The Permanent Creativity of Self

Abstract

Within the area of psychoanalysis and epistemology of complexity, a conception of the subject intended as originally creative, active, and constantly expanding has been spread. This idea has been ignored for too long, because of the prejudices of a reductionist science that could not conceive how subjects would always be considered as agent, intentional, and able to self-generate their own world of meaning. Creativity is also the principle which allows the creation of value, because each person brings a “differential” with respect to the reality deriving from its own irreducible subjective look.

Creativity, however, if it does not want to degenerate into a self-reverie, has to be intended as a principle of inclusion, since it cannot be separated from the world, from the “object”; creativity demands to take reality into account and to include it in the construction of the world of meaning of the subject, to operate “synthesis” increasingly mature and complex between subject and object. In the epistemology of complexity this concept is expressed by the assertion that individuals are simultaneously self-referential and hetero-referential. This also origins an ethic implication, because man is obliged to “take charge” of reality (from his subjective point of view), reaching higher and higher levels of integration between subject and object, rebuilding both the sense of the whole humanity (C.G. Jung, E. Fromm, L. Sander) and the meaning of the whole universe (T.S. Eliot, W. Bion, A.N. Whitehead).