The Process of Janusian Thinking in Creativity

"Janusian thinking"—the capacity to conceive and utilize two or more opposite or contradictory ideas, concepts, or images simultaneously—is discussed in relation to its role in the creative process in art, literature, architecture, music, science, and mathematics. I feel that understanding the psychological factors in creativity should be of importance in the theory and everyday practice of the art of psychotherapy.

themes in the artists' completed works would inevitably shed direct light on the creative process.Al¬   though this type of approach to creativity is fraught with basic con¬ ceptual pitfalls, as I have tried to show extensively elsewhere,4 these early forays into art produced many psychodynamic formulations about creativity which still have a degree of creditability in psychoanalytic circles.In recent years, analysts have changed their approach some¬ what and attempted to combine analyses of artists' biographies and of great works of art with material derived from their own clinical work with gifted patients.In some cases, earlier formulations about creativity were reiterated with slight modification and, in others, new formulations were presented.Examples of the more prominent psychoanalytic formulations about the motive and capacity for creativ¬ ity are the following: jealousy of female procreation,5 mobile depres¬ sion,6 heightened oedipal conflicts,7 expansion of ego boundaries,8 and extended interest in the transitional object in childhood.9By far the most famous and most widely held psychoanalytic hypothesis about creativity is the "regression in the service of the ego" notion of Ernst Kris.10 Kris developed his notion from wide familiarity with art bi¬ ography, art history, and aesthetic theory as well as clinical observa¬ tions.Like other psychoanalytic formulations about creativity, "re¬ gression in the service of the ego" is highly general and somewhat vague but it sharply distinguishes creative states from pathological states such as psychosis.Further- more, it attempts to account for the artist's apparent capacity to include unconscious, ordinarily repressed material, in great works of art.His¬ torically, Kris's work on creativity represented a divergence of interest from the earlier psychoanalytic studies on art.Whereas the earlier works were primarily focused on universal psychodynamic processes exemplified in the lives of artists and in great works of art and were only incidentally (albeit forcefully) concerned with creativity per se, Kris focused directly on creativity as part of his general interest in clarification and development of ego theory.Along with Anna Freud, Heinz Hartmann, and Rudolph Loewenstein, Kris contributed to a new psychoanalytic emphasis on ego functioning, an emphasis that per¬ sists to the present day.
Approximately 20 years ago, psy¬ chologists of diverse theoretical backgrounds became interested in creativity partly because of a re¬ surgence of interest in ego function pervading the field of psychology at the time.Returning from a notable preoccupation with motives, emo¬ tions, and psychopathology to their traditional concern with ego func¬ tions such as perception and cogni¬ tion, psychologists began to apply newly achieved experimental meth¬ odologies and computer technology to the problem of creative thinking as a special type of cognitive proc¬ ess.Creativity research in psychol¬ ogy and other fields received further impetus in this country at the be¬ ginning of the last decade when an apparent lag in space technology raised widespread concern about traditional American superiority in scientific achievement.Research on scientific creativity and artistic creativity as well was strongly en¬ couraged at that time in the hope that such research would help boost America's seemingly sagging poten¬ tial.Inteisest in developing creativi¬ ty swept the field of education particularly and today the word "creativity" has become a byword on almost every new curriculum or teaching proposal.Results of di¬ verse types of psychological studies in creativity and impressionistic evaluations of educational programs designed to enhance creativity have so far consisted of delineation of general traits or faculties such as: verbal fluency, ideational fluency, redefinition, elaboration and evalua¬ tion factors, and originality11; courage, femininity in male sub¬ jects, perceptiveness and openness to experience, and independence of thought and actions12; capacity to bring together remote associa¬ tions13; capacity to defer judgment and extend effort in idea produc¬ tion.14 In psychiatry, attempts to study creativity continue to have perti¬ nence as explorations of ego func¬ tioning.In spite of the apparently high incidence of psychopathological disturbance among creative people, the process of creating seems to be a highly adaptive func¬ tion.Erikson, for one, has asserted that an important but neglected form of ego adaptation is the capac¬ ity to change the environment.15Since adaptation is a critical aspect of so-called normal functioning, ex¬ plorations in creativity potentially contribute to an understanding of normality as well as psychopathological abnormality.
It is self-evident that better delin¬ eation of adaptation and normality would be directly pertinent to the theory and practice of psychiatric therapy.One further issue bears mentioning, however.Psychother¬ apy, a major modality of psychiat¬ ric treatment, is clearly more an art than it is a science at the current stage of our knowledge.Although interest in creativity began with poets, philosophers, and theologians, it now seems crucially important for psychiatrists to understand and delineate the psychological factors in creativity, particularly artistic creativity, since such understanding should have direct application to the basic theory and everyday practice of psychotherapy in all its forms.
