(This article appeared in Amendt-Lyon, Nancy, & Spagnuolo Lobb, Margherita, 2003, Creative License:  the Art of Gestalt Therapy.  Wien/New York:  Springer, pp. 163-180.)

by Gordon Wheeler

Creativity may be usefully defined as the capacity to generate novel solutions to problems, which includes of course the ability to see the world in problem-solving terms in the first place. Clearly, this creative capacity is the defining characteristic of our species, an extremely young branch of the primate order, which has managed to arise and then spread over the entire planet in the course of only 3000 or so generations, a mere blink of evolutionary time. This capacity, in turn, rests in some way on our biological history: specifically, the remarkably rapid expansion of brain tissue in our ancestral line, in which the neocortex together with its infoldings has multi- plied some fourfold in surface area in the brief evolutionary window of only a couple of million years (Calvin, 2002). Plainly, a pace this rapid points to a strong positive feedback loop between adaptation and evolutionary pressure, one in which each new degree of development opens up new environmental territory, which then exerts strong selective pressure for expansion of that new capacity, in the recursive way of evolution. It is this expansion, together with accompanying reorganization, that has both permitted and been driven by the growth and elaboration of imaginal power and the nesting of active and long-term memory, which are key to our ability to experiment – i.e., to create and try out these novel solutions flexibly, both “in our heads” and in the “real world.” To achieve all this, we are evolutionarily “hard-wired” (to use the current cybernetic metaphor) to live by and through a more or less continuous problem-solving process, generating novelty by engaging in an ongoing recur- sive sequence of near-constant scanning of our world (both “inner” and “outer”), registering contrasts and differences, elaborating an organized picture or map as we go (the “best available gestalt”), relating that map to an emotional valence, running “scenarios” in our head on the basis of those scans and that valence, estimating outcome probabilities, and using the inte- grated whole of this process as a ground for experiment and action, and all the rest of that flexible, recombinant organization of perception that we know as experience (see Wheeler, 2000). This is our ongoing human-process strategy for surviving, meeting challenges, and seeking to grow, given our biological nature as low-instinct, high-learning animals, who aren’t good at much of anything except this creative problem-solving ability itself. With it, we have managed to outperform and outlast rival hominid and other species across the entire variable range of planetary (and now some extra-planetary) environments. At the same time, this recursive sequence also amounts to a description of our inborn gestalt-process nature, the basic data and subject matter of our Gestalt model of understanding and intervention for change. Thus creativity, seen in this way, is no more than our gestalt nature in action – what in the Ge- stalt model is meant by the rich term contact, the construction of meaningful (i.e., useful, experimental/predictive) whole pictures of understanding in the integrated field of experience and living (Lewin, 1936; Perls et al., 1951). How this process of contact works – the unfolding of a creative sequence – has been explored and elaborated in a number of ways in Gestalt teaching and literature. Prominent among them is the heuristic/diagnostic model known as the Contact Cycle, or Cycle of Experience, which outlines the life history of an impulse or desire, tracing a path from sensation and awareness (the formation of a sense of need), through the heightening of energy and mobilization (gath- ering attentional focus and muscular tonus preparatory to moving), action to- ward the goal, “contact” in the sense of transaction or resolution, withdrawal/ closure, and then on to the next sensation and need (see Fig. 1). Whether the contact/solution achieved is then novel/creative or familiar and routine is not addressed by the model: if anything, examples in the literature tend to be sim- ple biological urges that are relatively unproblematic in the field (see Wheeler, 1991). Either way, the implication here is that this sequence is natural and “or- ganismic”, basically biological