ABSTRACT
Some researchers tell that American creativity is declining, even as others report that childhood creativity is three times more important to lifetime creative achievement than childhood IQ. Perhaps creativity is critical to a child's development in other ways as well. Children naturally play out the emotional stories they are processing from family life. Eventually, how they tell each story, how it evolves, how it opens up with flexibility and resonance, is a measure of that child's accruing health. In the Lacanian psychoanalytic tradition, analysts in training are actually authorised by the authenticity with which the story of their own analyses can be told— except in symptoms, nightmares, and actions. The psychoanalyst Adam Phillips once remarked, "people are only ever as mad as other people are deaf". Psychopathology is suppressed creativity, and psychological growth is about storytelling and story listening.
