Highly creative individuals usually have very strong creative needs. They are attracted to the mysterious, to the unknown, and to the unexplained. They have a strong need to question, to explain, to test ideas, and to communicate the results of their testing.
Creative individuals, however, need outside encouragement to keep up their efforts. Society in general does not supply this encouragement, but teachers and counsellors are in a position to supply much of this support.
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It should be recognised, however, that the goal of guidance is not to promote just individuality and creativity but to encourage healthy kinds of individuality, creativity, and conformity.
Many creative individuals, however, need guidance in achieving the balance between creativity and conformity so that they enhance one another.
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This is a guidance task for teachers and counsellors at all levels of education, because the creative personality does not emerge suddenly and dramatically. It must be nurtured through many crises.
Kris (1951), Maslow (1954), Rogers (1954), Stein (1956), Barron (1958), Kubie (1958), MacKinnon (I960), and others have discussed the essentials of the creative personality from various viewpoints.
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Before suggesting some specific goals in counselling and guiding creative individuals, please review briefly some of the personality requirements which have been outlined in chapter 28 of this book.
By synthesizing the findings of various investigators, we might list the following as necessary conditions for the healthy functioning of the preconscious mental processes which produce creativity:
Conditions
1. The absence of serious threat to the self, the willingness to risk.
2. Self-awareness: In touch with one’s feelings.
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3. Self-differentiation: Sees self as being different from others.
4. Both openness to the ideas of others and confidence in one’s own perceptions of reality or one’s own ideas.
5. Mutuality in interpersonal relations: Balance between excessive quest for social relations and pathological rejection of them.
Another general goal in guiding the highly creative individual of course is to help him counteract some of the many pressures which push him towards the mean. Evidences of the existence of these pressures and of the power of their influence are widespread.
Pressures from parents are especially difficult to deal with and the research evidence on this count is rather strong. Getzels and Jackson (1960b) found that the parents of both the highly intelligent and highly creative children are not interested in nurturing giftedness in their children. Parents prefer that their children be “well adjusted.”