of
which their dissatisfaction and quest have grown. I believe that a
major cause of these longings lies in the alienation of man from him-
self, from his fellow men, from his work and from nature, and in the
consequent dreariness and coercion characterizing the lives of so many.
The same dissatisfaction, arising from the meaninglessness, boredom
or hopelessness of life felt by so many, has given rise to the phenomena

of the beatniks, the hippies, the search for artificial excitements and
&dquo;highs,&dquo; and to the many other forms in which the quest for a more
meaningful and satisfying way of life has found expression-though
usually not fulfillment.
1
Requests for reprints should be sent to Dr. Ernest G. Schachtel, 315 West 106th
Street, New York, N.Y. 10025.

26
A noticeable change in the social position of the artist, the poet,
the writer is related to this new longing for creativity. At the turn of
the 18th to the 19th century they were the Boheme, looked upon by
the solid citizen with ambivalent feelings of envy (usually repressed),
curiosity and scorn or patronizing condescension. Today, this ambiva-
lence still exists in large parts of the population; but many members
of the metropolitan, educated middle class have enthroned the artist
and writer, and many envy him and look up to him because they con-
sider his life more meaningful than theirs. The envy is now more
conscious, while the disdain and patronizing derogation have been
driven more underground and are permitted to appear only toward
either the unsuccessful or toward those who, like the hippies, while
not being artists or writers, seem to have adopted much of the pattern
of life of the erstwhile Bohème and share its scorn for the life of the
bourgeois, the square, the organization man.

CREATIVE PRODUCTION AND CREATIVE EXPERIENCE

To become an artist, writer, poet, composer, creative thinker or scien-

tist obviously requires more than the longing-however genuine and
strong-to lead a meaningful life. It requires special talents, skills
and interests which only relatively few are blessed or burdened with
and which even fewer have the opportunity to develop. Thus, it would
seem that for most the quest for creativity, for a creative life is futile,
a blind alley leading nowhere. But this is so only if we restrict the

meaning of creativity to the production of a work that embodies what

the writer or artist felt and thought, such as a poem or a painting.
However, there is another meaning of creativity for which I have
suggested the term &dquo;creative experience.&dquo; Creative experience is a pre-
requisite of creative production, but it occurs much more often and in
many more people, potentially in all men but the most severely stunted,
without leading to a visible creative product separate from its creator.
While some creative works enlarge the scope and depth of human
experience, creative experience widens and deepens only the horizon
of the person in whom it occurs. Thus, it is both related to and dif-
ferent from creative production. This widening of one’s horizon implies
more than just an added piece of knowledge, such as the learning of
a fact or a word that one did not know before. Thus, creative experi-

ence is not identical with learning. While some kinds of learning can
be a creative experience, others are not. And while the concept of
learning is popularly a narrow one, confined to the acquisition of
knowledge and skills, creative experience can, but need not occur in
such learning as well as in any encounter: with another person, with
nature, with hitherto unknown aspects or potentialities of oneself,
27
with a work of art or literature, with religious or mystical experience,
with a problem in science or in living, and so forth. It may occur in
the form of a brief glimpse of something one had never thought of,
perceived, done or felt before; or-if one stays with it-it may grow
into a more enduring and developing part of oneself and one’s world.

