Abstract
Beginning with moving recollections of Dear Evan Hansen (Tony Award Winning Best Musical 2017) we plumb subconscious and unconscious minds while reflecting on the risks as well as challenges. and rich wonders, for creativity. Often the best part is thus revealed, along with strands of universal wisdom. Yet delicate and nonlinear balances are on the road to success. Mastering these are healthy to be sure, both for creativity and life in general. Yet they may be misunderstood in a culture not attuned to nonlinear dynamical changes and balances, or the idiosyncracies of openness and authenticity. Whether framed as “regression in the service of the ego,” conscious and unconscious, primitive and adaptive, inspiring with executive functions, Systems 1 and 2, these are balances well worth mastering.
Writing is easy. Just put a piece of paper in the typewriter and start bleeding.
Thomas Wolfe
The needle that prods into what really happened may be the same needle that writes a good line, I think …. poetry … has to strike fire somewhere, and truth, maybe unpleasant truth about yourself, may be the thing that does that.
Robert Lowell
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Notes
- 1.
Levenson (author), Dear Evan Hansen, Music Box Theater, New York City, November 2017.
- 2.
Borkin, Healing Power of Writing; Cameron, Artist’s Way, and others.
- 3.
Leavy, Method Meets Art, 2nd Ed.
- 4.
Pritzker, “Audience Flow.”
- 5.
Ray Bradbury, Classic Stories, I. Dr. Allan Combs, consciousness scholar, pointed out the power of such memories!
- 6.
Hassin, Uleman, and Bargh, New Unconscious, 3.
- 7.
Ibid.
- 8.
Richards, “Relations Between Creativity and Psychopathology.”
- 9.
Hassin, Uleman, and Bargh, New Unconscious.
- 10.
Jung , selected by Storr, Essential Jung, 65.
- 11.
Richards, “Creative Alchemy”; Russ, Pretend Play, 68.
- 12.
Costa and Widiger, “Introduction.”
- 13.
Mlodinow . Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior.
- 14.
Richards, “When Illness Yields Creativity”; Russ, Pretend Play, 68.
- 15.
Barron, Creative Person and Creative Process.
- 16.
Ibid., 88.
- 17.
Martin and Wilson , “Defining Creativity with Discovery,” 423.
- 18.
Scharmer and Kaufer, Leading from the Emerging Future.
- 19.
Ibid., 141.
- 20.
Zabelina , “Attention and Creativity,” 165.
- 21.
Scharmer and Kaufer, Leading from the Emerging Future, 143. Also see Scharmer, “In Front of the Blank Canvas: Sensing Emergent Futures.”
- 22.
LeGuin , “Afterword,” 265.
- 23.
e.g., Lepore & Smythe, editors, The Writing Cure. Pennebaker, editor, Emotion, Disclosure, and Health; Sundararajan shows further benefit of fine-grained language analysis, especially across cultures, in Understanding Emotion in Chinese Culture.
- 24.
Pennebaker, Kiecolt-Glaser, and Glaser, “Disclosure of Trauma and Immune Function.”
- 25.
Creswell, Research Design.
- 26.
Briggs and Peat, Turbulent Mirror, and see nuance, Chap. 16.
- 27.
Leavy. Method Meets Art, 2nd Edition.
- 28.
www.apa.org, Division 5.
- 29.
Anna Freud, Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense.
- 30.
Be aware these are not actual physical places, although the metaphor of iceberg can be helpful.
- 31.
See Lepore and Smythe, editors, The Writing Cure.
- 32.
Klein , “Stress, Expressive Writing, and Working Memory.”
- 33.
Zausner , When Walls Become Doorways.
- 34.
Morrison and Morrison, Memories of Loss and Dreams of Perfection.
- 35.
Norton, The Demeter-Persephone Myth as Writing Ritual in the Lives of Literary Women.
- 36.
Pennebaker, Kiecolt-Glaser, and Glaser, “Disclosure of Trauma and Immune Function.”
- 37.
Richards, “Everyday Creativity,” 38.
- 38.
Freeman, Mosby Complementary and Alternative Medicine, 3rd Edition.
- 39.
N. Rogers , Creative Connection; also N. Rogers, Creative Connection for Groups.
- 40.
C. Rogers, “Toward a Theory of Creativity”; Goslin-Jones and Richards, “Mysteries of Creative Process.”
- 41.
Goslin-Jones & Richards, Ibid. (in press).
- 42.
Russ, Pretend Play, 34.
- 43.
Ibid.
- 44.
Ibid.
- 45.
Freeman, Mosby’s Complementary and Alternative Medicine, 199.
- 46.
Russ, “Pretend Play and Creativity” (in press).
- 47.
Russ, Pretend Play, 62.
- 48.
Baars, In the Theatre of Consciousness.
- 49.
Jung , Active Imagination, 166–168; also Jung, selected by Storr, Essential Jung, 87.
- 50.
Shapiro and Carlson, Art and Science of Mindfulness, 2nd Edition.
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Richards, R. (2018). Deep Sea Diving. In: Everyday Creativity and the Healthy Mind. Palgrave Studies in Creativity and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-55766-7_11
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