in nature; thus, left to itself, it should simply run out to a series of satisfying outcomes (barring internal interruptions or “resis- tances”), and presumably also coordinate those goals and paths with the some- times nested, sometimes contradictory unfolding of other goals (and the goals of others!) – all somewhere outside the borders of the schematic, by a homeo- static process of “organismic self-regulation” (Perls et al., 1951). And yet, biological underpinnings and organismic self-regulation, how- ever important, can only be part of the story of creativity. For by the same terms of our high-flexibility, high-learning, and low-instinct animal nature, we are also the most intensely and richly social of animals, the animal most characterized by extreme neotony (immature birth) and consequent long pe- riod of childhood dependency and concentrated social learning. Thus, too, we are relational by our very nature, “pre-wired” again for interpersonal ori- entation and intersubjectivity, that capacity for looking at others as well as ourselves in terms of our shared motivational process (which is another way of saying our integrated gestalt/constructivist nature, or flexible organiza- tion of the experiential field in terms of our felt needs [Wheeler, 2000]). That is, we don’t just look at others: we look at others looking at us. Of course, to be used at all well, this capacity for knowing and using the social field inter- subjectively must be learned in development; but our prepotent ability to learn it is itself inborn and basic to our beings, in that infinite recursion of nature and nurture that characterizes all of life, but is the very hallmark of our species. For humans, as the biologist Paul Ehrlich [2000] observes, nature is nurture. Unfortunately, little or nothing of this social, relational ground of our being is evident in our familiar Gestalt Cycle models. As customarily drawn (Fig. 1), the Cycle gives us a schematic of the life history of an impulse in isolation, as if existing separately from its “inner” context of competing or overlapping de- sires and background of beliefs, expectations, and values – and separately as well from the “outer” context (which is also a living part of our “inner” life) of other people, who make up our relevant landscape and our contextual world. Now, certainly, every abstracted model plays on a necessary tradeoff between lifelike complexity, on the one hand, and clarity and simplicity of use on the other: a map, as we know, is not the territory being mapped – nor would it be useful if it were. Rather, a model is no more (and no less) than a lens, which serves to bring certain features into sharper focus while inevitably obscuring others; and as long as this model is held and used as it should be, as a diagnostic and heuristic tool (and not in any sense a full, normative picture of the real flow of human process and experience), then we may hope to avoid the more reductionistic implications of the diagram. Alas, examples of such normative, reductionistic teaching and applications of the Cycle model abound, amount- ing at times to a trivialization of the Gestalt perspective itself, and of its unique power for clarifying our interventions and our understanding of human affairs. [1] In particular, the Cycle models, as usually drawn, may often seem to imply that the only significant place to look for the dynamics driving human behavior is basically “inside” the person. Such a sharply individualistic bias distorts and constricts our understanding of human process in social field in general, and creative process in particular. Viewed in terms of this diagram, creativity would then have to be seen as an essentially mystical business, arising somehow solely from within – more or less the “genius” or inspiration model of the Romantic tradition (deriving in turn from the hypertro- phied individualism of the Greeks. In the Greek version, remember, creativ- ity was ascribed to the Muses, those female deities whose job it was to give inspiration or breath to creative genius – which was itself of course male, in the misogynistic reading so often found in hyper-individualistic cultures). Recontextualizing and redrawing the model in its living context can then serve to shed light on some quite different, often neglected features of our human landscape, with a corresponding expansion of its power to clarify the dynamics of creative experience and behavior.

