The Emerging Goddess: The Creative Process in Art, Science, and Other Fields by Albert Rothenberg (review)

Books 317 Finally, the problem of the future of science in the so-called ‘Third World’ is dealt with in a good chapter, but the role of international organization is perhaps too much left aside. Even if notoriously insufficient, mostly because of lack of means (but also because of local incomprehension); such organizations are one possible way of action. All in all it is an excellentbook which should be extensivelyread and meditated upon. The Emerging Goddess:The Creative Process in Art, Science,and Other Fields. Albert Rothenberg. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1979. 440 pp.. illus. $22.50. ISBN : 0-226-72948-6. Reviewed by Carl R. Hausman* The ways of genius are elusive-indeed, they remain mysterious for those who have sought explanations. Albert Rothenberg’s impressive study is, by his own admission, no exception. Yet, while admitting that certain aspects of creativity still elude us, he proposes a partial explanation that brings usamajor stepcloserto discovering the secret of creativity. That the kind of creativity in question is the work of genius is made clear by Rothenberg not only in the particular creative achievements he discussesbut also in the definition of creativity he assumes at the outset: ‘the state or the production of something both new and valuable’ (p. x), where newnessis radical and value has profound significancefor human existence. Unlike too many who have written on the topic, Rothenberg carefully examines his assumptions and subjects hisconcepts of newness and value to both philosophical and psychological criticism. Also, unlike many investigators in the psychoanalytic and the experimentalist traditions, he refusesto account for creativity by tracing it to psychological states or by reducing the publically accessible aesthetic features emerging from the form and content of its products to antecedent conditions found either in nature or in preconscious and unconscious processes. Basing his study largely on ‘numerous series of research psychiatric interviews’ (p. 8). not with subjects treated as patients but with persons selected by independent judges as highly creative, and confirming his findings with experiments with groups answering word association tests, Rothenberg findsthe cluesto creating in secondary (fully conscious) rather than primary (pre or unconscious) processes. In addition, he analyses many examples of established successfulcreations from the visual arts, musicand literature in order to demonstrate that there is ample evidence in the finished product of the dynamic structures he finds in the process itself. He also focuses attention on several exam’ples of the experiences of scientists as they arrived at their creations-discoveries. And he suggests how his theses apply to the creations of whole philosophies and religions of the past. An extended report of hisinterviewswitha highlyregarded poet in the process of writing a poem sets the framework for his theses. He finds that the creative process is a mirror image of dreaming. It mirrors the dream process in the sense that it reverses the structure by which the dreamer represses threatening primary process material, thereby sustaining sleep, as Freud hypothesized. The creator works toward an awakening to submerged conflicts and aims at controlling anxietyproducing unconscious emotions and wishes and even some pathological processes. The key processes by which such revelation is made possible are named ‘Janusian’ and ‘homospatial’. Janusian processes consciously bring conflicting opposites together, and apprehend them simultaneously. For example, in his discussion of the poet’s experience, he findsajanusian horse-is-human-human-is-horse conception. For the scientist, Einstein, it is man falling-not-falling in space which was the key to Einstein’s moving from the special theory of relativity for electromagnetic fields to the general theory for gravitational fields. Janusian thinking transcends time in identifying antitheses simultaneously , so that they are not in sequentially presented antithetical experiences. One basis for Janusian conceptions in the visual arts is found in the way negative as well as positive space fills the artist’s visual fieldso that empty space is ‘both positive and negative at the same time’ (p. 155). In seeing a forest, for example, spaces between trees simultaneously assume their own forms along with the trees themselves. Homospatial processes consist of conscious apprehensions of two discrete images in one space. Homospatial thinking transcends spatial conditions, requiring the creator to see(or hear orfeel)what...