The Definition of Creativity A difficult problem besetting all scientific research in creativity per¬ tains to the essential definition of the phenomenon itself.Creativity is not synonymous with originality, productivity, spontaneity, good problem-solving, or craftsmanship although the term is often used in¬ terchangeably with all of these.Cre¬ ations are products which are both new and valuable and creativity is the capacity or state which brings forth creations.A painter may be original but uncreative; a literary scholar may be productive, even prolific, but notably uncreative; a spontaneous person may produce conventional poems spontaneously ; computers as well as scientists pro¬ vide good but uncreative solutions to problems; and the skilled crafts¬ man may replicate great works of art over and over again but never be able to create one of his own.Many scientific explorations into creativity have ignored or shown confusion about these distinctions and much laborious and meticulous research has yielded results which have little if any direct pertinence to the phenomenon.But the basic problem lies deeper than that-even if we restrict the definition of crea¬ tions to products which are both new and valuable, it is difficult for a scientific psychology to attempt to explain the appearance of such products; it is difficult, if not im¬ possible, to explain the act of crea¬ tion.Value judgments are anathema to objective scientists and the value judgment that designates a new product as true creation is subject to extensive variation depending on time, place, and person.Even more difficult for the scientist, particular¬ ly the determinist scientist, is the criterial attribute of newness or novelty.As Hausman16 and Morgan17 have pointed out, if the concept of novelty in creation is taken literally, ie, a creation is truly Downloaded From: http://archpsyc.jamanetwork.com/by a Harvard University User on 06/10/2016 new and therefore radically dif¬ ferent from its antecedents, it is impossible to account for all the factors leading to its production and it is impossible to predict what it will be before it actually appears.I will return to this problem again later.At this point, I would simply like to make clear that I am going to define a previously undescribed thought process operating in the act of creation, a process which ac¬ counts for a limited aspect of crea¬ tivity although it by no means ex¬ plains the phenomenon.In defining this process, I will assume that cre¬ ations are products which appear new and are considered valuable by consensus, ie, experts have consid¬ ered them creations over extended periods of time.
The thought process I will de¬ scribe is based in part on the notion of structural opposition.Although Jung has emphasized the impor¬ tance of opposition in all of psychic life18 and philosophers, poets, and critics have, at various times, recog¬ nized the importance of opposition Janusian Thinking I call this process "Janusian thinking."I first described or dis¬ covered this thought mechanism several years ago in connection with an intensive study of the revision process in Eugene O'Neill's play, The Iceman Cometh* At that time I called the process "oppositional thinking"--the capacity to conceive and utilize two or more opposite or contradictory ideas, concepts, or im¬ ages simultaneously.I have substi¬ tuted the term "Janusian" for "oppositional" because it more accu¬ rately conveys the simultaneity of opposition and because, as a meta¬ phor, it embodies the process it de¬ notes.Janus, of course, was the Ro¬ man god with two faces, the god who looked and apprehended in op¬ posite directions simultaneously.He was the god of all doorways and his two faces (Janus bifrons) allowed him to observe both the exterior and interior of a house and the entrance and exit of all buildings.It is perhaps not generally known that he was a very important god, ap¬ pearing at the head of religious cer¬ emonies and, on the Roman list, he came even before Jupiter.He was the god of "beginnings," presiding over daybreak, and was considered to be the promoter of all initiative.His role as beginner is commemo¬ rated in the name January, the month which begins our year.In fact, he had an essential role in the creation of the world itself and was also known as Janus Pater, the god of gods.Of particular interest for this exposition of Janusian think¬ ing,, especially in relation to artistic creation, is the fact that Janus was also considered to be the god of all communication, an extension of his function as god of departure and return.
In the original exposition of the thought process, I presented evi¬ dence (derived from extensive study of revisions in the play, life history information, and extensive inter¬ views with O'Neill's widow, Mrs.  Carlotta Monterrey O'Neill) that the central iceman symbol in the play The Iceman Cometh had at least three different connotations : (1) the iceman was death (this is stipulated in the play itself) ; (2)  the iceman was Christ (the phrase "the iceman cometh" refers to the biblical phrase "the bridegroom cometh" and the play is structured as a modern parable of the Last Sup¬ per) ; and (3) the iceman was a sexually potent adulterer (based on an old joke known to O'Neill which goes as follows: a husband comes home from work and calls upstairs, "Dear, has the iceman come yet?"His wife calls back down, "No, but he's breathing hard!").Substitut¬ ing these meanings into the central creation of the play, the notion of the iceman coming, produces four or more logically opposite ideas: (1) Christ's coming or deliverance is the opposite of bleak death ; (2)   sexual potency is the biological and, according to Freud and others, the psychological antithesis of death; (3) a bridegroom and an adulterer are polar extremes; and (4) in¬ fidelity is opposed to the ultimate tenet of Christian faithfulness, Christ's coming.A potential fifth and probably more implicit opposi¬ tion is the celebration and elevation of sexuality, particularly illicit sex¬ uality, in conjunction with Christ himself.Christ was not only the opponent of illicit sex, especially adultery, but his teaching could be considered to be generally antisex- ual or antihedonistic.In the uncon¬ scious, of course, many of these oppositions can be significantly equivalent and one of the sources of the awful strength and beauty of the iceman symbol is its ability to con¬ note logical contradiction and basic truth simultaneously-in other words, the integration of opposites.