CONDITIONS OF CREATIVE EXPERIENCE

OPENNESS TOWARD WORLD AND SELF

Openness toward new experiences and the capacity to play are impor-
tant conditions for the occurrence of creative experience; integration
of the experience in the life and world of the person is a condition for
its lasting fruitfulness. The biologist Adolf Portmann (1951) has shown
that openness toward the world (Welto$enheit) constitutes an essential
aspect of being human, which differentiates between men and animals.
This openness is apparent in two major aspects of man. The newborn
infant, compared with the newborns of the most highly developed
mammals, has far fewer innate reaction patterns at his disposal and
because of this is much more helpless than e.g. the newborn monkey,
kid, calf or foal. But, as Portmann writes, &dquo;the free play of the limbs
which gives the human nursling so much richer possibilities than the
newborn monkey or ape reminds us that our state at birth is not simply
helpless but is characterized by a significant freedom.&dquo;
This freedom of movement, of ways of approaching and handling,
physically, objects of the environment, increases in the first year of
life together with the equally significant and far-reaching freedom
(openness) in experiencing, perceiving, thinking about the environ-
ment and its infinite variety of objects. Although from the lowest to
the most highly developed animals there is a considerable increase in
the relative richness of the Urrcwelt (ambient world) accessible to the
animal, by and large all animals are embedded in and tied to their
instinctive organization and the closed and narrow Uynwelt corre-
sponding to this organization. Only the relatively few objects signifi-
cant within this organization become accessible to them and-again
with relatively limited exceptions-only those aspects of these objects
that are relevant for the animal’s ability to satisfy his instinctive needs.
In contrast to this, man’s openness toward the world permits him
to see a potentially infinite variety of objects and a great many differ-
ent aspects of each object which significantly transcend those that are

indispensable for his survival. In other words, man’s ambient world is

potentially always expandable and inexhaustible. To the extent that
he makes use of and develops his openness toward the world, there
are no inherent limits set to him. He can learn, see and experience

28
as much as he wants and as his time on earth
permits him. This free-
dom for experience is limited only by native endowment, opportunity,
individual development of personality structure, choice, and by the
finiteness of man’s life. These limitations should not be minimized:
no man can develop all his potentialities; and the chances of realizing
at least some of them are very much greater for some than for others,
due to the conditions of the environment (human and socio-economic)
in which they grow up.
Openness toward the world is not possible without openness toward
oneself; the two complement each other. By openness towards oneself
I mean the capacity to allow one’s whole person with all one’s capacities
and sensibilities to be receptive and responsive to the world. Such
openness is not possible where there is severe repressiveness, excessive
control, stringent rules, fear or anxiety, strong need tensions, or other
factors that interfere with the free play of thoughts, feelings, senses,
action, attention and sensibilities. It is obvious that any stringent
restriction of these and other capacities narrows or blocks the ap-
proaches to and the perspectives on the object of one’s interest. It is
no accident that, according to Freud’s observation, artists show what

he calls a &dquo;looseness of repression.&dquo; Marked repressiveness cripples the

capacity for experience and limits the range and quality of experience.
For anybody who has observed young children it is obvious that
this openness toward the world is at its peek in early childhood and
that no later period in life can compare with the eagerness, curiosity,
joy, zest, and persistence with which the young child (unless, like the
institutionalized infants described by Rents Spitz, the child has been
stunted by being deprived of responsive mothering) explores the world,
including his own body, and tries out and exercises his developing
physical and mental capacities. He is not daunted by his innumerable
failures e.g. in learning to sit up, stand, walk, and in experimenting
with what he can do with the various objects of the environment, be-
cause these &dquo;failures,&dquo; as John Holt has pointed out, do not yet have
the dire connotations that failure acquires later on in school, in rela-
tion to parents and peers, and to a competitive society-namely, the
meaning of disgrace, shame, or of a crime that will be punished. More
learning, most of it spontaneous, takes place in this period than in any
period of similar duration in later life, and probably for most people
no later period compares in sensory, intellectual and emotional inter-

est, honesty and vividness with these first years.

Creative experience is likely to occur only to the extent that this
early openness toward the world or at least some of it persists, in some-
what changed forms, later in life and has not been completely stifled
by the fear of disapproval, humiliation, and of being shamed by par-
ents, teachers, or peers; by the fear of failure in their eyes and one’s

29
own; by the fear of rejection and ostracism; by the fear of uncertainty
of the new and of the unknown; by the fear of being, thinking or
feeling differently from those whose approval one wants and whose dis-
approval one fears, differently from how one imagines they would want
one to be, think and feel. These and other fears often lead to the
internalization of the standards and ways of those whose approval,
love and respect one wants. Such internalization usually implies or
results in defensive restriction of openness toward the world and in
areas of repression, i.e. of not knowing, not seeing, not feeling certain
facts and of having to preserve these taboos on learning about the
forbidden areas. This, in turn, may lead to a generalized fear of all
areas or occasions in which one is not sure that one is or will be &dquo;right&dquo;
in the sense-not of objective criteria-but of sureness of being ap-
proved by others.