I. The Cycle in Context

And yet, the various Cycle models have proved highly durable and useful in a variety of applications (perhaps most of all in interpersonal and sys- temic analyses, where it is much harder to confound this schematic map with any ideal of personal experience and process [see Nevis, 1987; Zinker, 1977]). How then can we embed the model more clearly in its natural ground of the living social field, making it more “experience-near”, and then using it to shed light on the dynamics of creative process? First of all, focusing on the social context in this way points to a hidden discontinuity in the model as traditionally drawn, at the stage where the cycle moves from mobilization to action (see Fig. 2).   What is obscured here is a state or phase transition, from the “inner” world of more or less private thoughts, feelings, impulses, and desires, to the “outer” world of public action, with a sharply discontinuous rise in perils, stakes, and possibilities for satisfac- tion or otherwise. Let us then redraw the diagram with this in mind, “uncurling” the circle into a wavy line (somewhat as Nevis [1987] does) and placing it in its experiential field context, with that field organized around this rough “me/not-me” boundary (to use Sullivan’s language [1953]) – which is the pre-organization Stern (1985), Fogel (1993) and others point to as a prepotent categorizing principle of our development from birth on. [2]  At the same time, in place of a one-dimensional line, we will indicate a gath- ering stream or channel of attentional focus, with felt boundaries between what lies inside and outside that particular organizing concern. [3] Here (Fig. 2) the phase transition we spoke of above, from private to public, becomes the chief organizing principle of the diagram as it is in de- velopment and in so much of our lived and felt experience. Below the dot- ted line, we have all the “inner” realm of desires, fears, intentions, past ex- perience both encouraging and discouraging, and integrated learning, which form the “inner ground” of belief and action. Above it, on the dia- gram, lies the “outside world”, the world of resources and risks, supports and obstacles, most significantly in the form of other people. All of us know the sharp intake of breath or deep sigh that can precede that moment of boundary-crossing or “plunging into” this outer world, a moment signaled at times by phrases like “Here goes nothing”, or even “Cover my back”, spoken to oneself or aloud to an onlooker/supporter. Drawing the picture in this way helps clarify a number of experiential issues and processes that were passed over in the circle diagram: for example, attentional dynamics and process (by showing more clearly how attentional boundaries must be energized and supported: see Kent-Ferraro and Wheeler, 2003); play (see Mortola P, Wheeler G, Play. The Analytic Press/Gestalt Press, Hillsdale, New Jersey, in press), and above all the crucial issue of support (Wheeler, 2000). In each case, insight and intervention power are gained by relocat- ing these processes in the social field, which is their dynamic contextual home. For our purposes here, let us then “zero in” on that moment or space of transition itself, the place where my field-organizing process takes the fateful step out of the world of feelings, fantasy, and the physical body, and into the wider, more perilous world of nurturance, rich resources, rich satisfac- tions and potential disasters (Fig. 3). Here we focus specifically on the “space-between” the inner and outer worlds of experience (at this point we will drop the quotation marks around these quite problematic terms, inner and outer, which are often used in a sharply individualistic sense, as if the two realms were rigidly separate rather than highly interpenetrable and mutually informing, as they actually are in lived experience). The interpenetration of the two ex- periential worlds is indicated here by the heavy dotted line across the diagram in Fig. 3, which both distinguishes and joins the individual with the social surround. The infant is born, to be sure, “preprogrammed” to begin integrating self-experience in terms of this basic field-organizational difference, “me/not-me” (or better, again, “body-self/field-self”), but still that boundary is always flexible, situational, highly mobile, and varyingly flexed or relaxed depending on the degree of perceived danger, safety, and support. The first thing we can note about this zone, as we have drawn it here, is how that crossover space partakes of both worlds, both the inner and the outer. At the same time, by drawing a boundary around it, we mark a third space, a transitional zone which draws freely on both the feelings and fanta- sies of the private zone and the physical reality of the public zone, while still being relatively protected from the high stakes and life-threatening risks that can characterize that outer realm, the “real world”. Even physical objects in this third space have the character of Winnicott’s (1965) “transitional objects,” items which have tangible reality while still embodying issues and meanings from the inner, imaginal world. Children’s toys, such as teddy bears, dolls, and comfort objects such as blankets often have this dual char- acter, but so too do many of the tools, toys, and commitments or activities of adulthood – what Kohut (1977) termed “self-objects”, a term which points (from a different perspective) to their dual nature, as well as their role in serving the maintenance of a coherent sense of self. This zone is then the particular arena of rehearsal, experiment, and play. Games, which are formally bounded play, belong by definition to this transi- tional zone – with the boundary of the space coinciding with the boundary of the game. That is, a game, like all play, is simultaneously both real and not real. If it is not felt as real enough – if the play does not partake of “inner space” – then I have no investment in it, I don’t care enough to be “really playing” (the kind of reproach children may sometimes make if one is only “going through the motions”, when what they wanted was a “real play- mate”). On the other hand, if I lose all sense of boundary between the game space and the “real world”, then I become a problematic game partner, one who is “overinvolved”, in a competitive sport for example, forgetting that the activity was “only a game” (for further discussion of play from a Gestalt perspective, see Mortola and Wheeler, in press). This is also the space of story-telling, drama and, by extension, all of art. Aristotle’s cathartic theory of drama, the communal emotional purging of the audience, depends on a momentary forgetting of the fact that what we are watching is “not real”, i.e., the temporary loss of that distinction, which is represented on the diagram by the lower arc of the oval (see Fig. 4). When we cry, or experience terror, or feel ennobled in a movie, play, or novel, we are enacting Aristotle’s view of dramatic art, “losing ourselves” for a time in the experience. [4] By the same reasoning, Brecht (1967) objected to this kind of drama, as serving to lull the audience into complacency by containing and draining away their empathy and political outrage in the artificial space of theater: this is the rationale of his political “theater of alienation”, in which he reminds the audience constantly that this is only a play, that happy end- ings are not real for real people, and that it is the real political world outside the theater, of poverty, exploitation, and war, that matters.