In this same study, I also present¬ ed evidence that suggested that O'Neill arrived at a central idea in the play, an idea which led in part to his creation of the iceman sym¬ bol, by means of a simultaneous conceptualization of opposites.This idea pertained to the suicide of the man who was O'Neill's roommate during the year 1912, a man upon whom the 1939 play was based in large part and who was represented in the play be a character named to realize that this roommate com¬ mitted suicide because, as the man had said, he was upset about his wife's infidelity with another man, but also because of an opposite feel¬ ing-he had unwittingly wanted his wife to be unfaithful to him.All his life, O'Neill had been plagued by the memory of this man's suicide and plagued by the man's assertion shortly before he died that his wife's infidelity had brought him to his state of deep depression.It ap¬ pears that only in his later life did O'Neill come to realize that the man had also wanted his wife to be un¬ faithful and that this was a moti¬ vating factor in the suicide.This insight was incorporated into The Iceman Cometh and the evidence in¬ dicates that it had a good deal of influence on the structure of the play and O'Neill's motivation to write it.
As exemplified in O'Neill's crea¬ tion of The Iceman Cometh, Janu¬ sian thinking is a type of thought process used by a creator while en¬ gaged in a creative act.It primarily occurs early in the creative process, the so-called inspiration phase (eg, O'Neill's discovery early in the con¬ ception of The Iceman Cometh play that his roommate both wanted and did not want his wife to be unfaith¬ ful) and is often, therefore, fre¬ quently hidden although its effects may be manifest in the final prod¬ uct, ie, the simultaneous oppositions in the iceman symbol.Janusian thinking may enter into basic plot ideas, specific early metaphors, or early formulations of the overall structure of a work of art; it may not be apparent or remembered by the artist himself and it may or may not lead to clear oppositions in the completed work.Moreover, within the psychoanalytic model of thought, the process of Janusian thinking must be considered to be a secondary process mechanism.The evidence indicates that O'Neill ar¬ rived at these insights by a simulta¬ neous conceptualization of opposites on a conscious ego level.He was completely aware of the contradic¬ tion in his roommate's simultaneous wishes for fidelity and infidelity and he must have been aware of some if not all of the contradictions embod¬ ied in the symbol of the iceman in the play.Furthermore, he did not unearth his own unconscious by slavishly employing the freudian formula that unconscious motiva¬ tions are often opposite conscious ones, nor did he engage in any proc¬ ess of making his own unconscious conscious.There is evidence that he did not apply the insight about his roommate, for example, to his own thoughts about infidelity and that the notions remained embedded as emotionally isolated issues in the play itself.In fact, one of the gener¬ al characteristics of such creative insights is that an author often ac¬ tually denies that they have any relation to his own feelings or con¬ flicts.They are considered to be rel¬ evant only to the work of art; a common assertion of novelists and playwrights is that such ideas are only insights into the feelings, thoughts, and conflicts of the char¬ acters in the work itself.
It is important to stress the sec¬ ondary process nature of Janusian thinking because primary process thinking has previously been con¬ sidered to be a crucial aspect of the creative process.As a secondary process mechanism, however, Janu¬ sian thinking helps account for the seeming ubiquity of primary proc¬ ess thought in works of art.As mentioned earlier, Kris and others had long been interested in the ap¬ parent ability of the artist to render unconscious material manifest in art.Since the artist, unlike the schizophrenic, does not seem to be overwhelmed by primary-process¬ like thinking, Kris postulated his concept, "regression in the service of the ego," to emphasize the phe¬ nomenon of ego control.At the time he presented this concept, Kris quoted Freud's comment that "one would like to know more about how, precisely, the ego achieves this."19   One important aspect of the concept of Janusian thinking is that it offers a partial answer to this ques¬ tion in that it describes a specific ego process which allows primaryprocess-like material to appear in consciousness.This form of think¬ ing, the simultaneous conceptualiza¬ tion of opposites, produces artistic products which appear to embody unconscious material because oppo¬ sites are equal in the unconscious.O'Neill, for example, was not aware that he was very likely unearthing his own unconscious sexual and ag¬ gressive fantasies in equating sex and death in the iceman symbol, but he was aware of the conflict and opposition between the notion of a sexual coming and the coming of death.Ambiguity, tension, and par¬ adox very frequently are manifest goals in an aesthetic creative act.The iceman symbol was not created by means of the type of primary process symbolization found in dreams.It was created, in part, by a secondary process mechanism which allowed unconscious material to ap¬ pear in consciousness but did not overcome repression.The ego de¬ fense which allows such a phenome¬ non to occur, the defense associated with Janusian thinking, is negation.Freud long ago pointed out that the process of saying something was not so could be an effective means of sidestepping repression without ov¬ ercoming it.20Thinking of the op¬ posite, the least likely alternate, si¬ multaneously, is a way of utilizing negation as a defense.In the exam¬ ple of O'Neill's iceman symbol, again, the negation defense operates as follows: sex overtly negates death and vice versa but the simul¬ taneous negation could indicate and indirectly express O'Neill's re¬ pressed castration fear.As I have pointed out in some detail else¬ where,4 creative artists use the ne¬ gation defense in other aspects of the creative act beside the Janusian process and defensive negation may very well be one of the hallmarks of creativity.There is reason to believe that Janusian thinking operates widely in diverse types of creative process¬ es.In Eastern culture, the concepts of Yin and Yang, Mazda and Ahri- man, Nirvana and Samsara, are cre¬ ations of the mind of man which convey simultaneous oppositions.In Western culture, pre-Socratic con¬ ceptions of Being and Becoming, religious conceptions of God and the Devil, Nietzsche's formulation of Dionysian and Apollonian, Freud's concept of the id containing a sex¬ ual and aggressive instinct or the Eros and Thanatos idea, all convey an integration of opposites.These concepts, like the iceman metaphor, are final products of creative thought and their mere existence does not prove that Janusian think¬ ing, a relatively early phenomenon in the creative process, accounted for their formulation.As mentioned before, however, there is evidence that O'Neill's original idea for The Iceman Cometh play was based on a simultaneous conception of opposites and we can infer that thé oppo¬ sitional iceman symbol, a later for¬ mulation related to the original idea, also resulted from such a pro¬ cess.Concepts such as Yin and Yang may have been formulated all at once and only later developed into a metaphysical system on the basis of exegesis of the implications of the metaphor.
