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.
In the library
30 passages
Creativity is the ability to respond to all that goes on around us, to choose from the hundreds of possibilities of thought, feeling, action, and reaction that arise within us, and to put these together in a unique response, expression, or message that carries moment, passion, and meaning.
Estés defines creativity as a wild, responsive, uncensored life-force that atrophies whenever psychic or social censorship limits the range of inner response.
Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Ph D, Women Who Run With the Wolves Myths and Stories of the Wild, 2017thesis
Creativity as a Human Instinct… Jung regards the instincts as older than, prior to, and outside the… any notion of two kinds of psychology — one for you and me and one for the creative person — cuts off the creative from common humanity.
Hillman, drawing on Jung, argues that creativity is a universal human instinct, not a special faculty of genius, and that treating it otherwise severs the creative from the ground of common humanity.
Hillman, James, The Myth of Analysis: Three Essays in Archetypal Psychology, 1972thesis
Creativity has been given the meaning of renewal, and the path to it is cyclical regression. The creative is then presented as the indestructible timeless ground of nature: earth, home, root, womb, or the transforming seas engirdling the world.
Hillman surveys the archetypal image of the creative as an impersonal, regressive, and inexhaustible maternal ground from which renewal cyclically emerges.
Hillman, James, The Myth of Analysis: Three Essays in Archetypal Psychology, 1972thesis
The creative force flows over the terrain of our psyches looking for the natural hollows, the arroyos, the channels that exist in us. We become its tributaries, its basins; we are its pools, ponds, streams, and sanctuaries.
Estés figures the creative force as an autonomous, transpersonal river-energy that flows into whatever psychic space the individual has prepared, not something the ego generates.
Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Ph D, Women Who Run With the Wolves Myths and Stories of the Wild, 2017thesis
Creative people think they are neurotic or in a neurotic crisis, and show every sign of this, but when you look at their dream material, it shows that they are neurotic not because of a maladjustment… but because they are haunted by a creative idea and should do something creative.
Von Franz argues that the 'neurosis' of creative individuals is frequently a misread call from the unconscious — a creative task pressing for realization rather than a clinical pathology.
von Franz, Marie-Louise, Creation Myths, 1995thesis
Creative people often have a solid, strong ego consciousness and usually need some upheaval from outside — a depression, or an emotional upheaval from within, or even an illness — to get into a state where they can create.
Von Franz identifies the paradox that robust ego-consciousness, necessary for disciplined creative work, must periodically be disrupted by the unconscious before genuine creative activity becomes possible.
von Franz, Marie-Louise, Creation Myths, 1995thesis
The many notions of creativity are comparable to the many notions of any basic symbol (matter, nature, God, soul, instinct). The very existence of so many notions is evidence for the variety of root metaphors by means of which the psyche perceives and forms its notions.
Hillman proposes that the irreducible multiplicity of definitions of creativity reflects not confusion but the psyche's own symbolic richness — each definition is a root metaphor, not a final formula.
Hillman, James, The Myth of Analysis: Three Essays in Archetypal Psychology, 1972thesis
To time the creative process properly, so as to be accurate, reflectively conscious, and aware of every detail, but at the same time not killing it by holding back too much, is one of the greatest arts.
Von Franz articulates the central discipline of creative work as a precise calibration between uninhibited impulse and reflective restraint — the failure of either pole destroys the work.
von Franz, Marie-Louise, Creation Myths, 1995thesis
Creativity, like chemistry, is based upon what happens when different elements interact with one another… Creativity is an energy that emanates from relationships. As in physics, some materials are better conductors than others.
McNiff reconceives creativity as a relational and environmental energy — not a private faculty but a field-phenomenon dependent on the dynamic quality of interaction among participants and materials.
McNiff, Shaun, Art Heals: How Creativity Cures the Soul, 2004thesis
This view of creativity insists that it must conflict with whatever yokes its power — cultural canons, standards of taste, bourgeois morality… it demands a descent to the abyss of disorder, even through derangement of the senses.
Hillman traces one major depth-psychological image of creativity as an essentially transgressive force, aligned with shadow and destruction, that requires a descent into darkness to release its vital energy.
