Creativity (22 page)
Authors: Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
They let me know they would never tolerate or accept that [taking drugs]. I won’t call any names, but a very famous musician once offered me cocaine—I guess it was cocaine—no, heroin, excuse me. As he called it, “a hit with heroin.” And I told him quite frankly, “I would never be able to go home if I did this.” And that’s the thing that terrified me more than anything else. I couldn’t figure out what I would tell my mother—far less my father—if I came home with a habit. There would be no reason for it. It wasn’t a fear of what he would do to me, it was a fear of—maybe destroying him
altogether. I didn’t know how I could ever explain this to him.
John Hope Franklin, the African-American historian, remembers that his father, a lawyer, read all the time, so the son grew up thinking that reading was what adults did night and day; and he remembers his mother as always supportive and encouraging. Franklin credits both parents for providing the intellectual and moral foundations of his life:
I come from an educated parentage, you know. My mother was a schoolteacher and a graduate of the teachers’ training program at Roger Williams University in Tennessee, and my father also attended that school. That is where they met. Then he went on to Morehouse College in Atlanta and graduated from there. Then he studied law. He read law in the office of a lawyer. That’s what was frequently done around 1900. And he passed the bar with the second highest scores. He graduated from the University of Michigan and took the bar in the Indian Territory, not yet a state. Oklahoma was not yet a state. And
so my parents had an enormous influence on my intellectual as well as my social development. I learned from them the value of studying and reading, that sort of thing. I learned from them too certain elements of honesty and integrity. I didn’t have to wonder later whether I should or should not do certain things. It was part of my being because of their influence.
Manfred Eigen, the Nobel Prize—winning chemist, learned from his father the music he still plays and the high standards of perfor
mance his father expected. The historian William McNeill’s father was also a historian, whose synthetic view of the past influenced his son’s professional development. Freeman Dyson also remembers his parents fondly:
Well, I was extremely lucky, of course, in having the parents that I had. They were both of them remarkable people. My father was this unusual combination of a composer and administrator, so that was a great inspiration to me, the feeling that you can do lots of things and do them all well. And my mother was equally unusual in a way because she was a lawyer and had read very widely and in fact was more of a companion to me than my father. They were both of them such strong characters. And yet still they left me complete freedom to do my stuff, which was science. And neither of them
was a scientist, but they understood what it was about.
Parental influence is not always positive. Sometimes it is perceived as having been fraught with tension and ambivalence. Hazel Henderson modeled herself on her loving mother but resented the fact that she was so submissive to her patriarchal husband. Speaking of her father, she said:
He would tend to be authoritarian because that’s the way men were supposed to be. And so Mother never won an argument. I didn’t want to be like him, although I realized that power was useful. And I did want to be like him in terms of, uh, well, I want to be effective, and I don’t want to be trashed—I don’t want to be a doormat. And so that was a tremendous tension in my childhood, what the hell to do with this. And so I think that, although I never verbalized it or thought about it at the time, I ended up deciding that I was really going to unite love and power.
Often, especially in the case of artists, parents are horrified by the direction their child’s interest is taking. Mark Strand, a U.S. poet laureate, started out with an interest in the arts. His parents “were not pleased when I announced my intention to be a painter. Because they were worried about how I would earn a living. And it was even worse when I expressed my intention to become a poet. They thought all poets starved, or were suicides or alcoholics.” György
Faludy had to take many university courses in various subjects to please his father, before turning to poetry. The generation of women represented in our sample were discouraged by their families to consider science as a possible career. What chance did they have to become physicists or chemists? Better stick with the plan of trying to become high school teachers.
As the above quotes suggest, parents were not simply a source of knowledge or intellectual discipline. Their role was not limited to introducing their children to career opportunities and facilitating access to the field. Perhaps the most important contribution was in shaping character. Many respondents mentioned how important a father or mother had been in teaching them certain values. Probably the most important of these was honesty. An astonishing number said that one of the main reasons they had became successful was because they were truthful or honest, and these were virtues
they had acquired from a mother’s or a father’s example. Robertson Davies says this about his parents, both of whom were writers:
They were very sincere about what they wrote, and I was brought up—I would not say strictly, because there was nothing harsh about it—but my parents brought me up in a kind of religious atmosphere so that I had a very profound respect for truth, and I was perpetually being reminded, because my parents were very great Bible-quoters, that God is not mocked.
The German physicist Heinz Maier-Leibnitz, who trained two of his students to the Nobel Prize, believes that the responsibility of a scientific mentor is not only to be honest himself but also to make sure of the honesty of his coworkers:
I don’t know whether the word
honesty
is the best word. It’s the search for truth in your work. You must criticize yourself, you must consider everything that may contradict what you think, and you must never hide an error. And the whole atmosphere should be so that everybody is like that. And later, when you are head of a lab or an institute, you must make a great effort to help those who are honest, those who don’t work only for their careers and try to diminish the work of others. This is the most important task that a professor has. It’s absolutely fundamental.
Why is honesty considered so important? The reasons given share a common core, even though they vary depending on the respondent’s domain of activity. The physical scientists said that unless they were truthful to their observations of empirical facts, they could not do science, let alone be creative. The social scientists stressed that unless their colleagues respected their truthfulness, the credibility of their ideas would be compromised. What the artists and writers meant by honesty was truthfulness to their own feelings and intuitions. And businesspersons, politicians, a
nd social reformers saw the importance of honesty in their relationship with other people, with the institutions they led or belonged to. In none of these fields could you be ultimately successful if you were not truthful, if you distorted the evidence, either consciously or unconsciously, for your own advantage. Most of the respondents felt fortunate to have acquired this quality from the example of parents.
