Innovation and Challenge in Contemporary Psychotherapy
with Kate McNulty
Myths about Creativity: Eccentricity
• Creative types are different from the rest of us• Being creative involves talent• People who are “creative” are weirdos
Without deviation from the norm, progress is not possible.-Frank Zappa
Impulsivity
• Working under pressure produces creative ideas
• Creative people have hot tempers• Creativity means messiness and chaos
The urge to destroy is also a creative urge.-Picasso
Romantic Primitivism
• Being spontaneous will stir creative ideas• Absent minded professor-types• Children are more creative than adults
At the age of four, you were an artist. And at seven, you were a poet.
-Seth Godin
Paying a Price
• Artists are tortured souls• The act of creating is a struggle• Creativity involves suffering
Visits from the Muse
• Nobody knows where ideas come from• Inspiration is whimsical• Creative ideas can’t be forced
Thinking doesn’t seem to help very much. The human brain is too high-powered to have many practical uses in this particular universe.
- Kurt Vonnegut
How Creativity Works
The best way to get a good idea
is to get lots of ideas.- Linus Pauling
Borrowing
All ideas are second hand, consciously or unconsciously drawn from a million outside sources and used by the creative person with pride and satisfaction.
-Mark Twain
The Unexpected
Discovery consists of seeing what everybody has seen and thinking what nobody has thought.
-Albert von Szent-Gyorgi
Abundance
You can’t use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have.
-Maya Angelou
Entertaining Oneself
People will kill you. Over time.
They will shave out every last morsel of fun in you with little harmless-sounding phrases that people use every day, like “Be realistic.”
-Dylan Moran
Risk
You have to do stuff that average people don't understand, because those are the only good things.
-Andy Warhol
Generativity
There is a fountain of youth: it is your mind, your talents, the creativity you bring to your life and the lives of people you love.
When you learn to tap this source, you will truly have defeated age.
-Sophia Loren
Deep Satisfaction
I am convinced that creativity is a priori to the integrity of the universe; that life is regenerative and conformity meaningless.
-Buckminster Fuller
Combining
There are no new ideas. There are only new ways of making them felt.
-Audre Lorde
Movement & Hands
Collecting
Diagrams
Mapping
Human salvation lies in the hands of the creatively maladjusted.
-Martin Luther King Jr.