Hillman, James, The Myth of Analysis: Three Essays in Archetypal Psychology, 1972thesis
Creative [subjects] tend to show high levels of right hemisphere activity (as compared to left hemisphere activity) during creative production… the total divergent-thinking-induced effect of more co-operation between cortex areas in the right hemisphere indicates a substantial contribution of the right hemisphere in creative thinking.
McGilchrist marshals neuroscientific evidence locating the substrate of creative production in right-hemispheric integration, lending empirical support to depth psychology's consistent association of creativity with non-linear, holistic cognition.
McGilchrist, Iain, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, 2021thesis
analyses revealed that more, as compared with less, original ideas elicited a stronger event-related synchronisation of alpha activity… and higher phase coupling in the right hemisphere. These findings corroborate the importance of right-hemispheric cortical networks in creative idea generation.
A parallel passage reinforcing McGilchrist's neurological argument that high-originality creative cognition is specifically associated with right-hemispheric coherence and phase coupling.
McGilchrist, Iain, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, 2021supporting
It is play, not properness, that is the central artery, the core, the brain stem of creative life. The impulse to play is an instinct. No play, no creative life.
Estés insists that play — rather than discipline or propriety — is the instinctual foundation of creative life, and that social injunctions to 'be proper' are the primary instrument of creative suppression.
Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Ph D, Women Who Run With the Wolves Myths and Stories of the Wild, 2017thesis
What is the creative paternal principle in our psychology? What is psychological genius, the genius of psychology which engenders the sense of soul and generates psychological reality?
Hillman poses the central speculative question of his essay: what is the archetypal principle — paternal, anima-driven, or otherwise — that generates soul within the analytic relationship itself.
Hillman, James, The Myth of Analysis: Three Essays in Archetypal Psychology, 1972supporting
The so-called creative genius may have a more direct and uncomplicated relation to his instinct; he may have special constitutional talents… Nevertheless, any notion of two kinds of psychology — one for you and me and one for the creative person — cuts off the creative from common humanity.
Hillman contests the Romantic myth of exceptionalism: even if genius enjoys greater instinctual access, this is a difference of degree, not of kind, and creativity must remain a shared human inheritance.
Hillman, James, The Myth of Analysis: Three Essays in Archetypal Psychology, 1972supporting
Emerson was correct in his description of creative action as being a step or two ahead of the reflecting mind… The creative transformation of the workplace begins with the simple process of perception.
McNiff, citing Emerson, argues that creative transformation precedes and leads reflective consciousness, and that perception itself — attentively practiced — is the primary creative act.
McNiff, Shaun, Art Heals: How Creativity Cures the Soul, 2004supporting
Such accidents are one of the most constellating factors in unconscious fantasy… They try to get close to the creative process by picking up those accidental things which offer themselves.
Von Franz identifies the 'accident' — the unexpected intrusion of the unconscious into an art-making process — as one of the primary vehicles through which creative content from the unconscious becomes available.
von Franz, Marie-Louise, Creation Myths, 1995supporting
The first attribute is sublimity, which, as the primal cause of all that exists, forms the most important and most inclusive attribute of the Creative… The attributes of sublimity and success take shape correspondingly in the creative man, the sage, who is in harmony with the creative power of the godhead.
Wilhelm's I Ching commentary presents the Creative as the cosmological first principle — the source of all becoming — whose power the sage realizes by aligning personal action with the movement of heaven.
Richard Wilhelm, Cary F. Baynes, The I Ching or Book of Changes, 1950supporting
the primal cause of all that exists, forms the most important and most inclusive attribute of the Creative… The success of the creative activity is revealed in the gift of water, which causes the germination and sprouting of all living things.
A parallel Wilhelm passage emphasizing the Creative as a cosmological principle of origination — its 'success' visible in the natural world's ongoing fecundity.
Wilhelm, Richard, The I Ching or Book of Changes, 1950supporting
The easiest way to achieve success is to invoke the help of the Creative, by which the particularly appropriate answer emerges… It is the way of the Creative, however, to be able to use our mistakes creatively once we recognize them.
Anthony reads the I Ching's Creative as a higher-order intelligence accessed by relinquishing ego-driven strategy, one that can even convert error into forward movement.