II. The Zone of Creativity

Thus, this transitional space is also the zone of imagination, which is to say the zone of creativity. What we do in this transitional space is by definition experimental: we try out novel combinations of elements, features, problems, and solutions – all that imaginal activity which we have said it is our special human nature to be able to do. Indeed, generally speaking we cannot not do this, much or most of the time, barring serious trauma. And here, trauma itself may be defined as those events which resist integration and thus are not available to the creative zone: i.e., they become “frozen gestalts”, patterns and sequences that then are not susceptible to this kind of deconstruction, creative recombination, and play. Such events may be said to have been undergone without being fully experienced – i.e., integrated into an organized, flexible, and usable narrative whole of meaning. The hall- mark of such fully integrated experience is then precisely that it may be played with – which is to say, manipulated creatively. In order to be capable of this, our brain/minds are necessarily organized narratively – i.e., as mutually embedded gestalts with a time dimension (see Wheeler, 2000). In Gestalt terms, narrative is the structure of ground, the organization of experience into story-telling units suitable for recombination, manipulation, and recall. That is, we run scenarios in our heads – trial narratives or “what if’s” – that play out different scenes and sequences, various combinations of imagined outcomes, wishes, fears, and other considerations, all in imaginary or experimental space. We are able to do this specifically because of the felt difference represented by the upper boundary line in the diagram, which distinguishes the trial narrative zone – i.e., creative space – from the zone of “real-life” stakes. Thus we begin to see how protecting this space is an essential field condition for creative process. As long as the experiment remains purely imaginary, we are still in the lower region of the oval on the diagram, the zone of daydreams (and night dreams) and fantasies, memories and hopes, regrets and fears – but also of mental rehearsal, reflection (including theory – the novel combination of con- cepts and ideas), and philosophy. Ultimately, all of our behavior that is choice- ful, and not merely routine, grows out of this space: selection of one scenario over another indicates readiness to cross the dotted line – first to the upper part of the oval, enacted experiment, and then on to fully public space.

Or we may take that next step, crossing the dotted line to experiment with tangible materials in some way – in dialogue, in the lab, in artistic me- dia, or in rehearsals and other kinds of trial and practice sessions. Therapy takes place in this zone, which Goodman (2003) aptly characterized as a space of “safe emergency”, capturing exactly the dual nature of all creative/ experimental process. Here again, therapy, like all serious play, all activity in this space, is at the same time both real and not real – this is what makes it a creative space, a zone for experimentation, under any model (and this is true whether or not the particular school or theory focuses, as Gestalt does, on this experimental process itself). As with game space, if the therapy is “too unreal”, too unfelt (as, for example, through denial of the present relational validity of the encounter, in the way of the classical psychoanalytic model), then much of the activity of the client’s inner world – specifically, everything having to do with present relational perceptions and feelings, the organiza- tion of the present inner/outer field – is discounted or denied, with a result- ing impoverishment of the space’s potential for fostering creative experi- ment. On the other hand, if the therapy becomes “too real”, and is taken (by the therapist) as wholly taking place in the outer relational zone, then the useful distinction between the real therapeutic relationship and other kinds of “real-world” relationships is sacrificed – with the door then opened for abuse (Fig. 5). Either way, the creative potential of the process is lost, as a space specifically devoted to experiencing new relational meanings and try- ing out new relational sequences, under safe-enough conditions of relatively low stakes – the prerequisite for all creative process and experiment.