In literary creation, the fact that paradox or opposition plays a role in the construction and aesthetic appeal of various types of literature seems to have been recognized for some time.Aristotle was probably the first thinker to emphasize the role of paradox or reversal in trage¬ dy particularly.21Modern critics such as Alan Tate, I. A. Richards, and, more recently, R. P. Warren (unpublished observations) have implicitly and explicitly indicated the importance of opposition in all of fiction.Cleanth Brooks22 has at- tempted to support a strong asser¬ tion that the basic feature of all of poetry is paradox.Even more perti¬ nent to the issue of simultaneous opposition in the Janusian process, Monroe Beardsley,23 the noted aesthetician, has expounded a de¬ tailed theory that all metaphor is based on verbal opposition.Meta¬ phor is a very specific and crucial entity in all forms of literature and many have considered the creation of metaphor to be the paradigm for all of literary creation.Further¬ more, a metaphor is a unity refer¬ ring simultaneously to disparate as¬ pects of experience.If Beardsley is right and metaphor is based speci¬ fically on verbal opposition, Janu¬ sian thinking would clearly play a large role in the creation of meta¬ phor.The importance of metaphor and the general importance of oppo¬ sition in all of literature suggests that Janusian thinking plays a cru¬ cial role in the entire process of literary creation.
In aesthetic fields other than lit¬ erature, integrated opposition and, by implication, Janusian thinking can be seen to have an important role.In architecture, the Janus met¬ aphor is particularly appropriate since it is necessary for the creative architect to conceptualize the inside and outside of a building simultane¬ ously.For example, convex outer shapes produce concave inner shapes and the architect must reconcile these contradictory spatial charac¬ teristics with the overall conception of a building to be built.Further¬ more, the best buildings do not con¬ vey a quality of spaciousness on the outside which is contradicted once one is inside.Since external shapes conveying spaciousness often decep¬ tively require a great deal of inter¬ nal buttressing structure and conse¬ quent cramping, it is necessary for the creative architect to overcome this.He does this, I believe, by for¬ mulating designs which accomplish spaciousness in opposite spatial ori¬ entations simultaneously.Frank Lloyd Wright, the great creative ar- chitect, has described the operation of Janusian thinking on an even wider scale than this in his descrip¬ tion of the development of Organic Architecture, the type of architec¬ ture he created.He referred to the Organic Architecture idea as an "affirmative negation,"24 meaning that it negated the three-dimension¬ al concept in architecture and affirmed it simultaneously.In the visual arts, the capacity to attend to the ground (in Gestalt terms) with¬ out loss of figure perception and the painter's freedom to reverse figure and ground to a degree that is not characteristic of ordinary percep¬ tion seems to represent an ability to maintain opposite orientations si¬ multaneously.The visual effect of moving back and forth while stand¬ ing still, which has been achieved by artists of the "Op" school, is an example of an art product which may have involved Janusian think¬ ing at some stage.
An interesting example of Janu¬ sian thinking in music comes from Arnold Schoenberg's creation of the twelve-tone scale, an important de¬ velopment leading to the so-called atonal movement in modern music.
Schoenberg reported that he had ar¬ rived at a notion that consonance and dissonance were equivalent."Dissonances are only the remote consonances,"25 he said-a highly revolutionary integration of oppo¬ sites.
Scientific and mathematical crea¬ tors also seem to use Janusian thought.Poincaré, the great and clearly creative mathematician, re¬ ferred explicitly to a process of combining elements "drawn from domains which are far apart" and "as disparate as possible" in his discoveries.26 The recent discovery of the "double helix" structure of DNA, the basic factor in genetic replication, shows a dramatic exam¬ ple of the operation of Janusian thinking in creative scientific thought.The double helix structure discovered by Watson  In his fascinating book describing the discovery of this structure, Dr.
