Howard E. Gruber

David Lavery Creative Work: On the Method of Howard Gruber This essay originally appeared in The Journal of Humanistic Psychology 33.2 (1993): 101-21.

In his explorations of the world, the individual finds out what needs doing. In his attempts to do some of it, he finds out what he can do and what he cannot. He also comes to see what he need not do. From the intersection of these possibilities there emerges a new imperative, his sense of what he must do. How "it needs" and "I can" give birth to "I must" remains enigmatic.
Howard E. Gruber, Darwin on Man (257)

To live a creative life is one of the intentions of a creative person.

Doris B. Wallace, Creative People at Work (29)

A native of Brooklyn, Gruber was educated at Brooklyn College and Cornell University, where he received a Ph.D. in psychology in 1950. Not until the end of the decade, however, did be become interested in the history of science and, especially, in Charles Darwin. His careful study of Darwin's notebooks led to several important discoveries about the creative process and culminated in his journey to Geneva to learn developmental psychology from Piaget himself, the publication of Darwin on Man: A Psychological Study of Scientific Creativity, an eventual joint appointment at the University of Geneva and Rutgers University, and three decades of research into the creative process giving birth to his case study method. Gruber is now a member of the faculty of the Teachers College at Columbia University.

In seeking to distinguish between creative work and creativity, Gruber demonstrates that creation is not the result of "a set of properties that a person has in a certain moment and carries around with him." "The question," in fact, he notes, "is really not the 'ivity' of it--the property list--but how people go about doing it when they do it" ("From Epistemic Subject" 175). Since it is indisputably the fact that "Creative works are constructed over long periods of time," the laboratory simply cannot measure them ("From Epistemic Subject" 171-72). Gruber remains highly suspicious of researchers willing to make "inductive leaps from college sophomores doing ten minute paper and pencil tests to individuals who organize their whole lives for creative work" ("And the Bush" 274). Convinced that true creation "must have some function other than to torment behaviorists" ("Inching" 254), Gruber seeks to "escape from the laboratory of N = 30, N = 60, etc., into the case study, where N = 1, because . . . the individual is worth knowing" ("From Epistemic Subject" 170).

"Averaging across subjects," as traditional social science methodology dictates, "blurs our view of exactly that which we want to study." Such an approach reminds Gruber of the famous composite photographs of Galton, which through superimposition of multiple portraits sought the "average" of the original faces. "Such a face," Gruber observes, "is empty and characterless. We can see at a glance, in the averaged faces Galton invented, that the creative individual has been lost" ("From Epistemic Subject," 170). The real question about the quantative approach for Gruber is thus not whether it is possible, but rather "Should creativity be measured" ("The Evolving Systems Approach to Creative Work" 5).

Gruber thus opposes all attempts to explain creation in a monolithic way. Critical of the "kind of reductionism, in which creative work becomes 'nothing but' an expression of personality" ("And the Bush," 281), he remains equally dubious of an expansive yet metaphysical notion like "genius": "There is no need," he states emphatically, "to think of the individual as solving problems in a mysterious way called 'genius'" ("The Emergence of a Sense" 6). (Thus, In Creative People at Work, he writes skeptically of both "the path of Holy Cow!" and that of "Nothing But," of "ineffectual mystification" and "fragmentary measurement" ["The Evolving Systems Approach to Creative Work" 3].) His research into the creative process has instead revealed again and again something much more basic: "a different organization of the system, an organization that was constructed by the person himself in the course of his life, in the course of his work, as needed in order to meet the tasks that he encountered and that he set himself" ("From Epistemic Subject"  177).

