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.