THE SIGNIFICANCE OF FREE PLAY

Openness toward new experience that will widen and deepen one’s
life and thus become creative experience requires openness toward the
world as well as toward oneself. It is implemented by the free play of
thought, of the senses, of feeling, and action, by the freedom of ap-
proach, as contrasted to stereotyped ways of dealing with or excluding
potentially new experience. Play is widely considered as the opposite
of seriousness, and many adults look upon the exploratory play of the
young child with an indulgent or condescending smile as something
cute or nice, as the opposite of what they consider as serious: earning
a living, being &dquo;a success,&dquo; and so forth. But what could be more im-

portant than the child’s unending attempts to find out about the world,
to make sense of it, to explore and relate to the many objects and as-

pects of his environment?

Particularly important in these eager and playful, ever-repeated,
varied and renewed attempts to discover the world and his place in it
is the infant’s play with the responsive mother, touching and being
touched, bounced, mutual nuzzling, looking, smiling, vocalizing, a
play of endless delight if all goes well. In it the child discovers his
capacity to evoke a response, to give and receive affection, pleasure,
joy and gratification in the very act of mutual relatedness. This mutual
play with the mothering one, often also with the father, older siblings,
and others, is later increasingly supplemented by the child’s attempt
to learn about the ways of the grown-ups and of the bigger children,
to find out what they do, feel, think, are and to try it on for fit as it
were, to learn how it is done and how it might feel. Thus the child
develops his own capacities and explores some of the practically in-
exhaustible possibilities of living, thinking, perceiving, feeling and
30
acting in a world that expands to the extent that the child and the
growing man are allowed to develop and use that freedom of explora-
tion which is inherent in man’s innate potential to be open toward the
world.
Whatever the role of physical or instinctual wants is in the origins
of human thought, a role stressed especially by Freud, I am convinced
that at least equally important is the role of free, exploratory play. In-
deed, anybody who observes infants and young children (and also the
young of some higher animals) can see that the periods of exploratory
play, of nascent and increasing interest in their environment occur
when the child is free from tensions, be they tensions of pressing needs
like hunger or thirst, or tensions of fear, discomfort or anxiety. To be
sure, in the newborn such moments are brief. The sudden transition
from intra-uterine to extra-uterine existence is such a tremendous up-
heaval that the newborn is full of &dquo;crying needs&dquo; when he does not
sleep. Hence, his crying and his neediness and helplessness are the most
striking features of his life, features that call forth the mother’s tender-
ness and care. Thus, it is easy to underestimate the significance of the
fact that already in the newborn nursling there are moments of awake-
ness that are relatively free from such needs and that it is in these
moments that we see him gazing at light, or at something colorful or
something moving, that we see him touching things and can observe
the free and pleasurable, playful exercise of his arms, legs, fingers.
These at first brief moments increase rapidly in frequency and duration
during the first few years. It is at these times that the incredibly rich
and varied learning and exploring of the young child takes place,
including learning to crawl, walk, to speak, to get acquainted with
the objects of his environment, with what one can do with them and
how they feel, taste and look, and how people and animals respond.
Such exploratory play widens the child’s horizons and thus leads to
creative experience, to discovery and integration of the newly dis-
covered in the child’s growing world and to the growth of his capaci-
ties. A very important task of parental care is to provide for these
tension-free periods and to encourage the child’s exploratory play,
to provide Spielraum, i.e. the kind of stimulation, space, time, security
in which the child feels free to play and experiment.
What is true of the child is, in somewhat changed forms and cir-
cumstances, also true of man. Only when man is free to play in thought,
feeling, sensing, experiment, exploration, imagination and so forth,
is he likely to have creative experiences. And this freedom for explo-
ratory play exists in direct proportion to his freedom from fear, need,
anxiety, from rigid and stereotyped views, routines, habits, and from
compulsive needs as, for example, competitive needs to succeed, to be
right, to make no mistakes, etc. The creative moments of thinking
31
occur not when we try to be strictly logical or remain tied to what we
have learned but when we are able to permit the free play of thought,
feel free to look at a familiar object with fresh, unfettered eyes, to
walk with open senses and mind, receptive to all impressions and not
blinded by the tacit assumption that what we have seen or thought
in one way a thousand times in the past is all there is to it, thus closing
our mind to new perspectives andapproaches.
Free, exploratory play is notarbitrary nor does it run wild. It is
object-centered in that its purpose is to get acquainted with its object,
to relate to it, to try out what can be done with it, how to make sense
of it, and to see whether, where and how it fits in with one’s world.
I am using the word &dquo;object&dquo; here in a wider than its usual sense.
Anything can become the object of exploratory play: a thing, a word,
a person, an animal, a
part of one’s body, an idea, a feeling, a rela-
tionship, a different way of using one’s body or one’s mind such as
for example in learning to walk, bicycle, swim, read, and so forth.
The two main functions of exploratory play are 1) to get steeped in,
acquainted with the various aspects of the object of play, 2) to discover
its connections with and relations to oneself and to other objects, its
place in one’s universe. These two functions may be conceptualized
as two phases of exploratory play. But they do not necessarily follow
each other-they usually go on simultaneously or alternately.
In those adults who have retained the interest in and capacity for
such exploratory play it tends to be or at least appears as more focused
than the child’s. Such focusing has its advantages and its dangers. The
advantage is that it tends to cut out a lot of what seems to be ir-
relevant data. The danger, especially apparent in some highly special-
ized people, is that by narrowing the focus too much one may miss
decisive, new and unexpected aspects of the object and of its relation
to and place among other objects, and thus bar the way to discovery
of a new and unexpected significance of or perspective on the object.
What to the adult would appear as distracting and irrelevant &dquo;noise&dquo;
and, at best, lead to what has been called &dquo;incidental learning&dquo; (that is
learning that was not intended), to the child appears in quite a dif-
ferent light because in his eager attempts to explore the world around
him anything can become of interest at any time without being ex-
perienced as confusing or distracting. The concept of incidental learn-
ing does not fit the young child’s situation because, while his world
is as yet narrower than the adult’s, the scope of what can arouse his
interest and curiosity is relatively much wider: nothing is incidental,
everything can become grist for his mill at any moment. This does not
mean that he may not be fascinated with any object for several min-
utes or even half an hour or more.

