ABSTRACT
‘The Creator’ par excellence is God and whenever we create some new thing we feel we are God-like and achieving immortality. The Greeks were aware of the awesomeness, the double-edged nature of creating, for Prometheus who discovered fire was venerated as a benefactor of mankind, raised to the Pantheon, but also, having aroused the envy of the Gods, punished cruelly for his pains. In its most basic sense (to ‘pro-create’) creating denotes sexuality—of beast as well as man—and hence is charged with all the emotion, the complexes and inhibitions, and the mysteries surrounding our deepest biological urges. Small wonder then that ‘creativity’ (a word of American coinage, not found in the Oxford English Dictionary) is a word of power, prestige and prodigiousness that we all wish to appropriate. Creativeness confers power and distinction. To quote Bruner (1962):
It is implied, I think, that the act of one creating is the act of a whole man, that it is this rather than the product that makes it good and worthy. So whoever seeks to proclaim his wholeness turns to the new slogan. There is creative advertising, creative engineering, creative problem-solving—all lively entries in the struggle for dignity in our time.