Only in a few cases does parental influence appear as a thoroughly negative force, an example of what the child wants to avoid in the future. Parents who are always quarreling, who are materialistic, who are unhappy with their lives, show their children ways not to be. But by and large it seems that parents are still the main source of the curiosity and involvement with life that is so characteristic of these creative individuals. This is true even when the parent is no longer alive.
Missing Fathers
A notable contradiction to the importance of parental help is the fact that so many creative people lost their fathers early in life. This pattern is especially true for creative men. About three out of ten men and two out of ten women in our sample were orphaned before they reached their teens.
George Klein, one of the founders of the new domain of tumor biology, is one of them. In a book of essays he describes at length the effect on his life of his father’s death. He attributes both his sense of almost arrogant autonomy and the feeling of responsibility that drives him to the fact that he didn’t have a living father to fear and to depend on. A young boy deprived of a father may feel a great sense of liberation, a freedom to be and do anything he wants to; at the same time, he may feel the tremendous burden of having to live up to the expectations he himself has attributed to the abs
ent father.
A fatherless boy has the opportunity to invent who he is. He will not have to stand in front of a powerful, critical father and justify himself. On the other hand, he will not have the opportunity to grow up and become a friend and peer to his father. The relationship remains frozen in time, and the psyche of the child always carries the demanding memory of the all-powerful parent. It is possible that the complex and often tortured personality of creative individuals is in part shaped by this ambivalence. George Klein ends his essay entitled “The Fatherless” with the following lines:
Father, little brother, my son, my creator, you who will never allow me to know you, come, oppress me, crush me, mold me into whatever you want—into someone I never was, never will be, if only I could tell you that…What would, I really want to tell you? Perhaps only this: It is wonderful to live—thank you for making that possible for me. I probably would have killed you if you had lived, but I was never truly able to live while you were dead.
Although few mention their loss with such insight and pathos, in most cases the father’s early death seems to leave a drastic mark on the son’s psyche. Wayne Booth was raised in a Mormon family, where fathers are looked up to as God’s representatives, almost godlike themselves. So when his father died, young Wayne felt a double blow: first the natural grief over losing his father and then the shock to his most basic beliefs: If Father was so powerful, how could he die? But again, with the grievous loss came an unusual gain: In the highly hierarchical Mormon family, at a very young age
, he replaced his absent father, gaining the respect and high expectations vested in the oldest male. Wayne Booth’s approach to his vocation reflects this ambivalence of his early years. On the one hand, his approach to teaching, to literature, to criticism is informed by a deep respect for order and tradition; on the other hand, he has kept questioning accepted truths, maintaining into his seventies the open curiosity usually associated with youth.
Sometimes the father, though alive, is virtually inaccessible to the son. Such was the case with the Indian composer and musician Ravi Shankar:
I have to talk about my father a little. See, he was a seeker. In the sense that he was always seeking for knowledge. And he was such a learned person. In every subject. Starting from Sanskrit, to music. He was a lawyer by profession, he was in the Privy Council in London, he was with the League of Nations when it started in Geneva. He did his political science in French, almost nearing his fiftieth year. And toward five, six years from the end of his life, he gave up everything and started giving talks on Indian philosophy, even at Columbia University and foundations in New York.
He earned a lot on different occasions, and he was offered fantastic jobs, you know, paying a lot of money, but he never saved. He didn’t really look after us that way. My mother was separated from him at a very early stage. And he married an English lady, whom I haven’t seen but I have heard about. So from my childhood on I saw my mother very unhappy and very lonely. But you know, she was such a great lady. She spent all her energy, time, and everything for the sake of us children. With very little money that we had, she really struggled to give education to my brothers.
My father, as I said, was a very lonely person himself. And he lived away from his family, always. I have hardly seen him. If I add them up—two days, three days, maybe a week. [The] longest was once two weeks in Geneva we spent when he was with the League of Nations. I haven’t seen him for more than maybe two or two and a half months altogether. So I had nothing to do with my father, unfortunately, though I respected him and liked him very much. But I grew up very lonely myself, because I was the youngest. My mother was my best friend.
The mere fact of not having a father is not what affects the later life of such children; what counts is the meaning they extract from the event. The death of a father is as likely to destroy a son’s curiosity and ambition as it is to enhance it. What makes the difference is whether there is enough emotional and cognitive support for the bereaved child to interpret the loss as a sign that he must take on adult responsibilities and try harder to live up to expectations. And here the mother becomes crucial, because in most cases it is to protect and comfort a loving mother that
the child tries to work hard and succeed.
The effects of a parent’s death are often quite complicated. Brenda Milner’s father, whom she adored, died of tuberculosis when she was eight. He had been a pianist and music critic for the
Manchester Guardian
. Because his job allowed him to spend many mornings at home, he took Brenda’s education in hand and taught her the arithmetic tables and had her read Shakespeare to him. His death was “the worst emotional experience” in her life. After this event, Milner was drawn to science in part to avoid being overly influenced by her artistic mother, for whom she had a great affection when sep
arated, but with whom she quarreled if they spent more than a quarter of an hour together in the same room. “I wanted to show that I was doing my own thing and not my mother’s thing,” she says of her decision to pursue science. “It was selfish, perhaps, but it is very claustrophobic living with someone who has so much emotional investment in you when you are a child.”
In some cases, the support to the orphaned child may come from the larger community. When Linus Pauling’s father died, the nine-year-old boy was taken on as the responsibility of the other pharmacists in Portland. Each day after school he would go to a different drugstore, and help his father’s colleagues prepare medications, thus developing the initial interest in the mysteries of chemistry that he had first acquired by helping in his father’s store. Being orphaned certainly did not dampen Pauling’s interest in the world around him: