Parents play important roles in the encouragement of creative expression

Many will say, "Surely, schools have a right to be concerned about mental health, full mental functioning, educational achievement, and vocational success. They ought to be concerned that coming generations contribute productively to our society. But how can school guidance workers contribute to the creative growth necessary for these things?"

This is a legitimate question. Parents and peers play such important roles in the encouragement or discouragement of creative expression and growth, what can school guidance workers do? There are at least six special roles which school guidance workers can play in helping highly creative children maintain their creativity and continue to grow. Each of these is a role which others can rarely fulfill. Our social expectations frequently prevent even teachers and administrators from effectively fulfilling these roles. Thus, in some cases, only counselors, school psychologists, and similar workers will be able to fulfill these roles. In many cases, however, teachers and administrators can supply these needs, if they differentiate their guidance roles from other socially expected roles.

The six roles which I have in mind are: (1) providing the highly creative individual a "refuge," (2) being his "sponsor" or "patron," (3) helping him understand his divergence, (4) letting him communicate his ideas, (5) seeing that his creative talent is recognized, and (6) helping parents and others understand him. I shall now discuss each of these roles briefly.

Provide a "Refuge"

Society in general is downright savage towards creative thinkers, especially when they are young. To some extent, the educational system must be coercive and emphasize the establishment of behavior norms. Teachers and administrators can rarely escape this coercive role. Counselors and other guidance workers are in a much better position to free themselves of it. Nevertheless, there are ways teachers and administrators can free themselves of this role long enough to provide refuge, if they are sensitive to the need.

We know that highly creative adolescents are estranged from their teachers and peers. The studies indicate that the same holds true for children in the elementary school. The reasons are easy to understand. Who can blame teachers for being irritated when a pupil presents an original answer which differs from what is expected? It does not fit in with the rest of the grading scheme. They don't know how the unusual answer should be treated. They have to stop and think themselves. Peers have the same difficulty and label the creative child's unusual questions and answers as "crazy" or "silly."

Thus, the highly creative child, adolescent, or adult needs encouragement. He needs help in becoming reconciled and in being "made cheerful over the world's stubborn satisfaction in its own follies." The guidance worker must recognize, however, that the estrangement exists and that he will have to create a relationship in which the creative individual feels safe.

Vocational Success

Guidance workers have traditionally been interested in the vocational success of their clients. Indeed, the guidance movement got much of its impetus from this concern. Of course, it has long been recognized that creativity is a distinguishing characteristic of outstanding individuals in almost every field. It has been generally conceded that the possession of high intelligence, special talent, and technical skills is not enough for outstanding success. It has also been recognized that creativity is important in scientific discovery, invention, and the arts.

We are discovering now that creative thinking is important in success even in some of the most common occupations, such as selling in a department store. In one study it was found that saleswomen ranking in the upper third in sales in their departments scored significantly higher on tests of creative thinking than those who ranked in the lower third in sales. An interesting point in this study, however, is that the tests did a better job of discriminating the high and low selling groups in what the personnel managers considered routine sales jobs requiring no imagination than in the departments rated as requiring creative thinking. Thus, creative thinking appears to be important, even in jobs which appear to be quite routine.

Social Importance

Finally, educators are legitimately concerned that their students make useful contributions to our society. Such a concern runs deep in the code of ethics of the profession. It takes little imagination to recognize that the future of our civilization -- our very survival -- depends upon the quality of the creative imagination of our next generation.

Democracies collapse only when they fail to use intelligent, imaginative methods for solving their problems. Greece failed to heed such a warning by Socrates and gradually collapsed. What is called for is a far cry from the model of the quiz-program champion of a few years ago. Instead of trying to cram a lot of facts into the minds of children and make them scientific encyclopedias, we must ask what kind of children they are becoming. What kind of thinking do they do? How resourceful are they? Are they becoming more responsible? Are they learning to give thoughtful explanations of the things they do and see? Do they believe their own ideas to be of value? Can they share ideas and opinions with others? Do they relate similar experiences together in order to draw conclusions? Do they do some thinking for themselves?

We also need more than well-rounded individuals. We ordinarily respect these well-rounded individuals, broad scholars, and men of many talents. An emotional deficiency disease, a paralysis of the creative imagination, an addition to superficials -- this is the diagnosis I would offer to account for the greater part of the widespread desperation of our time. Paralysis of the imagination, I suspect, would also account, in part, for the fact that the great majority of us, wedded to comfort so long as we both shall live, are turning our eyes away from the one thing we should be looking at: the possibility or probability of co-extermination.

Behaviorism, Gestalt Theory, and the Heirs of Freud

Without doubt, the greatest single change that distinguished the intellectual atmosphere of the 1920's from that of the period before 1914 was psychology's leap into the center of attention. Here again, however, the way had been prepared in the prewar era. The social thought of the decade and a half preceding the outbreak of the war had been markedly subjective in character. In nearly all the major writings of this period, the common element had been an emphasis on unconscious mental processes, on criticism of one's own thinking, and on the doubtful character of knowledge about society. The war experience had further encouraged this tendency toward subjectivity and self-doubt. When all stable values had been thrown into question, the human psyche emerged as the one fixed point in an indeterminate universe.