Watson makes clear that the notion of identical chains running in op¬ posite directions occurred to him all at once.After describing a long pe¬ riod of struggle consisting of nu¬ merous observations by x-ray crys¬ tallography combined with careful logical assessment of alternate pos¬ sibilities, Watson indicates that the actual discovery occurred as fol¬ lows: When I got to our still empty office the following morning, I quickly cleared away the papers from my desk top so that I would have a large flat surface on which to form pairs of bases held together by hydrogen bonds.Though I initially went back to my like-with-like prejudices, I saw all too well that they led nowhere.When Jerry Donohue came in I looked up, saw that it was not Francis [Crick], and began shifting the bases in and out of various other pairing possibili¬ ties.Suddenly I became aware that an adenine-thymine pair held together by two hydrogen bonds was identical in shape to a guanine-cytosine pair held together by at least two hydrogen bonds.All the hydrogen bonds seemed to form naturally; no fudging was required to make the two types of base pairs identical in shape. . . .The hydrogen bonding requirement meant that adenine would always pair with thymine, while quanine could pair only with cytosine.Chargaff's rules [adenine equals thymine, guanine equals cytosine] then suddenly stood out as a consequence of a double-heli¬ cal structure for DNA.Even more exciting, this type of double helix sug¬ gested a replication scheme much more satisfactory than my briefly con¬ sidered like-with-like pairing.Always pairing adenine with thymine and guanine with cytosine meant that the base sequences of the two intertwined chains were complementary to each other.Given the base sequence of one chain, that of its partner was auto¬ matically determined.Conceptually, it was thus very easy to visualize how a single chain could be the template for the synthesis of a chain with the com¬ plementary sequence.Upon his arrival Francis did not get more than halfway through the door before I let loose that the answer to everything was in our hands.Though as a matter of principle he maintained skepticism for a few moments, the similarly shaped A-T and G-C pairs had their expected impact.His quickly pushing the bases together in a num¬ ber of different ways did not reveal any other way to satisfy Chargaff's rules.A few minutes later he spotted the fact that the two glycosidic bonds (joining base and sugar) of each base pair were systematically related by a dead axis perpendicular to the helical axis.Thus, both pairs could be flipflopped over and still have their glycosidic bonds facing in the same direction.This had the important consequence that a given chain could contain both purines and pyrimidines.At the same time, it strongly suggested that the backbones of the two chains run in opposite directions [italics mine}.
The question then became whether the A-T and G-C base pairs would easily fit the backbone configuration devised during the previous two weeks. . . .We both knew that we would not be home until a complete model was built in which all the ster¬ eo-chemical contacts were satisfactory.
There was also the obvious fact that the implications of its existence were far too important to risk crying wolf.Thus I felt slightly queasy when at lunch Francis winged into the Eagle [restaurant] to tell everyone within hearing distance that we had found the secret of life.27Watson's description makes clear that the actual breakthrough con¬ sisted of conceiving simultaneously of identical but spatially opposed forms.Also, he indicates that this breakthrough was not the complete answer, not the total creation, so to speak, but that a whole system of reactions had to be worked out to give it coherence and validity.
A relatively recent and influential creation in the realm of social thought is the work of Marshall Preserving the form of a previously held general belief and assumption about messages, ie, "the content is the message," McLuhan substituted the word which was the antithesis of "content" in this context, "medi¬ um."In doing so, he has it both ways : he conveys a sense of content to the medium.Although some may question whether McLuhan has ac¬ tually developed a new or creative philosophical system or whether he has actually applied notions de¬ veloped by previous thinkers about the relationship of form and con¬ tent to a new context, there is little doubt that the phrase itself was new at the time it was formulated and that it did spark a relatively new approach to art and modern experience.
Recent Evidence Clinical Evidence.-Later,I will discuss some of the reasons that McLuhan's sentence and similar formulations are experienced as cre¬ ations.Now, I will briefly specify some further evidence for Janusian thinking as a process in creation which has come out of clinical and experimental studies currently in progress.For the past seven years, I have conducted intensive inter¬ view studies of prominent and nov¬ ice creative writers, studies which focus on the writing process itself.
These interviews are carried out on a regular weekly or biweekly basis over extended periods of time, from months to several years in some cases, but they focus on the literary work in progress and are not con¬ tracted to be therapeutically orient¬ ed or to be personality explorations per se.Although I can not reveal the identity of the subjects, the prominent writers have been poets and novelists who have been win¬ ners of Pulitzer Prizes, National Book Awards, Bollingen Poetry Prizes, and members of the Ameri¬ can Academy of Arts and Letters.varying ages who are serious about a writing career and who have been identified as talented by prominent literary critics and teachers.In ad¬ dition to these criteria, subjects in both these groups are consistently rated as highly creative by their writer peers.In order to establish a comparison baseline for the results of these interview studies with cre¬ ative writers, I have also conducted similar intensive interviews with "noncreative" persons engaging in an attempt to produce a work of fiction or poetry for financial reim¬ bursement.These noncreative per¬ sons are similar to both the promi¬ nent and novice writer subjects in age, sex, socioeconomic characteris¬ tics, and ethnic background, but differ in that they have never been interested in literature, have never engaged in serious creative writing on their own, and are not consid¬ ered creative or creatively oriented by peers or superiors.To be specific, they have not shown evidence or inclination for literary creativity.During these interview series, I have seen many examples of the process of Janusian thinking in op¬ eration in the prominent and novice writer subjects but never in the noncreative persons.In order to in¬ dicate the nature of the evidence I have collected and to clarify the specific operation of Janusian thinking in the literary creative process, I will cite some specific ex¬ amples.

Novice writers have been persons of
In the course of discussing the circumstances surrounding the gen¬ esis of a particular poem, a poet subject told me that he got an idea for a particular poem while walking on a beach.He came upon some rocks and thought that they were heavy and were weapons but that, at the same time, they felt like human skin.The poetic ideas that followed this inspiration and the final poem itself were a comment on the rela¬ tionship between sex and violence in the world.Indeed, the idea that sex and violence had many things in common was an early realization in this poet's mind as he wrote the poem.
In another instance, a poet was cooking cream of celery soup and began to think of arguments she had heard as child at school that things had no form unless they had boundaries or were in a container.