III. Field Conditions of Creativity

This brings us to the question of the provision and support of field conditions for creative process itself – always remembering that in the Gestalt model, when we speak of field, we are referring to the whole experiential world, both the inner and outer zones of perception and experience. What drawing the diagram in this way supports us to see is how creativity depends on and is supported by the assertion/protection of the boundary around this “third space,” the space of experimental process itself. Whenever the consequen- ces of any trial activity or novel combination of elements and ideas threaten to become “real world” consequences, then the experimental zone is compromised to that extent, if not cancelled altogether. The higher the stakes, the more I am constrained to limit risk, sticking to familiar response patterns, even when those patterns are deeply unsatisfying. This is, after all, what we come to therapy for: because our familiar habit patterns are unsatisfying. And locked in as we are by the apparently high stakes of stepping outside them, we can find neither the perspective to see them for the learned patterns they are, nor the corrective experience to suggest there might be other ways, together with a safe-enough space for making these experiments. Therapy, we may find when we get there, is especially designed to offer this safe-enough creative space, one in which the therapist her- or himself can become a “transitional object” in this sense, for intersubjective exploration by partaking enough – but not too much – of both worlds (or better, a “transitional subject”, a partner for a time in the transitional space of experiment and creativity). And thus, too, the therapist’s special responsibility to protect the upper boundary of the oval zone on the diagram for the client, the boundary that represents the difference between this particular “real rela- tionship” and other “real-world” relationships, thereby maintaining the experimental, low-stakes nature of the encounter. These field conditions for therapeutic growth are then the same, dynami- cally speaking, as the field conditions for all creativity. In all these different kinds of cases – the generation of novel combinations and new trial solutions in art, science, “free play”, games, theory, psychotherapy, and other relation- ships alike – the creative process itself depends on field conditions of protection and support for this transitional space, which is the essential space for experiment and novelty, and which can then partake of both experiential realms, the outer/public and the inner/private, without being overwhelmed by either. For the developing child, this support necessarily comes from adult caretakers, who affirm the child’s experimental process and products, and receive and respond to trial interpretations of the world, and of relational experience – even as they may teach and steer the child toward progressively more complex, ambitious solutions. Without this support, the child has no experiential base for exploring and learning to value experimental space itself. For the adult, support for creative space and meaningful experiment depends crucially on both 1) knowledge/validation of our inner worlds (feel- ings, desires, fears, and the like), so that we have new material, new imaginative combinations to work with, and 2) the identification of a significant social group of reference, where our own experimental combinations and trial meanings can be received and in some sense understood (as at least intelligible, if not necessarily successful or desirable). Each of these will be taken up in more detail below, as we consider how creative space is inhibited or blocked, when either or both of these essential supports are not avail- able and felt.

IV. Shame and the Constriction of Creative Space

Any field condition that is the opposite of this support then works in the op- posite way, limiting or canceling out the space where experiment and cre- ativity arise and are played out. By “the opposite of support”, in a field-self model (as distinguished from an individualist model), it is important to be clear that we do not mean just active opposition, but far more insidiously, all that complex social/emotional field dynamic we know as shame. Resistance, after all, is a form of engagement: when we are met with active resistance in the outside world, we may often be able to react with a redoubling of energy and an increase of creativity, including the creative organization of more support in some part of our social field. Where we cannot respond to opposi- tion in this way, oftentimes the problem may be that support is itself tinged with feelings of shameful dependency – feelings that are themselves then material for therapy. Engaged resistance, which may be energizing and even inspiring, becomes debilitating shame when our social world moves from opposition to our actions, to withdrawal and shunning of our inner states of being, our desires, fears, feelings, and dreams. When this is chronically or severely the case in our early years then, eventually, the developing child ceases to energize whole parts of the “inner world” at all – thereby ceasing to know, ex- plore, try out, and develop those whole dimensions of the self. The result is that the experimental zone itself is not fully supported and energized from “below” (on the diagram): with prolonged or severe shaming, we literally don’t dare to dream. The inevitable consequence is to shrink and weaken that zone, which is the essential space of creative process. These problems are compounded in a hyper-individualistic culture such as ours in “the West” today, and perhaps most of all in U.S. culture, where the individualist tradition is most entrenched. In an individualistic self-model and ideology, where a rigid autonomy is often held up as the developmental ideal, support itself is necessarily pictured as weak and regressive, with sensitivity to the lack of basic social affirmation, or shame-sensitivity, typed as particularly shameful (see Wheeler, 1996, 2000). At the same time, since maximum individual self-expression is supposedly also an ideal of the system, a kind of double bind dynamic is set up, where high pressure for creative self-expression and “originality” competes with inhibited access to the inner world of free impulse and feeling, and the outer world of social be- longing and support. With the experimental or creative zone weakened to that extent, and pressure to “produce” creatively still high, the result is likely to be a kind of creativity that is jerky and impulsive, asocial or anti-social, unrooted in a community of shared belongingness and meaning. Creativity in the arts may then be expected to be divorced, oftentimes, from politics, eth- ics, and authentic feeling. While creativity in economics and technology may easily burst forth without concern for social, political, and ecological consequences, creativity in politics and social forms themselves may seem to dry up altogether. An ancient and inherent linkage between personal ambition and the collective welfare is severed, with “self versus other” coming to be regarded as the natural order of social relations, evolution, and nature itself. Meanwhile, since the drive to integrate and resolve the whole experiential field remains the basic imperative of our human nature and process, domi- nance and submission may easily become the basic ordering principles of our society and the basic energetic fuel of our creative process itself. That all of this is a fair (if not universal) description of the world we actually do live in today, is an indication of the persistence of creativity in the face of adverse conditions – and of the inseparability of creative expression and form from those social field conditions themselves.

