Few terms in the depth-psychology corpus carry as much conceptual weight — or as much definitional instability — as ‘creative.’ The corpus reveals three broad and sometimes competing orientations. First, a cosmological-archetypal reading, most prominent in von Franz, the I Ching commentators Wilhelm and Anthony, and Estés, treats the creative as an impersonal force — a primordial power flowing through the psyche’s prepared channels much as water flows through arroyos, sourced in an unconscious ground that precedes the ego and exceeds it. Second, a psychobiological reading, most forcefully developed by Hillman in his sustained essay ‘On Psychological Creativity,’ insists that creativity is a universal human instinct, not the exclusive province of genius, and that its deepest expressions move through Eros, shadow, trickster, and anima rather than through rational will. Third, a clinical-expressive reading — represented by McNiff, Ogden, and Dayton — locates creative energy in relational and somatic fields, treating it as something healable, teachable, and blocked by trauma or organizational inertia. Across these positions, a shared tension persists: the creative is simultaneously something one does and something that happens through one, a paradox that McGilchrist illuminates neurologically by assigning its primary substrate to right-hemispheric integration. The term is inseparable, in this library, from discussions of the unconscious, soul, instinct, and healing.