Creative surrender: A Milnerian view of works by Y. Z. Kami

Born in 1900, Marion Milner started psychoanalytic training in 1940, following a trajectory which took her into territory later developed by Winnicott. She was an independent thinker who drew on a variety of sources to explore her own and her patients' creativity. She linked the creative process to psychic health and to the ability to achieve a level of perception that leads not to the re‐creation of lost objects but to the creation of what did not exist before. By linking Milner's theory of perception to works by Y.Z. Kami, I draw parallels between a psychoanalyst's perception of the creative process and that process as described and executed by an artist. Milner's lens and Kami's brush both articulate thoughts and feelings about what it means to be human, the condition of mortality and, after Freud, the illusions that sustain mankind through the creation of the gods. This study looks at how the work of an artist and a psychoanalytic thinker can be mutually reinforcing and inter‐animating, thereby broadening and deepening the insights gained from both.     

Reflection and Disagreement

How should you take into account the opinions of an advisor? When you completely defer to the advisor's judgment (the manner in which she responds to her evidence), then you should treat the advisor as a guru. Roughly, that means you should believe what you expect she would believe, if supplied with your extra evidence. When the advisor is your own future self, the resulting principle amounts to a version of the Reflection Principle—a version amended to handle cases of information loss. When you count an advisor as an epistemic peer, you should give her conclusions the same weight as your own. Denying that view—call it the “equal weight view”—leads to absurdity: the absurdity that you could reasonably come to believe yourself to be an epistemic superior to an advisor simply by noting cases of disagreement with her, and taking it that she made most of the mistakes. Accepting the view seems to lead to another absurdity: that one should suspend judgment about everything that one's smart and well‐informed friends disagree on, which means suspending judgment about almost everything interesting. But despite appearances, the equal weight view does not have this absurd consequence. Furthermore, the view can be generalized to handle cases involving not just epistemic peers, but also epistemic superiors and inferiors.     

From Implicit Theories to Creative Achievements: The Mediating Role of Creativity Motivation in the Relationship between Stereotypes,Growth Mindset,and Creative Achievement

Research has demonstrated that implicit theories of creativity are crucial in shaping an individual’s behavior and real‐life decisions toward being creative. The present study proposed and examined the underlying mechanisms of how two kinds of implicit theories—the growth mindset of the creative self and the stereotype of creative others—are associated with creative achievements through the mediating role of creativity motivation. Participants were 606 undergraduate students who were enrolled in an education major in two universities in China. Overall, the study found that Chinese students held a positive image toward a creative student, regarding him or her as highly competent, warm, and popular. Student perceptions of a creative other were positively related to their growth mindset of creativity. Moreover, results verified both the mediating role of creativity motivation on growth mindset, as well as the effect of positive stereotyping of the creative other on students’ creative achievement. These findings point to promising creativity motivation strategies including the cultivation of a malleable view of creativity and of creative role models, that may, in turn, promote creative achievement by encouraging students to do, learn, and accomplish new things.     

The Development and Evolution of Person‐Centered Expressive Art Therapy: A Conversation With Natalie Rogers

Many counselors are unaware that Natalie Rogers, daughter of Carl Rogers, has extended her father's work into the creative and expressive arts. This article includes a verbatim conversation with Natalie Rogers as she reflects on her childhood and her professional work. Person‐centered expressive art therapy is an alternative to traditional verbal counseling approaches and may be especially helpful for clients stuck in linear, rigid, and analytic ways of thinking and experiencing the world.     

Creativity: Intrapersonal and Interpersonal Selection of Creative Ideas

Creative idea selection—the selection of the most creative idea(s) from available ideas—is an important yet understudied topic. Creative idea selection can be performed by the idea generator (i.e., intrapersonal selection) or by another person (i.e., interpersonal selection). In the current research, we examined whether these two types of selection lead to different levels of performance. Participants generated six creative ideas to solve a societal problem. Thereafter, two selection tasks—intrapersonal selection and interpersonal selection—were performed. During intrapersonal selection, the idea generator selected the most creative idea from his/her own ideas; during interpersonal selection, another person made the selection from the same ideas. We found no effect of intrapersonal and interpersonal selection on creative idea selection performance: People selected ideas of identical creativity, irrespective of whether that idea was from themselves or from others. Moreover, we replicated the earlier finding that people perform suboptimally at creative idea selection, failing to select ideas that were more creative than an average idea, for both intrapersonal and interpersonal selection.     

