Self-Actualizing Creativity

Introduction

A distinct form of creativity called “creativeness” is one of the important traits that personality psychologist Abraham Maslow identified. He considered “creativeness” to be a core feature of self-actualizing people—those who had, according to Maslow's theory, satisfied the more basic foundations of his “hierarchy of needs” and so were able to spontaneously express a peak form of human flourishing.

Key Information

Maslow distinguished the “creativeness” he observed in self-actualizing people from the creativity for which productive and culturally influential artists of various kinds are known. Maslow considered artistic creativity to be potentially uncorrelated with psychological health, given the reputation of many famous artists for intense psychological distress and disruption (Toward a Psychology of Being, p. 127). He wrote that self-actualizing creativeness:

sprang much more directly from the personality, and… showed itself widely in the ordinary affairs of life, for...