The concept of creativity throughout history.

A concept that has attracted the attention of many thinkers, philosophers and scientists.

Creativity is a human psychological phenomenon that has favorably served the evolution of our species, just like intelligence. In fact, for a long time, they have come to be confused.

Today, it is argued that creativity and intelligence it is argued that creativity and intelligence are closely related.But they are two different dimensions of our psychic world; highly creative people are not necessarily more intelligent, nor are those with high IQs more creative.

Part of the confusion about what creativity is is due to the fact that , for centuries, creativity has been cloaked in a mystical-religious halo.. For this reason, practically until the 20th century, its study has not been approached scientifically.

Even so, since ancient times, it has fascinated us and we have made efforts to try to explain its essence through philosophy and, more recently, by applying the scientific method, especially through psychology.

Creativity in Antiquity

Hellenic philosophers tried to explain creativity by means of divinity.. They understood that creativity was a kind of supernatural inspiration, a whim of gods. The creative person was considered an empty vessel that a divine being filled with the necessary inspiration to create products or ideas.

For example, Plato held that the poet was a sacred being, possessed by the gods, who could only create what his muses dictated (Plato, 1871). From this perspective, creativity was a gift accessible to a chosen few, which implies an aristocratic vision of creativity that would last until the Renaissance.

Creativity in the Middle Ages

The Middle Ages, considered an obscurantist period for the development and understanding of the human being, arouses little interest for the study of creativity. It is not considered an epoch of creative splendor, so there was not much effort in trying to understand the mechanism of creation.It is not considered a time of creative splendor, so there was not much effort in trying to understand the mechanism of creation.

In this period, man was completely subordinated to the interpretation of the biblical scriptures and all his creative production was oriented to pay tribute to God. A curious fact of this period is the fact that many creators renounced to sign their works, which evidenced the denial of their own identity.

Creativity in the Modern Age

At this stage, the divine conception of creativity faded away to give way to the idea of a hereditary trait.. Simultaneously, a humanistic conception emerges, from which man is no longer a being abandoned to his destiny or to divine designs, but co-author of his own becoming.

During the Renaissance, the taste for aesthetics and art is retaken, the author recovers the authorship of his works and some other Hellenic values. It is a period in which the classic is reborn. Artistic production grows spectacularly and, consequently, so does the interest in studying the mind of the creative individual.

The debate on creativity, at this time, is centered on the duality "nature versus nurture" (biology or nurture), although without much empirical support. One of the first treatises on human ingenuity belongs to Juan Huarte de San Juan, a Spanish physician who in 1575 published his work "Examen de ingenios para las ciencias", a precursor of Differential Psychology and Professional Orientation. At the beginning of the 18th century, thanks to figures such as Copernicus, Galileo, Hobbes, Locke and Newton, confidence in science grows, as does faith in the human capacity to solve its problems through mental effort, confidence in science grows as faith grows in the human capacity to solve its problems through mental effort..... Humanism is consolidated.

The first relevant research of modernity on the creative process took place in 1767 by William Duff, who analyzed the qualities of original genius, differentiating it from talent. Duff argues that talent is not accompanied by innovation, while original genius is. The views of this author are very similar to recent scientific contributions; in fact, he was the first to point to the biopsychosocial nature of the creative act, demystifying it and getting two centuries ahead of the Biopsychosocial Theory of Creativity (Dacey and Lennon, 1998).

Conversely, during this same period, and fueling the debate, Kant understood creativity as something innate, a gift of nature, which cannot be trained and which constitutes an intellectual trait of the individual.a gift of nature, which cannot be trained and which constitutes an intellectual trait of the individual.

Creativity in postmodernity

The first empirical approaches to the study of creativity did not take place until the second half of the 19th century, when the concept of creativity was openly rejected.The first empirical approaches to the study of creativity did not occur until the second half of the 19th century, when the divine conception of creativity was openly rejected. It was also influenced by the fact that at that time psychology was beginning its split from philosophy to become an experimental science, so that the positivist effort in the study of human behavior increased.

During the 19th century, the conception of hereditary trait predominated. Creativity was a characteristic trait of men and it took a long time to assume that creative women could exist. This idea was reinforced by medicine, with different findings on the heritability of physical traits. A passionate debate between Lamarck and Darwin on genetic inheritance dominated scientific attention for much of the century. The former argued that learned traits could be passed on between consecutive generations, while Darwin (1859) showed that genetic changes are not so immediate. Darwin (1859) demonstrated that genetic changes are not so immediate, nor are they the result of practice or of theThe former argued that learned traits could be passed on between consecutive generations, while Darwin (1859) showed that genetic changes are not so immediate, nor the result of practice or learning, but occur through random mutations during the phylogeny of the species, for which long periods of time are required.

Postmodernism in the study of creativity could be situated in Galton's work (1869) on individual differences, strongly influenced by Darwinian evolution and the associationist current. Galton focused on the study of the hereditary trait, disregarding psychosocial variables. He made two influential contributions to later research: the idea of free association and how it operates between the conscious and the unconscious, which Sigmund Freud would later develop from his psychoanalytic point of view, and the application of statistical techniques to the study of individual differences, which made him a bridge author between the speculative study and the empirical study of creativity. bridge the gap between the speculative and empirical study of creativity..