In "The Evolving Systems Approach to Creativity," Gruber places three important and revealing restrictions on his own project:

• Our aim is not to explain how the person became creative. (270)
• Our theoretical aim . . . is not to use the study of extraordinary creative processes to draw any conclusions about the general population, and vice versa. (275)
• Our aim is not to make law-like generalizations about creativity, but to develop an evolving systems approach that will serve as a guide to the study of creative individuals. (276)

Gruber has taken pains to distinguish his case study method from that of biographers, historians of science and ideas, and psychoanalytic critics. Intellectual biographies rarely illuminate the creative process, Gruber shows, because they "run through the actual work of hard thought of their subjects far too briefly to analyze its inner structure, tensions, growth" ("And the Bush" 290); the conventions of the genre, its commitment to telling a whole life, necessitate superficial coverage of creation's difficult work. Historians fare little better: "working on different scales of time and social space," they often "treat the individual as though a lifetime of thought and work could be compressed into a single unit." The result stands in direct opposition to that which Gruber's method yields: "This compression has sometimes led to odd juxtapositions in which they see internal contradictions where we would see change and growth" ("And the Bush" 290). And historians of science stand accused of studying "the development of disembodied ideas, detached from the individuals who think them" ("Cognitive Psychology" 305; Gruber echoes here the complaint of Stillman Drake). Between the case study approach and psychoanalysis, the chasm is even wider.

"The case study method . . . is quite distinct from psychoanalytically oriented psychobiography. Such studies have emphasized the underlying motives of the creative person, their childhood origins, and their neurotic character. Our focus of attention has been on how creative people do their work, rather than on why, and on the developmental process within the career, rather than on that leading up to it" ("Inching" 248). Understanding why a person is creative, Gruber insists, does not explain how he creates. Instead, he remains committed to the discovery of a "theory of the individual" ("And the Bush"  274-75).

"We are far from denying the importance of unconscious processes," Gruber cautions. "We nevertheless see them as occurring in a person struggling and often succeeding in taking command of them to make them serve the interests of consciously and freely chosen enterprises" ("Inching," 248). Still, he is anxious to correct the customary view that they "express the way in which a person is divided against himself." For "a person is not always so divided," Gruber reminds. "When he bends all his efforts towards some great goal, the same problems which occupy his rational, waking thoughts will shape his imagery and pervade his dreams" (Darwin on Man, 246).

Early in his research into the creative process, Gruber tells us, he was perplexed with the question of how to "put some order in this seeming chaos [of the creative process]." "The answer . . . ," Gruber confesses, "took me by surprise when I first began to think of it: we should not" ("Cognitive Psychology" 309). "Everything should be as simple as it is," Einstein observed, "but not simpler"--a conviction "with which Gruber, who speaks of the "aesthetics of simplicity" as appealing only to "some little boy part of my mind" ("From Epistemic Subject" 177), would certainly agree.

Gruber's "deeply phenomenological" ("And the Bush"  278) method, his "demystification of the creative process" ("Inching" 243), then, "start[s] with an individual whose creativity is beyond dispute . . . and then . . . map[s], as carefully as [possible] . . . , what is going on in that person's mind over a period in which creative breakthroughs were occurring" ("Breakaway" 69). "The phenomenological approach," Gruber explains, "begins by taking the subject's reports about himself as an invaluable point of departure." Employment of such a method need not result in the abandonment of critical judgment; for "the double task of reconstructing events from the subject's point of view and then understanding them from our own" ("And the Bush"  277) remains.

While acknowledging that there is a need for studying individuals "below the summit of Mount Olympus," and speculating that "it may even turn out that as a field of scientific inquiry, ordinary people are more intriguing than extraordinary ones," Gruber insists that "the serious study of creative work requires careful and prolonged attention to the individual and must pay special attention to the very great" ("The Evolving Systems Approach" 6; "Which Way" 119). The choice of subjects is limited, however, by 1) the availability of material--notebooks, journals, manuscripts, etc.--and 2) the researcher's ability to understand the subject matter involved ("And the Bush"  273). Gruber's own work has centered on Charles Darwin and Jean Piaget, and colleagues and students have used his method to investigate such individuals as Antoine Lavoisier, William Wordsworth, Michael Faraday, William James, Vincent Van Gogh, Erasmus Darwin, George Bernard Shaw, Sigmund Freud, Dorothy Richardson, Benjamin Franklin, Albert Einstein, Anais Nin, John Locke.