32
CREATIVE EXPERIENCE AND LEARNING ABOUT
CULTURE AND SOCIETY

Neither child nor man has to start out anew and discover by himself
all that it has taken mankind many thousands of years to discover,
build and develop. A fundamental difference between man and
animal is that man creates a culture which is transmitted from one
generation to the next and is changed and developed by succeeding
generations. While the objects of nature, organic and inorganic, seem
to be independent of culture, the perspective from which they are

experienced may be and usually is different in each culture and sub-

culture, including even such relatively small sub-cultures as the city
(compared with the nation) and the family. Thus, while nature is not
part of culture, man’s experience of and attitude toward nature are
part of his culture. The transmission of the culture into which he is
born and of some of the knowledge that mankind has accumulated is
essential for the growth and development of each child and continues
to be important and desirable throughout life even though, unfortu-

nately, for most people such transmission stops at an early age from
when on they tend to remain tied to and embedded in a rather narrow
and often rigid pattern and lose interest in seeing beyond this pattern.
The ways in which the transmission of the culture takes place, and
the ways in which each person gets acquainted with the culture of his
society-the ways of learning about the culture-are numerous and
often highly complex. All children, except the most severely stunted,
start out with eagerness and curiosity to learn about the ways of the
grown-ups, i.e. their culture, and about the products of the culture
which surround them. I want to draw attention here to a vital dif-
ference between learning about the culture, about some aspect or part
of it, as a creative experience and learning about it in ways that dis-
courage or otherwise prevent such experience. Two quotations from
Goethe express the decisive point about this difference. In Faust I
he says:

What from your fathers you received as heir

Acquire if you would possess it.
What is not used is but a load to bear;
But if today creates it, we can use and bless it.

