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Creativity Vygotsky
Creativity Vygotsky
Perezhivanija Russian for living through is the term Vygotsky used as the connector of subject and object.
It basically refers to subjective experience, which Vygotsky puts as the foundation for the development of fantasy,
meaning making, and aesthetic response. Experience is the basic unit of development: how a person interprets and
relates to an object, other person, or event determines what s/he finds emotionally real and meaningful (Van der
Veer & Valsiner, 1994). Even though fantasy does not have an external object, Vygotsky (1971) asserted that
emotions attached to it are experientially real, even in children: Perhaps the pronounced and real emotional roots of
the childs imagination are as strong as in the adult. (Vygotsky quoted in Smolucha, 1992, p. 54; Vygotsky, 1987).
As Vygotsky put it, The essential factors which explain the influence of environment on the psychological
development of children, and on the development of their conscious personalities, are made up of their emotional
experiences [perezhivanija]. (quoted in Van der Veer & Valsiner, 1994, p. 339).
Csikszentmihalyis (1993, 1996) studies of creativity in adolescence and adulthood had a similar aim to
describe creativity from the subjective point-of-view of the creator, which culminated in his well-known theory of
flow. Furthermore, Csikszentmihalyis later work with Sawyer (1995) supports Vygotskys ideas about the role of
emotional experience personally and socially in creativity: When we look at the complete life span of a creative
insight in our subjects experience, the moment of insight appears as but one short flash in a complex, timeconsuming, fundamentally social process (p. 331).
Emotions
The motive gives birth to thought, to the formation of thought itself, to its mediation in the internal word
to the meanings of external words, and finally, to words themselves.21
Emotions, therefore, are the bedrock of creativity: All psychological systems which attempt to explain art are
nothing but various combinations of the theories of imagination and emotion. (Vygotsky, 1971, p. 200). More
specifically, creative imagination is the dialectic synthesis of emotion and intellect (Vygotsky, 1998). Thought and
feeling are not opposites and one cannot be reduced to the other; rather they are two processes that develop and
intertwine (Vygotsky, 1999). Reason and imagination are both based on emotions; emotions provide the why of
development as well as creative and productive action (Mahn & John-Steiner, in press; Smolucha, 1992; Vygotsky,
1987). Russs (1993, 1998) studies support this dialectic: specific affective processes facilitate creative cognition,
which, in turn, influences personality and further affect. However, creativity need not be determined by emotion:
Bibliography
Abra, J., & Abra, G. (1999). Collaboration and competition. In M.A. Runco & S.R. Pritker (Eds.), Encyclopedia of
creativity (pp. 283-293). San Diego: Academic Press.
Abraham, F.D. (1996). The dynamics of creativity and the courage to be. In W. Sulis & A. Combs (Eds.), Nonlinear
dynamics in human behavior (pp. 364-400). River Edge, NJ: World Scientific.