One of the practical reasons for using the great as the focus for study of the creative process is simply the fact that "they leave better traces." Indeed, "the making and leaving of tracks--preliminary sketches, countless revisions, early notebooks, variations on a theme . . . ," Gruber observes, "is part and parcel of the process itself . . . a kind of activity characteristic of people doing creative work" ("Which Way" 119). (The "fossil record" of the processes of creation, Gruber recognizes, may well be self-fulfilling prophecy. "Wittingly or not," he notes, creative people "create the conditions under which we can study their development" ["Which Way" 119].)

A chief motive of the case study method is thus "the desire to recontextualize the process of thought; rather than isolating it, to see it in a whole person working under real historical circumstances" ("From Epistemic Subject" 169). And such a task, able to advance, as Gruber acknowledges, only by "successive approximations" ("And the Bush"  274), is more than a little intimidating: "To see the creative thinker in full historical context is a large undertaking, requiring the knowledge and skills of historian, anthropologist, sociologist, and literary critic. Faced with such a task, one is tempted to retreat to the laboratory" ("From Epistemic Subject" 169). Convinced that "the most challenging task of creative research is to invent means of describing and explaining each unique configuration" ("Inching" 245) --for each creative person, necessarily "a moving target" ("The Evolving Systems Approach" 8), inclined to "multiple deviance" from existing norms ("The Evolving Systems Approach" 6-7), is "unique in a unique way" ("From Epistemic Subject" 177)--Gruber quotes fondly William Blake's maxim: "One law for the Lion and Ox is Oppression" ("Inching" 246 and elsewhere).

"So far as data goes," Gruber acknowledges, "there is often an embarrassment of riches."

True, we cannot interview a dead subject, but notebooks and letters often provide answers to questions we might have asked. Historical distance in some ways makes imagination easier, and in some ways harder, insofar as the task is to see things from another's point of view. Historical distance has the great advantage that we can survey the subject's work as a whole, the later work often helping to understand the earlier. In no case can we take the subject's words exactly at face value; in every case the subject's reflections about himself are pearls of great price; upon our own shoulders falls responsibility for the phenomenologically oriented reconstruction of the subject's world, especially his task-space. ("And the Bush" 277)

Gruber's method nevertheless remains "quite modest," for it is not, like the approach of the psychoanalyst, an attempt to "discover any thing like a 'latent structure,' a set of relationships unknown to the knower" ("And the Bush"  290). Like the Geneva School of literary criticism with which it shares both geographical and intellectual origins, Gruber's procedure is self-effacing, dedicated toward a close reading, in turn phenomenological--"inside" and close to the subject's own point of view--and critical--detached, "outside" the subject and aware of possible bias--of the original text (Wallace 32), a reading which results in "schematizing the ideas of the creative thinker in a way that he would probably recognize and accept as a reasonable representation" ("And the Bush"  290). "Our main point of departure," Gruber explains, "will always be the study of the construction of an idea, of a work, of an oeuvre" ("From Epistemic Subject" 177). (Few psychologists, Gruber admits, are well trained for the task of interpretation--of "listening and reconstruction"--essential to his method ["From Epistemic Subject" 177-78].)

With Darwin's notebooks in mind, Gruber has described the manner in which he encounters a text:

I proceeded like an explorer in a new territory, reading the notebooks through, over and over again, figuring out what he was focusing on, what his cryptic notes meant, trying to recreate his thought processes from one day to the next. I tried to freeze the current of his thinking at crucial points. ("Breakaway" 69)

In the laboratory, the subject tells the experimenter what he is thinking while solving a problem; the experimenter records these words along with other behavior. When a Darwin writes in his notebooks, he, too, is saying, "I think . . ." a phrase which might be considered as prefacing everything he writes. But the subject's words are not taken as directly providing answers to our questions about the creative process. Such answers must result from the psychologist's effort at reconstruction, making use of the subject's words and actions, from analysis of the creative product itself, and other relevant information. ("And the Bush"  276)

notions that seemed too absurd to be written down, transient thoughts still too fleeting or awkward for written expression, taboo ideas that can be expressed only when muted or transformed. And there is another sort of thinking that leaves very little trace, although it is not rejected or suppressed: the personal imagery one uses to carry a thought along, the personal knowledge one gains of a situation only by actually being in it--seeing, hearing, feeling, tasting, smelling it. Doing, enjoying, remembering, imagining it. (Darwin on Man 253)