And in the opening, first aphorism of his book Maxims and Reflections
he writes: &dquo;Everything intelligent has already been thought, one must
only try to think it again.&dquo; Only if one makes something that is handed
down to one by the culture truly one’s own, only if one re-thinks and
re-experiences it, only when thereby it becomes part of oneself does

33
such learning become a creative experience which widens one’s horizon
or produces a change in oneself or one’s outlook. If one just learns it
by rote or out of intimidation, if true learning is supplanted by drill,
if it remains without meaning for one’s life, it is dead ballast, useless
and &dquo;but a load to bear&dquo;; or worse, such a load may become a source
of coercion and anxiety and thus narrow or block rather than widen
one’s view.
The freedom for exploratory play is essential for the kind of learn-
ing in which one acquires something in the sense of making it one’s
own. This implies the freedom of questioning, changing or being

critical of that which is handed down to us in the transmission of

culture. Indeed, creative thought is based on questioning, on wanting
to find out. Unquestioning &dquo;acceptance&dquo; is not real acceptance, does
not enlarge one’s horizon, is not creative experience. Of course, all of
us inevitably accept a great deal without questioning it. Life is too

short to explore everything.

THE RELATIONSHIP OF FREE EXPLORATORY PLAY

TO LOGIC AND REALITY
It sounds like the most obvious commonplace that, unless our thoughts
and views are logical and correspond to reality, they will be mistaken
and invalid. However, should exploratory play be tied down too
closely to logic and reality, it would no longer be free and would be
unlikely to lead either to creative experience or to discovery. As
Susanne Langer has pointed out, logic is not a way of thinking and not
the ground of validity, but a measure of validity. New thoughts, per-
ceptions, intuitions are not created by logic but by the constant sym-
bolic activity of the mind. Such symbolic activity may be more or less
free or constrained or compulsive. If, at every step, I ask myself
whether my thought is logical, I am unlikely to be free for new ex-
perience, new thought, discovery. The place of logic is in the testing
of what occurs to the mind in its activity, not in its tentative, ex-
ploratory play which may or may not be consistent with logic.
To the naive mind what is reality seems to be quite obvious. Yet,
the question of what is real and whether man can know reality has
occupied philosophy from its beginnings to the present day. In the
present context I mean by reality common-sense reality. The person
who stays too closely tied to common-sense reality is unlikely to dis-
cover anything new. He is also unlikely to make actively his own
what the culture transmits to him, rather than passively taking it for
granted. Our view of reality and especially common-sense reality is
the product of our senses and our culture, that is of the social order
into which we are born and in which we grow up. Thus, reality is a
34
most complex and slippery concept, although it is very often used as
though it were the obvious and final answer to any question. Com-
mon-sense reality is the way things are supposed to be and what they
are supposed to mean in a
given culture, society or social group-for
instance, family
a which may have its own taken-for-granted view of
what and how things are supposed to be. A good deal of this common-
sense reality usually is a myth although not recognized as such by the
social group or society that has produced or inherited it.
Being too closely tied to common-sense reality will make it difficult
if not impossible to look at and think about anything with an open
mind. Indeed, the mind completely tied to common-sense reality and
its presumed logic resembles a horse harnessed so that it has no free-
dom of movement, with blinders preventing it from seeing what is
going on around it and only allowing it to see straight ahead, forced
by its rider to go in the direction he has decided to guide it. I am
afraid that most of us, most of the time, do just this to our own minds
and to the minds of our children and students, unless we realize the
progressive and creative power of the free play of the mind and its
decisive importance for creative experience and productive learning,
both in the acquisition of the culture and knowledge transmitted to
us, and in enriching, changing or transcending it.