She thought of the fact that cream of celery soup had no form outside the pot and simultaneously thought of the first line of a poem which went as follows: "Cream of celery soup has a soul of its own."In this case, using the term "soul", she was thinking of an entity which was both formed and formless.The total poem went on to become a vibrant statement of conflict between her¬ self as a child and as an adult.
The two examples cited indicate the way in which Janusian thinking enters into the formation of poetic content.A third example relates to the operation of Janusian thinking in relation to alliteration, a formal property (not, of course, divorced from content) of the poem.A poet with a Southern background created a line, the best in the poem he felt, which contained the words "price" and "praise" in an alliterative se¬ quence.Spontaneously, the poet in¬ formed me that he had thought of these words together and, in the South, they would be pronounced almost identically.After some ques¬ tioning, the poet readily acknowl¬ edged that, in the context of the poem, the words "price" and "praise" denoted oppositions, refer¬ ring to paying a price, a punish¬ ment, and being praised, a reward.
In numerous instances through¬ out these interviews, single phrases, images, and metaphors which were embodiments of simultaneous oppo¬ sition were the starting points for poems.Because of the necessity of preserving the anonymity of my subjects I cannot quote actual poems or significant lines and the examples I have given necessarily lack some richness.Richer examples taken from final versions of poems by poets I have not worked with are Hart Crane's "penniless rich palms,"29 Keat's "all his men looked at each with a wild surmise/Silent upon a peak in Darien,"30 Hopkins' "all life death does end"31 and "Elected silence, sing to me,"32 as well as Emerson's33 section from the poem, "Brahma" : Far or forget to me is near Shadow and sunlight are the same The vanished gods to me appear And one to me is shame and fame.This is an explicit series of poetic statements embodying Janusian thought.
Novels also, in their early stages, have been powered by Janusian thinking.In one instance, a revolu¬ tionary hero was conceived as being responsible for the deaths of hundreds of people but only killing one person with his own hand ; this person was someone who was kind to him and whom he loved.This idea occurred early during the ger¬ mination of the plot and much of the subsequent novel became an elaboration of it.
The examples cited pertain to concrete manifestations of form or content that demonstrate Janusian thought.I would like to make clear, however, that such thinking can op¬ erate to dictate formal aspects of cognition as well as to account for actual words and contents.The art¬ ist's capacity to integrate abstract ideas with concrete forms, a capaci¬ ty which Arnheim34 suggests is the hallmark of aesthetic creation, can be considered to be a capacity to maintain opposite cognitive orienta¬ tions simultaneously.The notion of "regression in the service of the ego" connotes a cognitive orienta¬ tion in which past and future are manipulated simultaneously and, in¬ deed, my subjects consistently show me as we explore the experiential roots of their work that their liter¬ ary themes come out of their past in creation, preliminary results of some experiments I have carried out tend to confirm the hypothesis.In one experiment (Rothenberg, un¬ published data), carried out in sim¬ ilar fashion to the study by Carroll  et al35 on opposite responding to the Kent-Rosanoff (K-R) word-associa¬ tion test, a high tendency to rapid opposite responding was found in a creatively oriented group of male college students.The standard K-R word-association test procedure (in¬ cluding measurement of response time) was administered to a popu¬ lation of 114 male college students.
On the basis of a detailed question¬ naire designed to assess creative orientation and performance in the arts and in science, the subjects were divided into two groups: high creative orientation and low creative orientation.Proportion of opposite responses to the K-R stimulus words (eg, "white" as a response to stim¬ ulus word "black", "health" as a response to stimulus word "sick¬ ness") and the mean difference of time response between these oppo¬ site responses and all other responses were computed for both groups.Analysis of results indicates that the high group gave a significantly greater proportion of opposite and contrast responses in a significantly shorter period of time (latency of response)than the low group.The results of the experiment by Carroll et al had previously indicated that certain groups of subjects respond¬ ed to the K-R test preferentially with opposite and contrast words, but that experiment had not identified such subjects as potential¬ ly creative (no identification of sali¬ ent subject characteristics was made ; also, response times were not recorded).Although associating in opposites to the K-R test is not equivalent to directed or creative thinking, the results suggest a pro¬ clivity toward verbal opposition in persons with a high creative orien¬ tation.Furthermore, the rapidity of opposite responding in the high cre¬ ative orientation group suggests that opposite associations could oc¬ cur simultaneously in creative work.
Other experimental procedures have been carried out to clarify and test hypotheses about opposite and contrast word associations versus word associations which are merely different (Rothenberg, unpublished data).Again, rapid opposite and contrast associations rather than merely different ones were charac¬ teristic of aesthetic and creative groups.Special association tasks as well as the K-R word-association test have also been administered to prominent and novice creative writ¬ ers, the subjects of the interview studies described above.Prelimi¬ nary assessment of the results of these latter studies indicates a high propensity to rapid oppositional as¬ sociation in these highly creative subjects as well.Further studies as¬ sessing the role of Janusian think¬ ing as a function of directed thought as well as a function of associative processes are in prog¬ ress.