Carol K. Anthony, A Guide to the I Ching, 1988supporting
The creative problem, which she always evaded with the excuse of lack of time or fatigue, was… the creative handicraftsman crops up, and then another venerable feminine figure, an image of the Self, who warns the dreamer not to dissect the unconscious intellectually but to give it form religiosē.
Von Franz reads a patient's dream as a summons from the Self toward creative expression — and specifically toward a humble, embodied, religious making rather than intellectual analysis.
von Franz, Marie-Louise, Psychotherapy, 1993supporting
The environment transmits creative forces and becomes a primary agent of transformation. My lifelong practice within the studio was constructed in those first days of 'beginner's mind' that accessed the ancient continuities of a participation mystique.
McNiff situates the creative process within the charged field of the studio environment, identifying participation mystique — a dissolution of self-consciousness into collective expression — as its enabling condition.
McNiff, Shaun, Art Heals: How Creativity Cures the Soul, 2004supporting
'Appreciate how creative vitality depends upon an engagement of the materials; otherwise you remain separate and static. Take a risk with me,' the materials say. 'You have little to lose since we will accept whatever you do.'
McNiff personifies art materials as active partners in creative dialogue, arguing that genuine creative vitality requires a relational surrender to the medium rather than mastery over it.
McNiff, Shaun, Art Heals: How Creativity Cures the Soul, 2004supporting
Accepted structures and templates have always been important to creativity and are the basis for improvisation. Creative composers of music know the rules, and when they break them, they do so within acceptable boundaries.
Dayton argues that creative innovation depends paradoxically on deeply internalized templates and structures, which provide the secure base from which genuine improvisation can depart.
Dayton, Tian, Emotional Sobriety: From Relationship Trauma to Resilience and Lasting Fulfillment, 2007supporting
Since psychological creativity will occupy the same destructive/constructive poles that describe the instinct in general, we are left with the realization that soul-making entails soul-destroying.
Hillman identifies the creative act in psychology as necessarily bipolar — construction and destruction are inseparable phases of the soul-making process, not alternatives to it.
Hillman, James, The Myth of Analysis: Three Essays in Archetypal Psychology, 1972supporting
With this new interest in the creative and creativity, academic psychology suffers from the same malady of over-differentiation… over one hundred definitions of creativity have been given by Taylor in his analysis of the creative process.
Hillman opens his essay by observing that academic psychology's proliferation of creativity definitions mirrors the pathology of over-differentiation it studies, suggesting the need for a depth-psychological, symbolic approach.
Hillman, James, The Myth of Analysis: Three Essays in Archetypal Psychology, 1972supporting
We often think, and fervently believe, that we are encouraging others to create, not realizing that our tone and style may militate against their creativity.
McNiff draws attention to the gap between intent and effect in creative facilitation — the facilitator's own energetic quality and relational tone are as determinative as any explicit encouragement.
McNiff, Shaun, Art Heals: How Creativity Cures the Soul, 2004supporting
The greater their creative power was, the surer their belief in an Existence which has reality and the majesty of the One who set all into motion. Even the more modest followers of the great masters could not dispense with the idea of inspiration.
Otto observes that creative power in its highest manifestations has historically produced not self-attribution but a compelling sense of an external originating Presence — the experience of inspiration as divine.
Otto, Walter F, Dionysus Myth and Cult (1965), 1965aside
Practice using your creative resources whenever you feel the impulse to use a survival resource. Record your successes and challenges below.
Ogden's clinical worksheet frames creative resources as conscious alternatives to survival-mode responses, positioning creativity as a therapeutic resource to be deliberately cultivated in trauma recovery.
Ogden, Pat, Sensorimotor Psychotherapy Interventions for Trauma and, 2015aside
Psychology is created within the vale of living intimacy… soul becomes the operative factor in converting… Where spirit lifts, aiming for detachment and transcendence, concern with soul immerses us in immanence.
Hillman distinguishes soul-making from spiritual transcendence, arguing that psychological creativity — unlike mystical or spiritual disciplines — is constitutively relational and immanent.
Hillman, James, The Myth of Analysis: Three Essays in Archetypal Psychology, 1972aside