Picturing the Wheatbelt: Exploring and Expressing Place Identity Through Photography

Community arts and cultural development is a process that builds on and responds to the aspirations and needs of communities through creative means. It is participatory and inclusive, and uses multiple modes of representation to produce local knowledge. ‘Voices’ used photography and photo elicitation as the medium for exploring and expressing sense of place among Aboriginal and non‐Indigenous children, young people and adults in four rural towns. An analysis of data generated by the project shows the diverse images that people chose to capture and the different meanings they afforded to their pictures. These meanings reflected individual and collective constructions of place, based on positive experiences and emotions tied to the natural environment and features of the built environment. We discuss community arts and cultural development practice with reference to creative visual methodologies and suggest that it is an approach that can contribute to community psychology’s empowerment agenda.     

Discussion of Dominique Scarfone’s Paper, “On ‘That Is Not Psychoanalysis’: Ethics as the Main Tool for Psychoanalytic Knowledge and Discussion”: Terminable and Interminable Discussion

When we ask ourselves if psychoanalysis is a science and what type of science it is, we raise many questions related to the notion of faithfulness. For instance, we might ask what it means to be faithful to a text, to the essence of an author’s writings, or to his or her creative power. If being a psychoanalyst means, at the very least, being able to translate the other’s thoughts, one of the difficulties of this task lies in what we call the complexity of translation. Analysts translate, interpret, interfere with the thoughts of the other in order to open up new paths, to offer themselves as a projection screen, or to try to create a link between two subjects so as to make room for the present, which is sometimes erased by history. To elucidate some of these issues, Scarfone (this issue) focuses on a discussion on the ethics of the analyst and of psychoanalysis     

Creativity and Cooperation in the Elementary Music Classroom*

The author examines attitudes towards, and the effects of focus on, creativity and cooperation in the elementary music classroom. First, elementary music teachers were interviewed regarding their values towards creativity and cooperation. Then, a curriculum was field tested that utilized cooperative learning and emphasized activities designed to encourage creative thinking and problem solving. A pretreatment-posttreatment study, with experimental and control group, was conducted to measure actual changes in student levels of creativity and attitudes towards cooperation. A follow-up of creativity measures was conducted four years later. Results indicate that elementary music teachers can adapt cooperative learning models to their teaching and can, short-term, influence students' levels of creativity and attitudes towards cooperation. Implications and opportunities for social-psychological creativity research and classroom educators are discussed. In 1983, Goodlad observed that, in general, there was a “gap between the rhetoric of individual flexibility, originality, and creativity … and the cultivation of these [things] in our schools” (p. 241) and that schools provided students with little opportunity to develop “satisfying relations with others based on respect, trust, cooperation, and caring” (p. 240). Goodlad encouraged teachers in the arts to provide opportunities for creative problem solving and to “boldly demonstrate the potentiality for doing through the arts what cannot be done readily through the other fields” (p. 238). His appeal to arts teachers is reminiscent of Maslow (1968):     

Discussion of Robert Grossmark's Case of Pamela

The author discusses Robert Grossmark's “Case of Pamela” from the perspective of developmental (relational) trauma and offers the view that Pamela's remarkable growth as well as the stunning power of the clinical process that made it possible is best illuminated from the vantage point of self-states, dissociation, affect dysregulation, and the dread of annihilation. The phenomenon of pathological narcissism, which in a classical idiom would be a central concept in describing Pamela's personality organization, is here formulated relationally in a self-state context. That is, each self-state, to the extent that it is protectively dissociated from others becomes, inherently, an island of narcissism and is what narcissism truly means. In the face of trauma, each island of selfhood operates to obliterate, automatically, the felt invasion of otherness from parts of the self that hold alternative views of “self-truth,” as well as from an other in real life—a separate person with a mind of his or her own. As each narcissistic island of Pamela's selfhood was recognized and accepted as valid in its own terms by Robert, the experiential wholeness of Pamela's sense of self began to be restored. The clinical process through which this was accomplished is seen by the author as the expansion and enrichment of Pamela's overarching self-coherence through her gradual representation of Robert's “otherness” as part of each self-representation. This in turn allowed the restoration of safe, communicative interchange between the formerly dissociated self-state islands of narcissistic insularity.     

Hypocritical Blame,Fairness, and Standing

This paper argues that hypocritical blame renders blame inappropriate. Someone should not express her blame if she is guilty of the same thing for which she is blaming others, in the absence of an admission of fault. In failing to blame herself for the same violations of norms she condemns in another, the hypocrite evinces important moral faults, which undermine her right to blame. The hypocrite refuses or culpably fails to admit her own mistakes, while at the same time demands that others admit theirs. The paper argues that this lack of reciprocity—expecting others to take morality seriously by apologizing for their faults, without one doing the same in return—is what makes hypocritical blame unfair.     

