Creativity is a human psychological phenomenon that has served favorably the evolution of our species, as has intelligence. In fact, for a long time, they have become confused.

Currently, it is maintained that creativity and intelligence have a close relationship , but that they are two different dimensions of our psychic world; highly creative people are not necessarily more intelligent, nor are those with a high IQ more creative.

Part of the confusion about what creativity is is due to the fact that, for centuries, creativity has been covered with a mystical-religious halo . For this reason, practically until the 20th century, its study has not been addressed scientifically.

Even so, since ancient times, we have been fascinated by it and have tried to explain its essence through philosophy and, more recently, by applying the scientific method, especially from Psychology.

Creativity in Antiquity

The Greek philosophers tried to explain creativity through divinity . They understood that creativity was a kind of supernatural inspiration, a whim of the gods. The creative person was considered an empty vessel that a divine being filled with the necessary inspiration to create products or ideas.

For example, Plato held that the poet was a sacred being, possessed by the gods, who could only create what his muses dictated (Plato, 1871). From this perspective, creativity was a gift accessible to a chosen few, which implies an aristocratic vision of it that would last until the Renaissance.

Creativity in the Middle Ages

The Middle Ages, considered an obscurantist period for the development and understanding of the human being, arouses little interest for the study of creativity. It is not considered a time of creative splendour , so there was not much effort in trying to understand the mechanism of creation either.

In this period, man was completely subservient to the interpretation of the biblical scriptures and all his creative output was directed toward paying tribute to God. A curious fact of this period is the fact that many creators renounced to sign their works, which evidenced the denial of their own identity.

Creativity in the Modern Age

In this stage, the divine conception of creativity is blurred to give way to the idea of the hereditary trait . Simultaneously, a humanistic conception emerges, from which man is no longer a being abandoned to his destiny or to the divine designs, but a co-author of his own becoming.

During the Renaissance, the taste for aesthetics and art was taken up again, the author recovered the authorship of his works and some other Greek values. This is a period in which the classical is reborn. The artistic production grows spectacularly and, consequently, the interest in studying the mind of the creative individual also grows.

The debate on creativity, at this time, focuses on the duality “nature versus nurture” (biology or nurture), although without much empirical support. One of the first treatises on human ingenuity belongs to Juan Huarte de San Juan, a Spanish doctor who in 1575 published his work “Examination of Ingenuity for the Sciences”, a precursor of Differential Psychology and Professional Orientation. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, thanks to figures such as Copernicus, Galileo, Hobbes, Locke and Newton, confidence in science grows at the same time as faith in the human capacity to solve its problems through mental effort grows . Humanism is consolidated.

The first relevant research of modernity on the creative process took place in 1767 by William Duff, who analyzed the qualities of the original genius, differentiating it from talent. Duff maintains that talent is not accompanied by innovation, while the original genius is. The views of this author are very similar to recent scientific contributions, in fact, he was the first to point out the biopsychosocial nature of the creative act, demystifying it and bringing forward two centuries to the Biopsychosocial Theory of Creativity (Dacey and Lennon, 1998).

On the contrary, during this same period, and feeding the debate, Kant understood creativity as something innate , a gift of nature, which cannot be trained and which constitutes an intellectual trait of the individual.

Creativity in post-modernity

The first empirical approaches to the study of creativity did not take place until the second half of the nineteenth century , when the divine conception of creativity was openly rejected. It was also influenced by the fact that at that time Psychology was beginning its split from Philosophy, to become an experimental science, so the positivist effort in the study of human behavior increased.

During the 19th century, the concept of hereditary trait predominated. Creativity was a male trait and it took quite some time to assume that creative women could exist. That idea was reinforced from the medical field, with different findings about the heritability of physical traits. A passionate debate between Lamarck and Darwin about genetic inheritance captured scientific attention for much of the century. Lamarck argued that learned traits could be passed on between consecutive generations, while Darwin (1859) showed that genetic changes are not so immediate , nor the result of practice or learning, but occur through random mutations during the phylogeny of species, which require long periods of time.

Postmodernity in the study of creativity can be found in Galton’s (1869) work on individual differences, which was heavily influenced by Darwinian evolution and the associationist movement. Galton focused on the study of the hereditary trait, dispensing with psychosocial variables. Two influential contributions to later research stand out: the idea of free association and how it operates between the conscious and the unconscious, which Sigmund Freud later developed from his psychoanalytic perspective, and the application of statistical techniques to the study of individual differences, which makes him a bridge author between the speculative study and the empirical study of creativity .

The consolidation phase of Psychology

Despite Galton’s interesting work, the psychology of the 19th and early 20th centuries was interested in simpler psychological processes, following the path marked by Behaviorism, which rejected mentalism or the study of non-observable processes.