V. Expanding/Constricting the Zone of Creativity

How then do we then support and expand the creative zone, enhancing both the range and vibrancy of the arena of novel combination, low-cost trials, and new solutions and growth? Such support and enhancement must always attend to issues and sources of shame, in both the inner and outer worlds. First of all, support is always needed for the inner world of experience – all that realm we have been referring to, loosely, as private (though, of course, that privacy is relative; we often “betray” our own fears and desires, revealing things we meant to keep safely to ourselves). This support is provided automatically in healthy development through the normal process of inter-subjective interaction: that is, interaction where our integrative experiential process is seen, met, and validated – even in cases when our desires or actions themselves are opposed. Again, it is not just resistance in the world of action per se that inhibits creativity; rather, my essential energetic zone for creative experiment shrinks when I live with the sense that my own experience, my sense of self and the world, and my attempts to integrate that sense into meaning, can find no witness, no accompaniment, no resonance in the crucial outer field of other selves. I find no vital belonging in my natural social environment; the world I am given is not my world. And here we see how that sense of inner/outer, which serves at times to organize my self-experience so usefully for action, and which is perhaps most strongly clear in states of opposition, is only a flexion of a boundary that remains always interpenetrable, always just one possible organizing dynamic of a vital, living whole. In adulthood, the remedy for a lack of that af- firming resonance, that support for novel organization of at least the inner world of experience, always involves identifying and identifying with a different social group of reference. Underneath the romantic Western cultural image of the solitary hero on his intrepid quest (the image is heavily gender-typed) lies a reality of rich social support, whether from a present affirming group of fellow-dissenters, and/or from a more distant reference group of meaning, through identification and inspiration. Thus Mandela finds creative inspiration through identification with M. L. King and others, King with Gandhi, Gandhi with Thoreau, Thoreau with early American Puritan dissidents, who themselves identified with Jesus, and so on. Indeed, we may think of maturity and mature “autonomy” not, as Perls famously remarked, as the transition from “other-supports to self-supports,” but rather much more complexly and intersubjectively, as the transition from dependence on and identification with immediately present others (as the child on/with its care- takers), to the richer autonomy of an adult capacity to select those social supports and contexts that best integrate with our wider adult goals and deeper adult values. We do not “outgrow” our need for socially resonant others in favor of an isolated “autonomous self” to support our own creative learning and growth: rather, we become more able to carry this essential, referential social support with us, and use it to protect and support the “creative zone,” which is where that experimentation and growth take place.