Like the Romantic poets who often ended their great lyrical outbursts with strategic questions ("Do I wake or sleep?"), Gruber again and again offers for our consideration a question to which he does not yet have the answer. "How do [the creative person's] purposes evolve?" he ponders. But it is only the first of a catalog of questions:

What determines his high level of aspiration? How does the process of self-criticism work? How does the creative person grow so that he can continue to assimilate the criticism of others without surrendering his own evolving vision? ("And the Bush" 278)

"To place the person in history, to describe his ensemble of metaphors, to pay close attention to his system of categories and to changes in his units of analysis, to see each activity as part of his network of enterprises, to search out and examine those very special skills that the particular creative person may have, and to try to understand his special point of view" ("From Epistemic Subject," 178)--this, in summary, is Howard Gruber's method for the study of creative work. His discoveries are many and valuable.

Creative work is the product of individuals governed by a sense of purpose. "The conservative assumption to make," Gruber suggests, "is that [creative individuals] know what they want to do and shape their lives accordingly. Any particular task undertaken must be viewed as part of the life, occurring in the context of the life. Context is not merely contemporary. Given a creature endowed both with memory and vision, the context of any single act is both retrospective and prospective" ("And the Bush"  272).

Even mysterious "serendipity" discoveries are purposeful in ways not normally acknowledged. Great insights come to a prepared mind, a "welcoming mind belong[ing] to one who has prepared it by his own efforts, as a field in which new ideas can flower" (Darwin on Man, 246, 248). They are not ruptures with the past, not the revelatory gift of a "Eureka experience," but "a fulfillment of . . . abiding purpose" ("Aha" 42). "Thus the sudden insight in which a problem is solved," Gruber writes, "may represent only a minor nodal point, like the crest of a wave, in a long and very slow process--the development of a point of view" (Darwin on Man 5). As Gruber observes, expanding on the problem of serendipitous discovery, "It may well be the case that the seemingly random juxtaposition of ideas produces something new. But this juxtaposition arises in one person's mind. It is he who activates the structures giving rise to the ideas in question. It is he who recognizes the fruit of the encounter and assimilates it into a newly forming structure. And it was he in the first place who assembled all these constituents in the close proximity of one person's mind, his own, so that all this might happen" ("And the Bush" 287)

For creative people "a long and well-worked through apprenticeship is vital to the development of a creative life." The particular circumstances vary: "Teachers and mentors may be imposed upon the young person, or sought out, or discovered in a lucky accident. They may be physically present or far away, living or dead models." But the end result is the same: "models and mentors there must be, as well as the disciplined work necessary to profit from them" ("Foreword" to Notebooks  x). "It is safe to say," Gruber concludes, "that no case of creative achievement occurs without a long apprenticeship" ("The Evolving Systems Approach" 15).

Creative people are willing to work hard for a very long time, even if such work does not produce immediate results or rewards, and this work remains enjoyable for them. "Perhaps the single most reliable finding in our studies," Gruber observes, "is that creative work takes a long time. With all due apologies to thunderbolts, creative work is not a matter of milliseconds, minutes, or even hours--but of months, years, and decades" ("Inching" 265). (True discovery is actually governed by a kind of irony, as Gruber notes: "In the heat of the moment, small advances feel great, and ones that turn out to be crucial slip in quietly" ["Aha" 43].) Creative individuals should not be thought of as obsessed or fanatic: "the creative person cannot simply be driven," Gruber writes. "He must be drawn to his work by visions, hopes, joy of discovery, love of truth, and sensuous pleasure in the creative activity itself" ("And the Bush" 294).

"The partial decoupling of the production of ideas from their dissemination and exploitation" interests Gruber; he cites the examples of Mendel and the geologist Wegener (who discovered continental drift and theorized the existence of tectonic plates). Both of these men "made fundamental discoveries, attempted to disseminate their ideas, and ran into the stone wall of intellectual inertia (either through being ignored or ridiculed), only to be 'rehabilitated' years later" ("History" 6).