The behavioral dominance postponed the study of creativity until the second half of the 20th century, with the exception of a couple of surviving lines to positivism, Psychoanalysis and Gestalt.

The Gestalt vision of creativity

The Gestalt contributed a phenomenological conception of creativity . It began its journey in the second half of the nineteenth century, opposing Galton’s associationism, although its influence was not noticed until well into the twentieth century. The Gestaltists argued that creativity is not a simple association of ideas in a new and different way. Von Ehrenfels first used the term gestalt (mental pattern or form) in 1890 and based his postulates on the concept of innate ideas, as thoughts that originate completely in the mind and do not depend on the senses to exist.

The Gestalt people maintain that creative thinking is the formation and alteration of gestalts, whose elements have complex relations forming a structure with certain stability, so they are not simple associations of elements. They explain creativity by focusing on the structure of the problem , stating that the creator’s mind has the ability to move from some structures to others that are more stable. Thus, the insight , or new spontaneous understanding of the problem (Aha! or Eureka! phenomenon), occurs when a mental structure is suddenly transformed into another more stable one.

This means that creative solutions are usually obtained by looking at an existing gestalt in a new way, that is, when we change the position from which we analyze the problem. According to Gestalt, when we obtain a new point of view on the whole, instead of reorganizing its elements, creativity emerges .

Creativity according to psychodynamics

Psychodynamics made the first major effort of the 20th century in the study of creativity. From Psychoanalysis, creativity is understood as the phenomenon that emerges from the tension between the conscious reality and the unconscious impulses of the individual. Freud argues that writers and artists produce creative ideas to express their unconscious desires in a socially acceptable way , so that art is a compensatory phenomenon.

It helps to demystify creativity by arguing that it is not the product of muses or gods, nor a supernatural gift, but that the experience of creative enlightenment is simply the passage from the unconscious to the conscious.

The contemporary study of creativity

During the second half of the 20th century, and following the tradition initiated by Guilford in 1950, creativity has been an important object of study of Differential Psychology and Cognitive Psychology, although not exclusively of them. From both traditions, the approach has been fundamentally empirical, using historiometry, ideographic studies, psychometry or meta-analytic studies, among other methodological tools.

Currently, the approach is multidimensional . Aspects as diverse as personality, cognition, psychosocial influences, genetics or psychopathology, to name a few lines, are analysed, as well as multidisciplinary, since there are many domains that are interested in it, beyond psychology. Such is the case of business studies, where creativity arouses great interest because of its relationship with innovation and competitiveness.

Thus, during the last decade, research on creativity has proliferated , and the offer of training and capacity building programs has grown significantly. Such is the interest in understanding it that research extends beyond academia, and occupies all types of institutions, including government ones. Its study goes beyond individual analysis, even of the group or organization, to address, for example, creative societies or creative classes, with indexes to measure them, such as: Euro-creativity index (Florida and Tinagli, 2004); Creative City Index (Hartley et al., 2012); The Global Creativity Index (The Martin Prosperity Institute, 2011) or the Creativity Index in Bilbao and Bizkaia (Landry, 2010).

From Classical Greece to the present day, and in spite of the great efforts we continue to devote to analysing it, we have not even managed to reach a universal definition of creativity, so we are still far from understanding its essence . Perhaps, with the new approaches and technologies applied to psychological study, as is the case with the promising cognitive neuroscience, we will be able to discover the keys to this complex and intriguing mental phenomenon and, finally, the 21st century will become the historical witness to such a milestone.

Bibliographic references:

  • Dacey, J. S., & Lennon, K. H. (1998). Understanding creativity. The interplay of biological, psychological and social factors. (1st ed). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
  • Darwin, C. (1859). On the origin of the species by natural selection. Londom: Murray.
  • From St. John, J. H. (1575). Examination of ingenuity for the sciences (2003- Dig.). Madrid: Biblioteca virtual universal.
  • Duff, W. (1767). Essay on Original Genius (Vol. 53). London, UK.
  • Florida, R., & Tinagli, I. (2004). Europe in the creative age. UK: Software Industry Centre & Demos.
  • Freud, S. (1958). The relation of the poet to day-dreaming. In On creativity and the unconscious. Harper & Row Publishers.
  • Galton, F. (1869). Hereditary genius: an inquiry into its laws and consequences (2000 ed) . London, UK: MacMillan and Co.
  • Guilford, J. P. (1950). Creativity. The American Psychologist.
  • Hartley, J., Potts, J., MacDonald, T., Erkunt, C., & Kufleitner, C. (2012). CCI-CCI Creative City Index 2012.
  • Landry, C. (2010). Creativity in Bilbao & Bizkaia. Spain.