VI. Creativity and “Internalized Shame”

But what if the absence of that essential context for contact and intersubjective resonance was so severe and prolonged in development as to amount to an ongoing trauma or post-trauma condition (remembering that trauma, in a Gestalt view, may be understood as that which chronically resists integra- tion, substituting pattern repetition or “frozen gestalts” for our normal, creative capacity for novel integration of the experiential field)? This is then the self/field-condition known as “internalized shame”, (Kaufman, 1980), “shame-binds” (ibid.), or a “shame attack” (Lee, 1994). Here the presence of an active “shaming other” is no longer required to trigger a significant reaction of shame, constricting the creative zone or even paralyzing our ability to respond at all, in other than completely repetitive ways. Rather, the original source of shaming has been internalized, most often into a well-integrated schema of sensation, emotion, behavior, and belief (Fodor, 1996), and then oftentimes forgotten. (Here I am thinking of one group member in particular, who referred ruefully to this automatic, self-paralyzing response to expres- sion and free desire as his “inner Rottweiler”.) This is what we discussed above as a constriction or collapse of the zone of creativity “from below” (again diagramatically), i.e., a condition where sensations, desires, and perceptions from the inner world, which are the necessary dynamic elements of new creative syntheses, cannot be energized or flow freely into the experimental arena. Novel combinations of thoughts, feelings, and desires cannot even be perceived and held long and energetically enough to fuel the creative zone, bringing experiment and novel trial combinations to life under relatively safe conditions. Here, too, the loosening of this constriction and restoration of creativity and growth will depend critically on the reintroduction of an affirming social world for contact, the location or relocation of a reference group of support of the kind discussed above. This support, which generally needs to be immediately and tangibly present, at least for a time, in the person of a caring, intersubjectively resonant other, is often first found in the therapist. But, eventually, almost always, it also must be found in a reference group of identification, a group of other people who have experienced the same kind of shaming for some similar kinds of inner experiences and/or group mem- berships. Think, for example, of a “heterosexual-identified” therapist working with a homosexual-identified client, one who has been traumatically shamed in development for “wrong” erotic responses and orientation. Even- tually, the client will almost always need to form some connections with oth- ers who share that experience, until the identification is robust enough to be portable – i.e., to serve, again much like Kohut’s “self-objects” (1977), to mirror/resonate with the person’s experiential world, so that his or her cre- ative processes can then go on, even in the absence of those affirming oth- ers. Again, our need for resonant affirmation by others for our experiential creativity and for the validity of our self-process itself is not something to be gotten over or outgrown in mature adulthood. What develops, in the healthy, creative case, is not a progression toward indifference toward the social field, but rather our capacity to invoke and evoke that necessary reference group of identification and “carry it with us”, making use of it to support our creative process, when such support is missing in our immediate social surround.

VII. Conclusions

To analyze the field conditions for creative process, as we have been doing here, is still not to reduce that process and mystery to those conditions or to their component parts. When we have finished our analysis (at least provi- sionally), that mystery remains, the alchemy of creativity itself, through which existing elements, under certain conditions, become reordered into some- thing new in the universe, a pattern which did not exist before and which, by existing now, necessarily affects in some way every other pattern in the field, both now and in the future. Goodman (Perls et al., 1951) knew that al- chemy as middle mode, a mystical union, fundamentally erotic in nature, in which the distinction between self and other becomes suspended, or, as we might say, is relaxed into its natural creative whole, which is the germ of life itself. The alternate flexing and relaxing of that boundary of distinction in the field is itself the fundamental erotic act, which gives birth to the experi- ential universe, and is life and creativity itself. That creativity comes to life, experientially, in a transitional zone, which partakes of both the inner and outer domains that make up our experiential field. This “space between” is the special arena of experiment, rehearsal, art, games, and other play – and therapy. To support creative process, we must support this zone itself, the zone of safe emergency, both by freeing up the flow of energy and material from the larger domains of which it is a part, and by protecting this third space from too much invasion or collapse into the larger surrounding domains. Protecting this space and enriching this flow are the special concerns of psychotherapy, under any model, with a resultant increase (in successful therapy) in the client’s ability to find new creative solutions in work, art, relationships, and life. Strong shame inhibits and potentially vitiates this essential transitional zone, which becomes impoverished from “below” (through constriction of imagination and desire) and invaded from “above” (by too many “real world” consequences for experimental trials and rehearsals). As a dynamic field condition, which is the functional opposite of support, shame shrinks the creative zone, in effect shrinking the self. Restoration of creative self-process neces- sarily involves the reconstruction of that missing support – including the identification of a significant social group of reference, with whom and in whom the client can find and feel resonance and validation for her or his in- tegrative, creative self-process itself, which are chronically missing in cases of traumatic shame. The restoration of a freely energized self-process is then the restoration and enhancement of creativity, eros in action, the inspiration and respiration of our very lives and selves.

Notes

1 Exceptions to this oversimplification include the work of E. Nevis, Zinker, Melnick, and S. Nevis, all of whom make important steps in the direction of an interpersonal or re- lational version of the model. 2 But note that this is still a highly Western, individualized way of putting this field dif- ferential, as if my community, relationships, and other commitments were clearly “not me”. A less culturally biased labeling might be “body-self”/”field self” – or perhaps per- sonal/transpersonal, as in many religious and other spiritual perspectives. 3 Wheeler G (in press) Experiment and play: The cycle reconsidered. In: Mortola P, Wheeler G (eds) Play. The Analytic Press/GestaltPress, Hillsdale, New Jersey. 4 Note here that this loss of separate-self sense is temporary, with the time boundary serving to replace the blurred distinction between felt emotion and the fantasy world. If the blurring is permanent, then we speak not of imagination, but delusion.

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