What Is Creativity? Are We All “potential Geniuses”?
Many of us have been immersed in creativity at some point. We have created, devised, imagined endless possibilities and worlds. We have related concepts and we have even formed a new reality.
Creativity is defined as the process of giving birth to something new and useful at the same time. To establish the relationship between this new environment and reality, we use our imagination.
It is common for people to conceive creativity as an attribute or quality that one is practically born with. The “creativity of the artist” is the most recognized as genuine, but What does an artist have to develop that creative side?
Discovering the keys to the creative personality
Each of us perceives the world around us in a different way. We have a personalized version of reality in our minds, that is, each of us has our own vision of the world that we feel and understand, guided by our experience.
Many artists in history have been related to some type of psychological imbalance or disorder: temperamental people, melancholic, lonely… Sigmund Freud expressed this circumstance with the following words: “There is always a pathology that frequently refers to traumatic childhood experiences an openness to the conflicts of the unconscious.”
Psychoanalysts debate the extent to which a person with a type of disorder can become a genius. For example, the case of Kim Peek illustrates how a superhuman ability in a field (in his case, a prodigious ability to remember everything he perceives) may not translate into a balance of all the facets that we as humans aspire to develop.
For Freud, Creativity is the summit of desire artist, an opening towards repressed desires and fantasies, where neurosis or psychotic personalities fit. On the other hand, the psychoanalyst Ernst Kris associated creativity with ability to find new connections between ideas. A recipe composed in conjunction with conscious and unconscious thought.
Keys to understanding the creative mind
If we stop to think about writers, sculptors, masters of art and sellers of dreams ; The vast majority share an intense story of their life, deep thoughts, search for truth and perfection, disappointments and pain, the self-perception of a deep self with which we feel identified. There are people who tell me repeatedly that during their nightmares, at their most discouraging moment or at their most intense moment of joy, is when they find the key that gives way to the idea they were looking for, or to the concept that gives a new color to the meaning of life.
The continuous search is what moves us, creating bridges with our imagination. A meaning or an experience is the creative canvas that we look for to capture something inexplicable and it is the artist who is the wise man who explains it to us, who shows us that it is possible to go beyond what we know.
August Strindberg, Jackson Pollock, Pablo Picasso, Louis Wain, Wassily Kandinsky among others, take us to multiple realities taken by the hands of a creator.
Therefore, we should not rule out that creativity accompanies the evolution of our world, and that it is in our world where we acquire our vision and creative inspiration. Howard Gardner’s Theory of Multiple Intelligences, without going any further, already warns us that each person is unique and unrepeatable and has certain skills and abilities, which should not be objectified.
You don’t have to be a person with a well-known name to participate in the explosion of something new we just need to close our eyes and let ourselves go, to become our own genius
