stressful first draft.

So for those of you who have had a Psychology class either during high school or your first semester in college, you may who I am choosing to talk about today. And for those of you who haven’t, it’s okay because I had no clue who this guy was before last week when we got to learning about him. My teacher was starting her lesson, and she said “what do you think of when you hear the name Freud?” and everybody around me is shouting out these answers and I’m just still sitting there like “nope, still not ringing any bells.”
Now, when I think of creativity, I think of someone who can think outside of the box. I think of a person that has come up with an idea that never has been thought of before, or someone who is the founder of it all. The person I chose to talk about today is Sigmund Freud. For those of you who do not know who this man is, he was the founder of the psychoanalytic theory. The psychoanalytic theory was an approach to therapy and a theory of personality.
Born in the Victorian age, Sigmund’s family lived in a rented a small room of a blacksmiths house. Although he had eight siblings, his parents favored him the most and despite their poverty attended to his education. He received a medical degree from the University of Vienna and opened his own practice as a clinical neurologist treating patients with emotional disorders. From working with these patients, he was convinced that sex was a primary cause to these emotional disorders. Now, to better understand this theory, there are three main elements: the different levels of awareness, the interplay of the three parts of personality, and the psychosexual stage theory of personality development.
Freud’s three levels of awareness are broken down to the conscious, the preconscious and the unconscious. The conscious mind is what you are thinking about right now, or can be known as your short-term memory. The preconscious mind is what is stored in your memory; you are not aware of it but can gain access to. This is also known as your long-term memory. Last but not least is your unconscious, and this is the thoughts that we cannot freely access.
Next in his theory are the three parts of personality. The id is present at birth and is your original personality and from here the ego and superego emerge. The ego starts developing during the first few years of life to make sure the id’s drives are satisfied. The third personality structure is the superego which also develops from the id, and this represents the conscience and idealized standards of behavior in a certain culture. For example relating to the ego, take a stressful situation in your life, one that you had different options for and wanted to please someone. Take the situation such as choosing where to go to college, we all had to do it, wanting to satisfy everyone, but it is just not possible. From there, your ego uses what Freud called defense mechanisms, or processes that help protect us from anxiety.
Moving on to Freud’s third element in his theory is the psychosexual stage. In this stage of his theory he came up with different levels or stages you should be going through in a particular time in your life. Although not everybody will follow these stages the same, everybody goes through them.
I consider this man as a genius based on the fact of his theory that is so broad. This had to take a long time to fully figure out and was all put on by one man. I also consider the time period that he grew up in, when woman were not even allowed to show their ankles because it was taken as a sexual thing. Our views of psychological research are much different in the present time, being over 100 years ago that this man made this theory is a genius idea. He had much impact on our thinking then, and some wonder what his views would be if he were alive today.

a second look at it ..

Last week, the definition I gave for genius could be someone on many different levels. From a famous person who invented something or just merely someone who has a genius mind with the way they think or use their talents to help others. An example of a truly genius invention would be all of the Apple Products created by Steve Jobs. One product in particular being the iPhone 5. Now that the iPhone 5 has been released, people now have access to a smart phone that you can talk to, look at maps in 3D, and even captures panorama pictures. As time goes on, these phones will only continue to get more and more advanced. We all have our own opinions of a person or thing that we think is truly genius, and last week I chose a more personal one. I talked about my own father as having a creative, genius mind and using it to help others find solutions to their problems.

Genius ...

In my opinion, a genius can be as big as a person who is an inventor that creates something that betters or helps out the society such as, Albert Einstein, but also, a genius could be as little as someone who is very good at problem solving or can make it out of different situations successfully. I think an example of a genius person would be my father. He was the first person to graduate from college in our family. He attended the University of Findlay for his undergrad, and then furthered his studies and received his Juris Doctorate from Duquesne University Law School. As an attorney, he owned his own practice in our small town of East Liverpool, and focused mainly on divorce cases, criminal and domestic law, estates, and social security. Not only was he good at solving his own problems, but was good at looking from different sides and helping others solve theirs. Even when the work got over bearing, he knew how to find solutions to ease it. Just because he was not a famous attorney that was well know all around the world, he was good at what he did and was one of the top around the area.

            He was also a person that even I would look to when I needed help with school, or if there was a problem between my sister and I. He would always give me a few solutions or ideas and would leave it to me to choose the best one. He was also a jack-of-all-trades, and knew a little about everything and how to fix them. All in all, I think that my father was not just a smart man, but had a genius side to him. I believe that anyone can have a genius side to them in their own, sometimes different, ways. Also, you do not have to be a famous person, or be a millionaire from an invention to be considered as “genius.”