Janusian Thinking, Dialectical Thinking, Conflict, and Ambivalence Before going into the specific re¬ lationship between Janusian think¬ ing and creation, it is necessary to clarify the critical distinctions be¬ tween Janusian thinking and other processes which may or may not be related-dialectical thinking, con¬ flict, and ambivalence.Superficially, Janusian thinking might seem to bear a resemblance to dialectical thinking, an important and produc¬ tive mode of thought having definite metaphysical roots, especially as defined by Hegel.36Janusian think¬ ing is, however, clearly distinct from dialectical thinking with re¬ spect to the temporal attributes of simultaneity and sequence.Both Janusian thinking and dialectical thinking involve opposition but Jan¬ usian thinking requires simultane¬ ity of opposition, whereas dialectical thinking involves consideration of opposites, contrasts, and contradic¬ tions in sequence.The Hegelian di¬ alectic starts with an assertion of a thesis followed by a counterthesis which is then followed by resolution of the opposition through synthesis.Although actual dialectical thinking may not follow such a clear stepwise sequence in the mind of the person conceiving the dialectic prior to his expounding it or setting it down on paper, it basically involves a weigh¬ ing of contradictory alternatives, a process which inevitably requires sequential steps rather than simul¬ taneity.To be sure, when one tries to unravel the truth of a Janusian thought according to logical crite¬ ria, one may then engage in a dia¬ lectical process, but the Janusian thought itself is not the result of this particular process.For exam¬ ple, after O'Neill conceived of the iceman symbol with its simultane¬ ous opposition between sex, death, and Christ's coming, he may have reflected on the implications of the equation of opposites and the syn¬ thesis, ie, death's coming is a deliv¬ erance from a suffering life; Christ's coming is a deliverance from suffering and death, etc.  Conflict is intrinsic to the opposi¬ tion in a Janusian thought.One of the particular values of Janusian thinking in art is that it produces both cognitive and affective conflict in an observer, creating suspense and surprise and acting as a stimu¬ lant to thought.Furthermore, as I have suggested in the earlier discus¬ sion of negation, the particular con¬ tent of a Janusian thought is very likely highly related to conscious and unconscious emotional conflicts in the creator himself.Janusian thoughts are not simply manifesta¬ tions of emotional conflicts alone, however, nor do they function solely to instill conflicts in others.Janu¬ sian thoughts resolve aesthetic as well as scientific problems.They provide integrations and harmonies in art and theoretical and practical conflictual elements in the creator's consciousness allows for new inte¬ grations and resolutions and the Janusian thought must be suscepti¬ ble to such resolutions to be more than a logical absurdity.Mrs. Mala- prop's memorable statement in The Rivals,37 "we will not anticipate the past-so mind, young people-our retrospection will be all to the fu¬ ture," is humorous but not an artis¬ tic creation in itself because the context does not indicate any inte¬ gration or resolution of the contra¬ dictory elements in her statement.The term, ambivalence, has been used in a variety of ways since Bleuler's original coinage of the word to describe schizophrenic pro¬ cesses.I cannot here go into the rela¬ tionship between Janusian thinking and schizophrenic thought but will simply discuss ambivalence as Freud used the term, in relation to contradictory feelings.Ambivalence is distinct from Janusian thinking in that the contradictory feelings of ambivalence are not simultaneously present in consciousness.Although we often can conceptualize our own ambivalence and indicate that we have mixed feelings about someone or something, we do not consciously experience contradictory feelings si¬ multaneously.We do not, for exam¬ ple, experience feelings of love and hate simultaneously, but we may feel them in an alternating se¬ quence.When we observe that some¬ one appears ambivalent about some¬ thing or someone, we are making an inference from his behavior-he is conscious only of feeling positive or negative at a given moment.I do think that ambivalence, like emo¬ tional conflict, probably has strong links to Janusian thinking and may even be a prior condition for the ability to have Janusian thoughts.
Creative people are often highly am¬ bivalent in many aspects of their lives.Ambivalence may be related to Janusian thinking but it is far from a sufficient condition for its appearance.
Janusian Thinking in Creation I began this exposition of Janu¬ sian thinking by raising the prob¬ lem of the definition of creations and of creativity and the notion of novelty in that definition.I also suggested that a complete explana¬ tion of the act of creation may be intrinsically and logically impossi¬ ble.I will not withdraw that suggestion at this point but will try to spell out the significance of Janu¬ sian thinking in creation.As one of the thought processes employed by creators during the act of creation, Janusian thinking does not contra¬ dict the view that the nature of creations may be intrinsically un¬ predictable and that creation is an undetermined event.
In a strictly deterministic view of the universe, there is nothing truly new under the sun or suns.Not only have all thoughts and productions (particularly human thoughts and productions) been anticipated in the thoughts and productions of the past, but all apparently new events are simply recombinations of fac¬ tors previously in existence.Accord¬ ing to this view, newness or novelty is basically a phenomenon experi¬ enced in the eye of the beholder and the creation of the world is simply an unknown event, not an unknow¬ able one.Leaving aside, for the mo¬ ment, the possible fallacious meta¬ physical implications of such a position, let me say that Janusian thinking goes a long way toward explaining the appearance of crea¬ tions in this extreme determinist context.In its purest form, Janu¬ sian thinking consists of conceiving a notion, belief, or "fact" which is generally taken to be absolutely true and formulating its opposite or con¬ tradiction simultaneously.An exam¬ ple of such a pure Janusian thought which has so far not led to a crea¬ tion (as far as I know) is, "The sun will rise tomorrow" simultaneously accompanied by "The sun will not rise tomorrow."The product of such a thought, an integration of these contradictory ideas, would be experienced as new in the eye of a beholder because no one had ever before considered the possibility that the sun could both rise and not rise tomorrow.So, too, any time that an opposite or contradiction is posited as of equal value or truth as a previously held notion, belief, or fact, it would be experienced as new and, by the laws of chance, occa¬ sionally of value.In art, such equat¬ ing of opposites could account for a good deal of the sense of surprise and novelty which is intrinsic to artistic creations.If scientific crea¬ tions are simply important and valu¬ able discoveries which are surpris¬ ing and appear novel in the eye of a beholder, the integration of opposi¬ tion and contradiction can explain a good deal of scientific creation as well.