THE INTEGRATION OF CREATIVE EXPERIENCE

Unless new experience, discovery, and learning are integrated with the
total life, thought and experience of the person, their isolation con-
demns them to sterility or oblivion and thus to the loss of their
creative potential. The work of integration starts in the free, ex-
ploratory play when many tentative connections are made between
the new object and earlier experience, thought, feeling and action.
These tentative connections are then tested and re-tested; in the
scientist’s work by experiment and logic; in the artist’s or poet’s by
their sensitive judgment whether something &dquo;works,&dquo; is &dquo;right&dquo; or
not; in the child’s expanding world by the continued trying out, check-
ing, pursuing, questioning, testing tentative &dquo;answers&dquo; or ways of
acting by play-acting and by observing how it feels and how others
will react to it. This is not so different in the adult who is still learning
and growing. Assimilation and integration of the new element may
require on rare and crucial occasions an internal revolution, a major
re-casting of one’s thinking, feeling or way of life. More often it will
mean the working out and establishing of the relations between the
new element and one’s total world and way of thinking.
The lack or failure of such integration prevents the new experience
from becoming creative. The assimilation of the new element to one’s
35
own thinking and feeling, or to one’s physical ways of being, moving,
acting-as in the case of learning a new skill or a new way of doing
something that one has done differently before-and its integration
in one’s life are decisive criteria of creative learning and experience.
They are in contrast to mere rote-learning, &dquo;learning&dquo; through in-
timidation, in order to get by, to avoid fear, anxiety, disapproval,
failure, conflict, and so forth.

THE STIFLING OF CREATIVE EXPERIENCE

Unfortunately, it is very easy to limit, starve, stifle and eventually kill

the child’s eagerness to discover the world and to develop his capaci-
ties, his thirst for growth through creative experience. It is done all
the time by parents, schools, teachers, peers, and by our society. Franz
Kafka had this in mind when he wrote: &dquo;Probably all education is but
two things, first, parrying of the ignorant children’s impetuous attempt
to conquer the truth and, second, gentle, imperceptible, step-by-step
initiation of the humiliated children into the lie.&dquo; The adults’ reasons
and motivations for this are many, often unconscious: fear, concern,
worry, ignorance and lack of understanding, need for power and status,
shame, self-protection against being seen as one is, fear of being found
wrong, ignorant, afraid, helpless, not as powerful and omniscient as
some grown-ups want to be seen by children and as especially the

young child is apt to see them. Of course, the adults themselves develop
some of these attitudes because they have been exposed to similar

pressures in their own childhood and continue to feel them, rightly

or wrongly, in relation to their peers, superiors and to society in gen-
eral.
While the presence of one or the other of these attitudes is very
widespread in the entire population, its effect is especially massive
and destructive among the poor and among oppressed minorities.
These groups typically internalize the negative attitudes to them of
their oppressors who foist these attitudes on them in innumerable
gross and subtle ways. This undermines their self-confidence and any
trust in the world and in themselves. They develop and transmit to
their children these feelings and the resulting negative self-image of
some basic inferiority which then stifle the confidence, security and
freedom necessary for free, explorative play. In addition, the material
pressures of poverty and the lack of a stimulating environment, the
latter also present, in a different way, in many middle and upper class
families, are apt to starve rather than nourish creative growth.
Some of the described concerns and preoccupations of parents or
teachers seem to be responsible for the attitudes of parents and
teachers toward creativity in the young, attitudes that Getzels and
36
Jackson (1962) found in their research on creativity and intelligence
in high school students. They distinguished a high I.Q. group from a
high creativity group of students. The high I.Q. group was high in
intelligence as indicated by I.Q. tests which measure the capacity to
retain the known, learn the predetermined, excel in the usual and
expected tasks, but low in the qualities characteristic of the creative
group: interest in and capacity to deal with the novel and speculative,
in exploring the undetermined and in thinking about what might be.
The high I.Q. group favored certainty, the creative enjoyed the risk
and uncertainty of the untried and unknown. The creative group had
a lower I.Q. than the high I.Q. group, but equalled it in scholastic