The Freudian theory of psychoanalysis most clearly exemplified the new trend, but its preeminence did not pass unquestioned. The laboratory study of experimental psychology continued on its patient, cautious way, scarcely troubled by the philosophical quarrels of the Freudians and their foes. These latter included the Behaviorists, who followed the American J. B. Watson in stressing the relationship of internal feelings to the observable activities and the physiological structure of the individual--as opposed to the psychoanalytic practice of deducing unconscious thought and emotion from dreams, random remarks, and slips in speech. Behaviorism--in Europe at least--had only a passing influence; a more serious intellectual challenge to the teachings of Freud came from the German Gestalt school. These theorists, who were speculative philosophers rather than clinicians, held that the way to understand an individual mind was through the painstaking delineation of its whole form ( Gestalt) in an effort to grasp all the subtle connections linking the complexities and apparent contradictions that constituted a single, unique emotional life.

Nevertheless, it was Freud and his school who aroused the liveliest interest. The great Viennese psychiatrist was a little more than sixty and apparently at the height of his powers when the war came to an end. Four years later, however, he was stricken by a cancer of the mouth that necessitated operation after operation and that finally killed him in 1939, just after the outbreak of the second world conflict. This constant battle with illness severely limited Freud's ability to work--but he continued with stoical resolution in the two main areas of his earlier activity, the clinical practice of psychoanalysis and the publication of books and articles on psychological theory.

Most of Freud's time was devoted to clinical psychiatry, which he had revolutionized a generation earlier with his novel technique of free association. More and more, however, those who lay on the couch in his office and sought his help were not regular patients but fledgling psychiatrists who had come to Vienna to be trained in psychoanalytic method. In the half-decade before the war, psychoanalysis had become an international movement, and although the four years of the conflict checked this development, its growth was resumed after 1918 on a still larger scale. Besides Vienna, which remained the general headquarters, Berlin, Budapest, London, and New York were main centers of psychoanalytic teaching and practice. Paris, Rome, and the Latin and Catholic countries in general showed themselves much less receptive to Freudian ideas. It was in the German- and the English-speaking worlds that psychoanalysis became firmly established in the 1920's.

The foundation of new psychoanalytic institutes and the maintenance of contact between them necessitated a great deal of consultation and correspondence on the part of the founder himself. Freud also continued with his theoretical writing, but this began to change in character. The main structure of his theory, which he had begun in 1899, with his Interpretation of Dreams, was now finished. In contrast to the volumes which presented and explained the central ideas and the method of psychoanalysis, Freud's later writings were shorter and more speculative, and they showed greater concern for the social and historical implications of his theories. The most influential of these, Civilization and Its Discontents ( 1930), dealt with the restriction of instinctual expression that Freud found inevitable in civilized societies and forecast the inhuman behavior to which the authoritarian states of Europe would very shortly resort. The measured pessimism in this little book was echoed in two brief studies of religion: The Future of an Illusion, in which Freud voiced his confidence in a humanist and atheist morality, and Moses and Monotheism, his last work, in which he traced the tragic history of the Jews (his own ancestors) to their creation of the concept of a single deity.

Meantime the psychoanalytic movement continued to be shaken by internal splits and struggles which were themselves of an almost religious intensity. Just before the first war there had been two notable defections from the Freudian camp. One of these, led by Alfred Adler of Vienna, had tried to turn psychoanalysis away from its basic emphasis on the unconscious emotions of the individual and to direct it toward questions of conscious participation in group life. Adler's teaching offered a curious combination of stress on the will--a Nietzschean inheritance--and of socialist ideals of Marxian origin. In the 1920's its influence did not extend very far, and Adler's own death in 1937 robbed it of its chief. The real importance of ideas of this sort was to be apparent only a decade later, when the Second World War focused attention once again on the relation between individual psychology and the organization of society.

A more serious challenge came from the Swiss Carl G. Jung, who had once ranked as Freud's heir-apparent. In the years following the war Jung diverged further and further from the teachings, of his original master. Through his study of Oriental philosophy and religion, the Swiss psychiatrist concluded that there existed a vast "collective unconscious" in which the same mythsymbols kept repeating themselves in widely separated places and ages. By tapping the resources of these great "archetypes," Jung argued, people could reach a higher understanding of their emotional difficulties. Hence, although he did not profess a specific faith of his own, Jung urged on his patients and on his readers the therapeutic value of a return to religion. In this emphasis on the usefulness of faith--which contrasted so sharply with Freud's atheism-Jung made a notable contribution to the wider movement of return to religion in the postwar epoch.

The "Old Masters": Freud, Croce, Weber, Durkheim

In social thought, the decade of the 1920's can be regarded in two contrasting fashions. On the one hand, it was an era of consolidation, in which an earlier revolution in ways of looking at society began to find wide acceptance and to extend into new areas of knowledge. On the other hand, it was marked by a philosophical revolution of its own, which drastically altered the earlier vocabulary of intellectual exchange, creating a cleavage between English and Continental thinking that was never satisfactorily bridged.

At the end of the First World War, a generation of unusually original social thinkers was passing from the scene or turning its intellectual activity in new directions. In Austria, the most influential figure of the whole half-century-Sigmund Freud--had virtually completed the outlines of his psychoanalytic theory. In Italy, Benedetto Croce had attained a position of unquestioned philosophical leadership: the volumes of his Philosophy of the Spirit in which Croce defined the criteria of aesthetics and historical study were achieving the position of classic formulations that they retained for the whole interwar period. In Germany and France, Max Weber and Emile Durkheim had put the study of sociology on a more empirical and objective basis, by deriving from specific and manageable problems the principles for the scientific study of society that the nineteenth-century fathers of sociology had tried in vain to formulate at one blow.

Durkheim died during the war; Weber, a year and a half after its close. Freud and Croce lived on for another generation, broadening the scope of their thinking and directing it into novel and unsuspected channels. But the effect on younger contemporaries was the same: alive or dead, the "old masters" continued to dominate the field, and the study of human society remained fixed in the paths that these had marked out for it in the prewar years.