Public Bodies, Private Selves

ABSTRACT A patient whose case notes had been used, without her permission, during a disciplinary inquiry on the conduct of Wendy Savage (her obstetrician) complained that this was a breach of confidentiality. Her complaint cannot be understood as based on a concern about the possible adverse consequences of this use of the notes: rather, her concern was just with the fact that medical information about her had been made known to others.
My concern is with the meaning and status of the right to privacy, to which the Savage patient appealed. Such a right cannot be reduced to a property right, since this cannot capture what concerned the Savage patient. A proper understanding of what lies behind her complaint requires us to recognise the way in which facts about oneself—in this case facts about one's body—are intimately bound up with one's self, with one's identity, and thus with one's autonomy. What kinds of fact, and thus what conception of the self, are involved in such a conception of privacy need not everywhere be the same; the crucial point is that privacy and the self are concepts which, whatever their particular content, are internally related [1].     

Curriculum Vitae: Embodied Ethics at the Seams of Intelligibility

Sites of embodied disruption challenge academics to engage with power at its seams. In this article I consider an ethics of embodiment, situating it within questions raised by Judith Butler in her articles, “Doing Justice to Someone” (Butler 2001a) and “Giving an Account of Oneself” (Butler 2001b). In “Giving an Account,” Butler claims that gaps in knowledge and representation are germane to ethical practice, that brave inadequacies and creative approximations are the best we can do for others and ourselves. In “Doing Justice,” Butler enacts this stance, recounting the story of David Reimer, a child who in 1965 was offered up to science after his penis was severed in a botched circumcision. She seizes upon, through narrative fragments, a body whose sexual indeterminacy became the site and occasion for particularly brutal regimes of interpretation. Butler situates this patchwork narrative within the academic industry that reappropriates David's story for its own purposes. Taking Butler's ideas to heart, I carefully trace the nuances of her argument and highlight the (necessary) silences and foreclosures of her account. I propose “seamfulness” as a possible ethical‐aesthetic strategy for embodying Butler's ethical concerns. I close by briefly introducing some implications for arts‐informed representations in academic work.     

Dignity in Context,and Out: Discussion of Lynne Jacobs’ “On Dignity,a Sense of Dignity,and Inspirational Shame”

ABSTRACT

Dr. Lynne Jacobs’ “On Dignity, a Sense of Dignity, and Inspirational Shame” is an interdisciplinary integration of a priori ethics and a phenomenology of dignity. She contends that the human person’s engagement with other people—writ large in the therapeutic encounter—is inherently ethically situated. Moreover, she avers an inherent content to this ethics, namely, mutual respect for distinctively human value—dignity—between and among people. Her ethics of dignity informs her psychoanalytic exploration of experiences of dignity, indignity, and her notion of inspirational shame, among others. I join in Jacobs’ advocacy for therapeutic facilitation of a person’s sense of inherent worth, as well as her opposition to relational contexts of devaluation and degradation. However, the primordiality Jacobs grants to her ethics of dignity often obscures the constitutively cultural, familial, and personal contextuality of, first, her—and in my view, any—ethical conviction; second, what she describes as the experience of being human; third, the alleged indignity of human vulnerability; and finally, the claim that shame is the natural reaction to one’s failure to live up to personal ideals. In the end, and subject to certain clinical concerns, Jacobs’ article integrates into psychoanalysis primordial ethical duties that she and others claim inhere in us as human beings.     

Openness to Experience and Intellect Differentially Predict Creative Achievement in the Arts and Sciences

The Big Five personality dimension Openness/Intellect is the trait most closely associated with creativity and creative achievement. Little is known, however, regarding the discriminant validity of its two aspects—Openness to Experience (reflecting cognitive engagement with perception, fantasy, aesthetics, and emotions) and Intellect (reflecting cognitive engagement with abstract and semantic information, primarily through reasoning)—in relation to creativity. In four demographically diverse samples totaling 1,035 participants, we investigated the independent predictive validity of Openness and Intellect by assessing the relations among cognitive ability, divergent thinking, personality, and creative achievement across the arts and sciences. We confirmed the hypothesis that whereas Openness predicts creative achievement in the arts, Intellect predicts creative achievement in the sciences. Inclusion of performance measures of general cognitive ability and divergent thinking indicated that the relation of Intellect to scientific creativity may be due at least in part to these abilities. Lastly, we found that Extraversion additionally predicted creative achievement in the arts, independently of Openness. Results are discussed in the context of dual‐process theory.     