The consolidation phase of psychology

Despite Galton's interesting work, psychology in the 19th and early 20th centuries was interested in simpler psychological processes, following the path set by Behaviorism, which rejected mentalism or the study of unobservable processes.

The behaviorist domain postponed the study of creativity until the second half of the 20th century, with the exception of a couple of lines that survived positivism, Psychoanalysis and Gestalt.

The Gestalt vision of creativity

Gestalt provided a phenomenological conception of creativity.. It began its journey in the second half of the 19th century, opposing Galton's associationism, although its influence was not noticed until well into the 20th century. The Gestaltists defended that creativity is not a simple association of ideas in a novel and different way. Von Ehrenfels first used the term gestalt (mental pattern or form) in 1890 and based his postulates on the concept of innate ideas, as thoughts that originate entirely in the mind and do not depend on the senses to exist.

Gestalts hold that creative thinking is the formation and alteration of gestalts, whose elements have complex relationships forming a structure with a certain stability, so they are not simple associations of elements. They explain creativity by focusing on the structure of the problem.They argue that the mind of the creator has the ability to move from one structure to another more stable structure. Thus, the insightor spontaneous new understanding of the problem (Aha! or eureka! phenomenon), occurs when a mental structure is suddenly transformed into a more stable one.

This means that creative solutions are usually obtained by looking at an existing gestalt in a new way, that is, when we change the position from which we analyze the problem. According to Gestalt, when we obtain a new point of view on the whole, instead of reorganizing its elements, creativity emerges..

Creativity according to psychodynamics

Psychodynamicists made the first important effort of the 20th century in the study of creativity. Psychoanalysis understands creativity as the phenomenon that emerges from the tension between conscious reality and the unconscious impulses of the individual. Freud argues that writers and artists produce creative ideas to express their unconscious desires in a socially acceptable way, so art is a compensatory phenomenon.Thus, art is a compensatory phenomenon.

He contributes to the demystification of creativity, arguing that it is not the product of muses or gods, nor a supernatural gift, but that the experience of creative illumination is simply the passage from the unconscious to the conscious.

The contemporary study of creativity

During the second half of the twentieth century, and following the tradition initiated by Guilford in 1950, creativity has been an important object of study of Differential Psychology and Cognitive Psychology, although not exclusively of them. From both traditions, the approach has been fundamentally empirical, using historiometry, ideographic studies, psychometrics or meta-analytical studies, among other methodological tools.

Currently, the approach is multidimensional. Aspects as diverse as personality, cognition, psychosocial influences, genetics or psychopathology are analyzed, to cite a few lines, while multidisciplinary, as there are many domains that are interested in it, beyond psychology. Such is the case of Business Studies, where creativity arouses great interest due to its relationship with innovation and competitiveness.

Thus, over the last decade, there has been a proliferation of research into creativityand the offer of training and qualification programs has grown significantly. Such is the interest in understanding it that research extends beyond academia, and occupies all types of institutions, including governmental ones. Its study transcends individual analysis, even group or organizational analysis, to address, for example, creative societies or creative classes, with indexes to measure them, such as: Euro-creativity index (Florida and Tinagli, 2004); Creative City Index (Hartley et al., 2012); The Global Creativity Index (The Martin Prosperity Institute, 2011) or the Index of creativity in Bilbao and Bizkaia (Landry, 2010).

From Classical Greece to the present day, and despite the great efforts we continue to devote to analyzing it, we have not even managed to reach a universal definition of creativity, so we are still far from understanding its essence.. Perhaps, with the new approaches and technologies applied to psychological study, as is the case of the promising cognitive neuroscience, we can discover the keys to this complex and intriguing mental phenomenon and, finally, the XXI century will become the historical witness of such a milestone.

Bibliographical references:

• Dacey, J. S., & Lennon, K. H. (1998). Understanding creativity. The interplay of biological, psychological and social factors. (1st ed). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
• Darwin, C. (1859). On the origin of the species by natural selection. London: Murray.
• De San Juan, J. H. (1575). Examen de ingenios para las ciencias (2003- Dig.). Madrid: Biblioteca virtual universal.
• Duff, W. (1767). Essay on Original Genius (Vol. 53). London, UK.
• Florida, R., & Tinagli, I. (2004). Europe in the creative age. UK: Software Industry Centre & Demos.
• Freud, S. (1958). The relation of the poet to day-dreaming. In On creativity and the unconscious. Harper & Row Publishers.
• Galton, F. (1869). Hereditary genius: an inquiry into its laws and consequences (2000 ed).. London, UK: MacMillan and Co.
• Guilford, J. P. (1950). Creativity. The American Psychologist.
• Hartley, J., Potts, J., MacDonald, T., Erkunt, C., & Kufleitner, C. (2012). CCI-CCI Creative City Index 2012.
• Landry, C. (2010). Creatividad En Bilbao & Bizkaia. Spain.