Creativity is usually regarded as a special kind of human activity. A person writes poetry, composes music, paints pictures, develops a scientific theory, or invents a new mechanism – and it is then that we describe their activity as creative. The rest of the time, it would seem, a person simply perceives the world, thinks, feels, and acts.
But if the psyche generates its own contents, creativity is not a separate kind of human activity. It is a natural mode of psychic life.
Psychic content does not arrive ready-made from outside
A human being lives in an environment in which objects exist independently of the subject, and in which events and changes occur. Environmental influences can be registered by the sensory organs and transformed by the nervous system. But psychic content does not enter the psyche together with these influences in a ready-made form.
We do not receive ready-made knowledge about objects from outside, nor a ready-made significance of those objects for us, nor ready-made information.
The psyche generates its own content.
Nor is this content given to a person from birth in the way that certain characteristics of the organism may be genetically determined. If the contents of the psyche already existed in a ready-made form, psychic life would amount merely to reproducing what had been predetermined in the person.
Yet throughout life, human beings generate new psychic content.
Psychological functions generate content
In the model of consciousness, psychological functions are defined by the content they generate.
Functions of perception / irrational functions — generate knowledge about what happens in the environment over a certain interval of time. The perception of invariants generates knowledge about what remains unchanged in objects and processes; the perception of changes generates knowledge about what changes in objects and processes.
The rational functions generate the significance of the knowledge that has been produced. Feeling generates the significance of knowledge for the subject. Thinking generates the significance of knowledge for that which is not the subject by representing knowledge in a form suitable for communication, interpretation, and processing. Knowledge represented in a form suitable for communication, interpretation, and processing is called information.
Perception, feeling, and thinking are therefore not the processing of psychic content that already exists. The operation of a function gives rise to content that did not exist before.
In this sense, every act of psychic life is a creative act.
The creative character of perception becomes particularly clear in relation to the future. The future does not yet exist as a reality capable of acting upon a person. A ready-made model of the future therefore cannot be obtained from the environment. By extrapolating perceived invariants and changes into the future, the psyche itself generates a possible or probable model of a world that does not yet exist.
Creativity does not begin with art
This requires us to broaden the concept of creativity considerably.
Creativity does not begin when a person sits down to write a poem or compose music. It begins already when knowledge about an object arises, when that knowledge acquires significance for the subject, or when information is generated.
Artistic, scientific, and technical creativity are therefore particular and especially visible manifestations of a much more general process.
Human beings are capable of creating works of art and scientific theories because psychic life itself is based on the emergence of new content.
In other words, a person is not creative only from time to time.
Creativity is a natural mode of existence of the human psyche.
Creativity on the right path
This conclusion becomes especially interesting when considered in relation to the right and left paths of consciousness.
On the right path, several psychological functions are differentiated. Each of them independently generates its own kind of content.
Consciousness does not require a single centre that controls these functions, assigns them a common task, and determines the direction of their activity. Nor does the dominant function control the other functions.
Consciousness is an open, distributed system.
Creativity on the right path therefore also has a distributed character. Different functions generate different kinds of content; connections arise between these contents; and the results generated by one function become conditions for further psychic life.
Here, what is new need not be the realization of a goal established in advance. It may arise in the very movement of consciousness.
What happens on the left path
Creativity does not disappear on the left path. As long as psychic life exists, the psyche generates new content, and therefore creativity continues as well.
However, the organization of the generated content differs on the right and left paths.
On the right path, the content of the psychological functions arises in a differentiated form. Different types of content can be distinguished from one another and enter into specific relations with one another.
On the left path, only the dominant function remains differentiated. The content of the other functions is also generated, but it arises in an undifferentiated form. These functions are fused both with one another and within their individual parts.
A work created on the left path is therefore not necessarily poorer or simpler. On the contrary, the undifferentiated nature of its content can give it ambiguity, multiple layers, and internal contradiction. One content is not clearly separated from another; different meanings can coexist, merge into one another, and at the same time suggest opposing interpretations.
It is precisely here that the characteristics Jung attributed to the undifferentiated function — ambivalence and ambitendency — become especially interesting. When opposing contents exist in a fused form, a work may evoke different, sometimes opposite experiences and allow several incompatible yet mutually non-exclusive readings.
This creates a sense of hidden meaning that cannot be exhausted by any single, unambiguous explanation.
Such a work may acquire qualities close to what Jung called a symbol. For Jung, a genuine symbol is not a sign with a single known meaning. It expresses content that cannot yet be exhaustively formulated in terms of known concepts. A symbol therefore allows for a multiplicity of meanings and points beyond any single interpretation.
The undifferentiated nature of psychic content may be one source of precisely this kind of symbolic ambiguity.
The history of art and literature contains many outstanding works that, according to the typological interpretation proposed here, were created by authors on the left path. The left path therefore cannot be regarded as a state in which a person’s creative possibilities simply diminish. It produces a different character of creativity.
On the right path, creativity arises through the successive generation and linking of differentiated types of content. On the left path, alongside the differentiated content of the dominant function, fused, undifferentiated content of the other functions arises.
As long as psychic life exists, a person creates. The right and left paths do not oppose creativity to its absence — they produce different forms of organization of creative content.
Freedom as a property of creative consciousness
This leads to another connection: the connection between creativity and freedom.
If psychic content were determined entirely by what comes from outside, a human being would merely be a system reproducing the influences of the environment.
If this content existed entirely within the person in advance, psychic life would be merely the realization of an already established program.
But the psyche generates content in the process of its own existence.
The human inner world therefore cannot be regarded as something given once and for all and subsequently altered only by circumstances. It is continuously coming into being.
A human being does not first receive a ready-made inner world and then live within it. The inner world comes into being because the person lives.
This is precisely why the openness of consciousness also implies its incompleteness. As long as psychic life continues, content can arise that did not exist before.
Perhaps it is at this point that creativity and freedom reveal themselves as two aspects of the same property of the human psyche.
And then Pushkin’s lines acquire an entirely new resonance:
Along the path of freedom
Go where your free mind draws you.
A free path does not have to be laid out in advance.
It comes into being as a person walks it.