Toward a Gongfu Reconstruction of Confucianism —Responses to Comments by Huang Yong,Fan Ruiping,and Wang Qingjie

Responding to comments of my recent book, Understanding the Analects of Confucius, by Huang Yong, Fan Ruiping, and Wang Qingjie, this paper looks to highlight one of its major features—that it is a contemporary continuation of the Chinese tradition of doing commentary both as a way of allowing classic texts to unfold their rich meanings in the context of different times, and as a way for the commentator to express his or her own views. It strives to explain how a gongfu reconstruction of Confucianism can explain the apparent inconsistency between advocating rule-like instructions next to its encouragement of the art of flexibility, and to reveal what is more fundamental about Confucianism—rather than a system of rigid moral rules, it is an art of life. This gongfu interpretation would lead to the view that Confucianism does not depend on metaphysical truths as its justification, although it does need to hold metaphysical views as a way of affirming its values, which are justified through the excellence of life to which they lead. While the gongfu approach more accurately reflects Confucius’ own philosophical orientation, and it is therefore used to determine technical details such as what interpretations to put into translation of a text and what interpretations to list in the annotations as alternatives, it is, in the author’s humble view, also a unique contribution that the Chinese tradition can offer to world philosophy.     

The emotional health of the clergy

Summary and conclusions The health we seek is creative growth through all the relationships of life. We need an elastic concept of health, with a capacity to accept limitations and to do our best with these limitations in creative efforts to keep growing.We need to be aware of the particular hazards in this vocation, which may endanger the emotional health of the clergyman. Seeing these more clearly we can better prepare to cope with them.We must know to whom we belong, and learn to be at home with those persons and groups who become our living, working, and reciprocal community of outgoing care and forgiving love.If we can see emotional health as a dynamic process of ever-growing outreach and integration, we will value the stresses of our life and work. The pains as well as the joys contribute to the challenge and fulfillment of persons who grow through creative encounter with other persons.Continuing education will be needed for this crucial vocation of ministering to others, as it is in every serving profession where the complexities of life are so baffling. Academic courses and library study, though needed, will not suffice to prepare for effective work with other persons in face-to-face relations. There will be constant need for supervised evaluation of what we are and seek to become to others in the critical moments of meeting, listening, and responding as person to person in the ultimate concerns of our life in community.He is also a member of the Academy.     

“I am NN”: A Reconstruction of Anscombe's “The First Person”

This paper develops a way of understanding G. E. M. Anscombe's essay “The First Person” at the heart of which are the following two ideas: first, that the point of her essay is to show that it is not possible for anyone to understand what they express with “I” as an Art des Gegebenseins—a way of thinking of an object that constitutes identifying knowledge of which object is being thought of; and second, that the argument through which her essay seeks to show this is itself first personal in character. Understanding Anscombe's essay in this light has the merit of showing much of what it says to be correct. But it sets us the task of saying what it is that we understand ourselves to express with “I” if not an Art des Gegebenseins, and in particular what it is that we understand ourselves to express with sentences with “I” as subject that might seem to express identity judgments, such as “I am NN”, and “I am this body”.     

Designing Translingual Pedagogies: Exploring Pedagogical Translation through a Classroom Teaching Experiment

This study examined how middle-grades language arts teachers learned to integrate a small-group collaborative translation activity into their teaching practice. We discuss what we call pedagogical translation as an emergent social practice, in which translation routines that are familiar to multilingual students may be leveraged toward instructional goals in a mainstream language arts class. The data were drawn from a classroom teaching experiment iteration of a larger design-based research study, whose goal is to create a fully developed instructional protocol useful to all teachers in linguistically diverse language arts classrooms, but especially teachers with limited or emerging proficiencies in languages other than English. We position pedagogical translation as a paradigm case of translingual pedagogy—instructional approaches designed to leverage the full range of emerging bilinguals’ linguistic resources—and we focus our analysis on the agentive participation of teachers as they integrate new translingual routines into their instructional practice. Using a conjecture mapping procedure, we describe the evolution of an instructional theory for how pedagogical translation can be leveraged toward literacy learning objectives. We present qualitative narratives describing how participating teachers made locally situated design choices that meshed new routines with existing instructional practice, documenting trajectories of teacher participation as agentive designers of translingual pedagogy.