performance.
The teachers were asked which type of student they liked best and
enjoyed most having in class; their answers showed that they clearly
preferred the high I.Q. students, but not the creative students, to the
average student. Parents were asked which type of children they would
like most to have as members of their family. The qualities they
favored were &dquo;emotional stability (adjustment), moral character, and
getting along with others.&dquo; The qualities characteristic of the creative
student were not among those mentioned by the parents. Both teachers
and parents ranked creativity high among the qualities of the gifted
child, but both teachers and parents preferred qualities other than
creativity in the children they liked best.
Another significant finding was that neither giftedness, nor intelli-
gence, nor creativity was seen by parents or teachers as among the
most important qualities making for adult success in life. Indeed,
among the teachers the correlation between the qualities defined by
them as important for giftedness and those believed by them as im-
portant for success in adult life was nil.
In these findings are reflected many factors, among them parents’
and teachers’ concern with the students’ success in a career and adjust-
ment to the conventional demands of society, and their wish to protect
themselves against what Kafka called the children’s impetuous attempt
to conquer the truth, their eagerness to find out. Some of them want to

protect themselves in a way resembling in some respects the jealous

God in the myths of the Old Testament who did not want men to
become knowing nor to cooperate in the building of the great city
and the tower of Babel, lest they become like God: knowing and cre-
ative. However, we ourselves and our society all too often block or
confuse the child’s eager quest.
Both the quest and the confusion are apparent in the current surge
for a more creative life. Thus, many people are wont to feel or hope
that some new object or new prescription will be the key to a creative,
more meaningful life. Actually, most new discoveries and creative ex-

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periences in adult life are not dependent on the finding of a new,
hitherto unknown (to oneself or to everybody) object nor on new
prescriptions, but on a change in the person’s way of relating to the
already familiar as well as to the new, a change in approach, percep-
tion, thought and feeling. The main qualities of this change are the
openness and freedom of approach and the integrative effort described
before.
In the longing for creativity that so many people feel these days, the
magic hope of the new object often plays a significant role. This may
lead to a craving to see different places, to travel, to meet different
people, to acquire different possessions, and so forth. The new place,
the new person, the new automobile or gadget becomes the incarna-
tion of that which is to fulfill and satisfy a magic hope and a magic
wish. But the three wishes of the old fairy tales, the fulfillment of
which the fairy or the devil is to grant, go sour in their fulfillment and
leave the person just where he was before, or even worse off because
his hope was futile and the fulfillment of the wish disappointing. It
is in one’s total attitude to the world and to experience that the con-
ditions for creative experience are given or have been stifled. The
death of interest makes creative experience impossible. Unfortunately,
much of our schooling and way of life promotes the death of object-
centered interest. In the longing for creativity the suffering from the
suffocation and stifling of genuine interests finds expression, even
where it may be misdirected towards a magic hope rather than towards
the nourishing or re-kindling of the great potential for interest and
openness toward the world with which man is born.

REFERENCES

GETZELS, J. W., & JACKSON, P. W. Creativity and intelligence

. New York: John
Wiley and Sons, 1962.
HOLT, J. How children fail. New York: Dell Publishing Co., 1964.
How children learn. New York: Pitman Publishing Co., 1967.
HOLT, J.
PORTMANN, A. Biologische Fragmente zu einer Lehre von Menschen
. Basel:
Benno Schwabe & Co., 1951.
SCHACHTEL, E. G. Metamorphosis: On the development ofaffect, perception,
attention and memory. New York: Basic Books, 1969.

AUTHOR
Ernest G. Schachtel, J.D. is a training and supervising psychoanalyst at the
William Alanson White Institute of Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis and Psychol-
ogy in New York City, and adjunct professor of psychology at the post-doc-
toral training program of New York University; he is also in private practice
as a psychoanalyst. He is the author of two books, Metamorphosis: On the

38
Development of Affect, Perception, Attention and Memory and Experiential
Foundations of Rorschach’s Test. Schachtel’s paper in this issue pursues fur-
ther some ideas on creative experience, which he initially dealt with in his
book, Metamorphosis.

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