Psychoanalytics: Ernst Kris, Lawrence Kubie
To seriously study creativity, it is useful to know something about the first scientific efforts to define and explain it, attributable to psychology.
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Step 1: Small doses...visuals!
The idiosyncrasies, concepts and language of mechanical engineering are somewhat distant from the psychological approach and it is easy for the reader to lose the thread of the explanations by becoming entangled with its specific terminology and its forms of expression.
For this reason, I have preferred to extract small fragments of the theories of creativity and make an effort to create my own graphic image for them.
My graphics involve the risk of biasing and/or distorting the original ideas, which also exists when trying to paraphrase them, but it brings the will to understand them and translate them into engineering language in the hope of bringing both approaches closer together.
To this end, I have relied on research works that compile and summarize these theories. In particular, the work of authors Busse & Mansfield that appears in the quotes in the next step of the tutorial.
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Step 2: Theories of Ernst Kris and Lawrence Kubie
The authors Busse & Mansfield (1984, pp. 47-48) cite the works of Sigmund Freud (Leonardo da Vinci and a memory of his childhood, 1957) and (On creativity and the unconscius, 1958); but they attribute the most elaborate psychoanalytic theories to Ernst Kris (Psychoanalytic explorations in art, 1952) and Lawrence Kubie (Neurotic distortion of the creative process, 1958).
The general idea of both theories is that creativity consists of a phase of inspiration at a preconscious level and another of elaboration at a conscious level and, with nuances, they place greater emphasis on the first of them. In particular, Kubie highlights the role of neurotic aspects of personality that block creativity.
References:
- Busse, T. V., & Mansfield, R. S. (1984). Teorías del proceso creador: revisión y perspectiva. (©. 2.-2. reservados, Ed.) Studies in Psychology = Estudios de Psicología, nº 18 (traducido del Journal of Creative Behavior, num. 2, vol. 14, 91-103, 1980), 47-57. Recuperado el 18 de diciembre de 2020, de https://dialnet.unirioja.es/ejemplar/7049
- Freud, S. (1957). Leonardo da Vinci and a memory of his childhood. En The standar edition of the complete psichological works of Sigmund Freud (vol. XI). Londres: Hogarth Press.
- Freud, S. (1958). On creativity and the unconscius. Nueva York: Harper.
- Kris, E. (1952). Psychoanalytic explorations in art. Nueva York: International Universities Press.
- Kubie, L. S. (1958). Neurotic distortion of the creative process. Nueva York: Noonday Press.
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Step 3: My graphic interpretation
Psychoanalytic Theory: Ernst Kris (1952)
Note. Creativity consists of a phase of inspiration and another of elaboration. The first induces a preconscious level of thought, passionate and disorganized, where ideas specific to the problem are associated and other potentially useful ones arise. It is a pleasant and motivational experience, not favored by logical and rational content but by daydreams, fantasies and desires. The subsequent elaboration phase subjects the ideas to a rigorous logical evaluation. Source: illustration by the author.
Psychoanalytic Theory: Lawrence Kubie (1958)
Note. At a preconscious level, the rational links between ideas are released, allowing their restructuring, mixing, association and emergence of new ones, while the neurotic aspects of the personality create restrictions and loss of creative productions. Source: illustration by the author.
Reference: all texts and images in this tutorial were extracted from the doctoral thesis cited below,
- Valderrey, M.E. (2021), “Catalizadores Creativos en Ingeniería Conceptual: Evaluación de Habilidades Visuales y Verbales para Diseño Mecánico”. Propuesta de tesis doctoral, UNINI-México.
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Step 4: Links
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