Creative Experience–Multiple Worlds, Projects, Emotions, and Endpoints: On Glăveanu & Beghetto’s Definition of Creativity

ABSTRACT

Glăveanu & Beghetto recently proposed defining creativity as the experience of novel person-world encounters with features of open-endedness, non-linearity, pluri-perspectives, and future orientation. This comment joins the discussion by bringing the phenomenological concepts of William James and Alfred Schütz into the conversation. They pointed out that, over time, we inhabit different realities, different experiential worlds, among them: the everyday world, the worlds of dreams, play, day- dreaming, music, and scientific theorizing. Each world has distinctive features with respect to the sense of self, sociality, time, typical action, and what is taken for granted. The worlds may affect one other simultaneously and successively in a figure-ground relation including the possibility of sudden reversals. Phenomenological concepts do not isolate the creative process in the mind of the creators. Examples show how encounters in creative worlds typically are embodied, involve interaction with the environment, and often are collaborations in a shared world with others. The process leading to intended products is usually non-linear, going in and out of different worlds with accompanying motives and emotions as central aspects. The process may have two kinds of endpoints, be difficult to determine, or indeterminate. Implications include possible directions for research and applications to education.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Schütz’s term for the different worlds was “provinces of meaning.” Since both James and Schütz also called the different realities “worlds,” that is the term that will be used throughout this paper.

2. Flow experiences in creative worlds, such as fiction worlds, exhibit most of the criteria Csikszentmihaly (1990) outlined for flow. However, they typically do not exhibit two properties Csikszentmihaly included in his list. The experience of flow in creative worlds often does not include clear goals and immediate feedback (Cseh, 2016; Cseh, 2017; Doyle, 2017). These results are consistent with the open-endedness and non-linearity Glăveanu and Beghetto (2021) proposed as features of creative experience. Clear goals and immediate feedback are obvious in flow in other domains Csikszentmihaly pointed to, such as flow in sports (called by athletes “being in the zone”). In tennis for example, the goal clearly is to win and there is immediate feedback for progress toward it after every shot.

3. See Martin and Gillespie (2013) for a fuller explication of position exchange theory. Note that perspectives such as position exchange theory and psychoanalytic theory are complementary to the worlds framework. Together they illuminate creative encounters. The play world permits safe expression of unacceptable impulses. Pretend play allows a child’s sense of self to change positions from moment to moment and to enact both parties to an interaction simultaneously. Thus the worlds framework sheds light on how the principles of the other frameworks may be realized.

4. Here, too, position exchange theory is relevant. Paley’s (1985) story was based on her interaction with a bigot n the everyday world. In her first attempts at the story, the narrator-protagonist was a character somewhat like herself. When Paley returned to the world of the story after two years, the bigot told the story – both of their interactions and his backstory.

5. Clapp and Hanson (2019), suggested shifting the focus of work on creativity from an individual’s ideas to their interactions with cultural systems, thus involving other participants. They called such studies biographies of ideas.