I think it is incorrect to espouse this extreme determinist view al¬ though it would clearly give Janu¬ sian thinking a very critical role in creation.Nevertheless, I think it is untenable to assert that creation ex¬ ists only in the eye of the beholder and that nothing is truly new.
There are many events which have been truly radical departures from anything preceding and are in no sense contradictions of the past, even integrated contradictions.
(The notion of truth of any kind existing only in the eye of the be¬ holder also raises the whole Ideal¬ ism-Realism philosophical contro¬ versy.The position of Idealism has been rejected by modern philosophy many times over and the determin¬ ist argument cited is rendered fur¬ ther untenable by its implying such a position.)The creation of the uni¬ verse and of life are models for such radical creation and human crea¬ tions have often followed such mod¬ els in kind if not in degree.I will not pursue this argument further here because I think it is self-evi¬ dent that neither strict determinism nor Janusian thinking by itself is up to explaining such events as Shakespeare's Hamlet, Beethoven's Janusian thinking is a factor in the creative process but it must be accompanied by many other cogni¬ tive, affective, and synthetic pro¬ cesses before an actual creation is produced.Opposition is a complicat¬ ed phenomenon and it can often be so idiosyncratic that it has no com¬ municative value and, hence, no val¬ ue in artistic type of creation and probably other types as well.There is a wide variety of types of opposi¬ tion, ranging from strong opposi¬ tion containing logical antithesis or contradiction to mild opposition consisting of simple contrast.To return to the Janus metaphor, the god simply faces in two distinct directions simultaneously.When the Janusian thought embodies strong opposition or logical antithesis it has the greatest shock or surprise value ; it conveys the greatest sense of novelty and may also convey the greatest truths.In artistic creation, for example, many integrations of opposites do not convey this sense of surprise and novelty because they are integrations of contrasts rather than contradictions.Most meta¬ phors are really manifestations of the integration of mild oppositions or contrasts.Although Beardsley's verbal opposition theory of meta¬ phor, referred to previously, is basi¬ cally sound, he does not take this multilevel nature of opposition ade¬ quately into account in his analysis.
Actually, when taken literally, the conception of true opposite depends a good deal on the level of sophisti¬ cation of the conceiver.For exam¬ ple, many people take red and green or blue and yellow to be opposites.
In certain contexts, say in the use of a palette, this may be true but in terms of the physical spectrum, red and blue are actually polar extremes and, therefore, opposites.Given these limitations and variations, how then does opposition actually function in creative thought?
I think it functions specifically in relation to sophistication and other factors which allow the creator to know and sense the most salient oppositions in the human and physi¬ cal world at a particular point in time or, sometimes, throughout hu¬ man history.The truly creative per¬ son knows his field well and also knows which widely held notions, beliefs, and "facts" are important and susceptible to opposition or con¬ tradiction on some level.It is this type of knowledge, a knowledge which may come into play after the creator hits on an integrated oppo¬ sition by chance, unconscious deter¬ mination, or other factors, which makes the Janusian thought mean¬ ingful and, in fact, valuable.Many oppositions, or disparate elements, as Poincaré stated in another part of the same statement cited earlier, are useless and without any value whatsoever.26 With respect to value, I have said little of the many other processes including psychological dynamisms which actually integrate oppositions as well as capacities and facilities with words, plastic materials, and conceptual symbols.These and myr¬ iad other factors go into the crea¬ tive process and have a good deal to do with imparting value to a cre¬ ated product, but they cannot be elaborated here.Moreover, I do not intend to claim that Janusian think¬ ing is the only or even the primary type of process accounting for in¬ spirations or creative ideas, as I think I have made clear.Many of the other factors are so far not only unknowable.Janusian thinking is, and, as I have suggested, possibly unknowable.Janusion thinking is, however, a factor in the creative process and it is the first specific thought process in creativity to be defined.

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Jimmy Tomorrow."O'Neill came Downloaded From: http://archpsyc.jamanetwork.com/by a Harvard University User on 06/10/2016 Downloaded From: http://archpsyc.jamanetwork.com/by a Harvard University User on 06/10/2016 Janusian Thinking in the Creative Process contains two similar but opposed spatial forms.Downloaded From: http://archpsyc.jamanetwork.com/by a Harvard University User on 06/10/2016 McLuhan.Here,McLuhan's early and central idea is a clear represen¬ tation of Janusian thinking.28In the development of his theory about the modern ethos based on techno¬ logical communication, McLuhan in¬ itially formulated the idea, "the me¬ dium is the message."The sentence meaning and syntax turns back on itself in simultaneous opposition.

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