 The best known description of the creative process is by the English psychologist and educator Graham Wallas (with Richard Smith), whose The Art of Thought of 1926 explains creativity in terms of successive phases.
The phases outlined by Wallas are five, though in most of the surrounding literature they are boiled down to four:
• preparation: the gathering and organization of materials and information with which one will be working. This phase demands a methodical and systematic approach. It sometimes happens that an investigation is sparked by a stroke of pure luck, as in the case of A. H Becquerel, who discovered radioactivity by realizing that a uranium-based compound had left an impression on a covered photographic plate that was nearby. Yet it is important to note that he was working with uranium, that he had photographic plates in his lab, and that he had sufficient knowledge to be able to recognize the relevance of this apparently randomly generated phenomenon, much in the way that Fleming’s ‘chance’ discovery of penicillin wouldn’t have happened if he hadn’t been a bacteriologist working with a staphylococcus culture.
The features of this phase seem to be: the ability to identify a problem, familiarity with the basic facts, propensity to find a solution.
• incubation: the mental elaboration of the available material with the aim of finding a coherence that produces new meaning. This is a process that unfolds by trial and error, by the flow of seemingly disordered thought. It continues even in moments when conscious attention is suspended, such as during sleep. Descartes recounts how he first delved into the fundamental concepts of analytical geometry during two dreams. It was also thanks to a dream of atoms dancing in a ring that Friedrick Kekulé solved the problem of the bonding of carbon and hydrogen in the benzene ring, the most complex of molecular structures, thus completing one of the most important steps in the development of organic chemistry. The archaeologist Hermann Hilprecht deciphered a Babylonian inscription not at a desk but in a dream.
At 16 years old, Einstein began contemplating certain fundamental problems of physics, specifically the meaning of the speed of light. When he realized that the problem could be resolved by challenging the concept of time, it took him only five weeks to draft his famous paper on relativity, even though he was working full time at the Swiss patent office.
• illumination or insight: the intuition, often instantaneous, of the existence of an unexpected solution that flies in the face of everything that had been previously hypothesized. Illumination appears to come in a spontaneous way, and is often accompanied by a powerful emotional rush, for the fact that certain solutions present themselves suddenly is surprising above all for those who discover them. Henri Poincaré tells of having resolved a complex mathematical problem while boarding a bus, thinking of something else entirely. Some researchers maintain that the solution that comes in a sudden flash is always completely different from all those considered previously (Hadamard, 1945).
• verification: proofs, fine-tuning, argumentation. The scientific method requires that a discovery be presented as formal argumentation, starting with a series of axioms or basic principles. Structuring an intuition in terms of formal exegesis is a way of verifying its soundness. As Einstein said: ... I rarely think in words at all. A thought comes, and I may try to express it in words afterward.... Over the years I’ve felt like I was moving in a precise direction, toward something concrete… something profoundly different from subsequent considerations of the solution’s logical form. Naturally there is always something logical behind this sense of a precise direction, but for me it always presents itself visually, in a certain sense, as a sort of general gaze.
The missing phase, which Wallas calls intimation, in most cases presented as a sub-phase, is the sensation of being on the right track, a feeling accompanied by a growing excitement that often precedes insight.
The sequence proposed by Wallas is plausible and calls for an alternation between logical thought and analogical thought. Logical thought unfolds in a linear, sequential way (cause/effect, before/after, premise/consequence), while analogical thought proceeds in a non-linear way (similarity/difference, suggestion, metaphor). Wallas’s first and last phases demand logical, structured thinking; the second and third demand an analogical approach.
Other authors have imagined different sequences. One much earlier model, proposed by the American philosopher John Dewey, (How We Think, 1910) subdivides the process into five stages: perception of a problem, identification and definition of that problem, proposals for possible solutions, evaluation of the solutions, verification through experimental proofs.
In 1931 Rossmann wrote of seven phases (observation of a need, analysis of said need, assembly of available information, formulation of probable solutions, critical analysis, invention, experimentation). Eindhoven and Vinacke (1952) found it necessary to introduce different phases to accurately explain the creative processes of artists and the differences between expert and non-expert subjects. Osborn (1953) organized the process into orientation, preparation, analysis, conception, incubation, new synthesis, evaluation. Johnson (1955) felt that it was best to reduce it all to three basic phases: preparation, production and judgment.
At the close of the last century, neo-Freudian psychologist Didier Anzieu listed six phases, starting however with what Wallace would call incubation and insight and then extending them to include the period after the true creative process is concluded.
His point of departure is saissement: a discontinuity, positive or negative, that leads the individual to lower his guard and become more receptive to intuition. This phase can be facilitated by forms of excess (human contact, alcohol, travel, drugs, sex) or absence of stimuli (silence, solitude, abstinence, immobility). This is followed by awareness, which coincides with the end of the initial state of grace and the introduction of doubts regarding the original intuition. The intuition is then progressively organized, structured and defined during the phases of composition and realization. Release is the critical moment when the idea in its definitive form is consigned to the world, with the concomitant explanation and promotion. Lastly comes regret, the feeling that one could have done better, or the fear that one might not be able to do as well again in the future.
Insight, no matter how we define it, remains a rather mysterious phenomenon. None of these models manage to fully account for the fact that within the process some phases can overlap (e.g. identification of the problem and gathering of information, or gathering of information and incubation), or that this overlapping might depend on both the nature of the problem and the personal style, character and degree of obsession of the individual trying to solve it. Nor do any of the models describe complex creative processes, such as the realization of a film, where not one but myriad creative processes of research, incubation, insight and verification take place, one after another, constantly intermingling, from the drafting of the script to the final editing, involving not one but many people.
It might be useful to imagine the creative process as a fractal structure: smaller sequences within larger ones, minor decisions within major ones.
Scholars of the phenomenon and creative practitioners alike agree on certain points, one of which is the the ability to visualize complex structures and to think in terms of images, which are the most dense and immediate code of the psyche. For Jung, the psyche is image. And in order to imagine, one needs… images, which, translated into words, become narration. Visual thinking seems to be a recurring component of creative thought, even outside the realm of the figurative arts. Indeed, many of the metaphors used to explain creativity are visually oriented (groping in the dark, having an illumination, a flash of genius, etc.). Also commonly recognized is the importance of the apparent ‘inactivity’ of creative thought, along with the unstructured, wave-like nature of thought during the incubation phase, without which it is impossible to filter out inappropriate ideas or ineffective thought patterns.
|
|
|