In my opinion, education can destroy ones creative side in a way. I sit more on the fence about it. I think it depends on what type of class it is. Being in a class, such as math, one cannot get really creative because there is only a right or wrong answer, and you always want to be right. Also, one might not be good at math, so it kind of takes away from the fun that you might have in other classes. Some teachers want you to do everything their way, and there is no room for creativity. Others can be really creative with their teaching style, or assign a certain project that can help you better learn a subject.

            I think that elective classes are where you get to be the most creative. In high school, I took an art class. My teacher would give us a week to do a project that she assigned. She would then tell us an artist, and we would have to find a piece of their work we liked, and recreate it, or make it into our own work. We got to choose what colors were used, size of the paper, and the medium for the work. I actually enjoyed that class, although I wasn’t the best artist.

            Another class that I felt I was creative in was my foods and nutrition class. Once again, my teacher would give us a few general topics for the week on what we were going to be making, such as cookies, or a type of bread. My group would then look for a recipe that looked good to make, and each group would make something different. At the end of class, we would all try each other’s food and the teacher would pick whose was the best and we would get a few extra points, so we normally strived to be the top group. At the end of the year we baked our own individual cakes, made our own icing and colored it, and got to decorate however we wanted to.

I think that revision plays into your “creative process” by letting your mind expand and it allows other ideas to unfold. The article we had to read on revision said that you should take some time away from the paper, and then come back to it later. When coming back to it, you can re-read what you have wrote and you might think that it is out of order, needs things added to it, find a repetition in words or your idea might have evolved into something different then your original outlook. When you come up with an idea in writing, or just in everyday life, there might be some place needed for revision.

When it comes to writing a recipe, you can always make room to revise it because you want it to be very clear, and you want to make it as concise as you can. You can also sometimes revise the ingredients, make substitutions or make adjustments to the amount of ingredients used in the recipe.  You want the recipe to be easily understandable so a person you share it with will be successful in trying it, too.

When writing instructions or directions on how to make anything, there is always a long process. You start out with writing all of the steps, and sometimes you need to make it shorter. You should want to condense it so other people can easily follow it.

How I see him ..

The movie we watched on Henry Darger defiantly caught me a little off guard, but I’m sure anyone who never heard of him and watched this would feel the same way. I wouldn’t say that he was mentally ill, but more like one of a kind. He was a man who had faced a lot of diversity in his early years, and never really had anyone around to talk to about his feelings so he expressed himself on paper. Along with not having much of a social life, he expressed his feelings in his own way using the characters he did in his fifteen thousand page story.

The few people that he socialized with accepted him, but they didn’t know anything that was going on behind the closed doors of his apartment until he was moved into the poor house. They treated him good, and he was lucky to have such a nice landlord and neighbor that were willing to help him, especially in his older days. He acted strange toward the world, but I feel as though he didn’t know any better. Some of his characters in his story were messed up to say the least and some of the stories he told people were different, but like I said, he never had the experience of a normal life, and he never had anyone to look up to, to learn from.

I feel that Henry was a very creative man. Although he copied images, he made them him own and even more recreated them. He told the story about things that were happening in the world and added to them. We should definitely care about the art he created because it was a memory of a very creative man who was different and wanted to tell a story even though he never thought it would get out to the entire world.

Cleese Summary

John Cleese tells us in his video that creativity cannot really be explained, and I agree with that. We talk about this topic in class and we have a hard time coming up with something or we do and we are unsure if it’s really creative or not. I feel that a lot of things are creative, but they are just creative in their own way. He feels as though your childhood can be a factor in the ability of your creativity. The simplest thing as a child with a big box can be useful and show creativity as to what they do with it.

We need to not only keep an open mind when looking to solve a solution or come up with an idea, but transition from an open mode to a closed mode. To be in open mode, we need to be relaxed, playful, and be open to humor. He says that when being in a closed mode, creativity is not possible. In a closed mode, you can be active, impatient and become stressed. It is easy to go into a closed mode and get stuck in it. Certain conditions can help when you are trying to get into an open mode. Having space, time, time, confidence, and humor are all necessities for coming up with an original idea. We need to seclude ourselves, set a time for yourself, find out when your decision is due, don’t be afraid to take risks or make mistakes, and be inclined to humor.  We need to stay on topic and not let things get us side tracked. Being around other playful people can help us come up with ideas easier. When being a helpful person, you need to be a more positive person than a critic. In the end of his speech, he says that creativity is like humor and throughout his whole speech he makes jokes and that is a form of him being creative.

A few tips of my own for being creative is to brain-storm with diverse people. Surround yourself with others who like to have fun, can laugh at themselves and look at things from a different perspective. I feel that being creative can come when you least expect it and sometimes when you have to improvise. For example, when people cook sometimes they don’t always have an ingredient for the recipe. Instead of going out and buying it, they use something else in place and come up with a different dish or one better than the original.