That which often frightens ordinary people appears as a challenge, an inducement to the creative individual. "Being creative means striking out in new directions and not accepting ready-made relationships, which take stamina and a willingness to be alone for a while" ("Breakaway" 72). Creative people show constant courage. They are not concerned with solving problems and then settling back into stasis. Rather, "creative work begets new and fruitful problems. Organizing matters so that this remains the case is part of what it means to lead a creative life" ("And the Bush" 292).

A creative life is thus distinctly nonhomeostatic. "Success along the way does not lead so much to a sense of satisfaction as to a sense of liberation--to do whatever comes next" ("Inching," 267). "And the bush was not consumed" (Exodus), Gruber notes, is a perfect metaphor of the life of a creative person. and yet such a person, he hastens to remind, is "not a runaway system that accelerates its activity to the point where it burns itself out in one great flash. The system regenerates the activity and the creative work regenerates the system. The creative life--a "deviation amplifying system" (the phrase is Maruyama's)--happens in a being who can continue to work, a being who is--in Newton's famous phrase--"never at rest" ("And the Bush" 269; "From Epistemic Subject" 176).

The open-endedness of the creative thus presents a stark contrast to the closed system of most individuals. "We know now," Gruber writes, "that the mental life of every human being is full of fascinating constructive and imaginal activity. Piaget has shown it for children. An army of investigators have shown it for the seemingly quite passive processes of perception and memory. They are not passive at all. There is a kind of creativity-in-the-small that permeates the universe of intelligent life." "Creativity-in-the-small," however, is "not sufficient to guarantee a creative life." It is common among contemporary pop psychologists to insist that all human beings are creative; Gruber knows better: "in many if not most lives, all this ingenuity is deployed by the person toward the aim of maintaining things as they are, rather than toward creating something new. All too often, successfully" ("And the Bush" 272). Creative work is simply not "species typical behavior," but rather "the maximum of which members of the species are capable" ("From Epistemic Subject" 175).

Creative people, Gruber has found, are not as isolated as once believed: they are, in fact, extremely good at collaborating, at interacting with peers. They often devote their skills and a surprising amount of time to establish environments and peer groups ("personal allegiances") capable of nurturing their work ("Breakaway" 72; "And the Bush" 294-95). Again, the example of Darwin serves as a case in point for Gruber. In an interview he tells of his discovery that the great biologist was not the suffering neurotic some biographers have diagnosed him to be: "he didn't seem very neurotic. He worked so steadily and he was such a good family man. He had his door open to his children all the time, and he played with them and drew them into his work in funny, whimsical ways when they were young and more seriously later on. . . . He was a happy man who had an undiagnosed disease" (Contemporary Authors 119, 129).

Early in their life's work, creative individuals make "good moves"--strategies, "first stroke[s] of the brush [which] transform the canvas"--that "set the stage for the protracted creative work of which it is only a part" ("From Epistemic Subject" 172). (These moves are often recorded in an "initial sketch": a "rough draft or early notebook to which the worker can repair from time to time--that serves as a sort of gyroscope for the oeuvre" ["Inching" 265-66].) Though "delays, tangents, and false starts" are equally as common and "almost inevitable," creative individuals find ways of managing their work "so that these inconclusive moves become fruitful and enriching, and at the same time so that a sense of direction is maintained." "Without such a sense of direction," in fact, as Gruber shows, "the would-be creator may produce a number of fine strokes, but they will not accumulate toward a great work" ("Inching" 265).

Creative individuals, Gruber discovers, "need to know a lot and cultivate special skills" ("Breakaway" 71): Darwin, for example, knew a tremendous amount about such esoteric subjects as barnacles and animal breeding, knowledge which shaped his discoveries about evolution; Leonardo's precise knowledge of anatomy informed his art; Newton's hands-on experience as the maker of scientific instruments was "instrumental" to his theory-making ("Foreword" to Notebooks  x). Creative individuals sometimes acquire this knowledge through a "special kind of narcissism" ("And the Bush" 280) such as that exhibited by Darwin when he used himself as his subject in order to study man's higher faculties. Such narcissism was, of course, simply not necessary when he was studying barnacles.

But creation is not necessarily the result of great skill or intelligence. Being brilliant and being creative, Gruber has found, can be quite distinct. T. H. Huxley, "Darwin's bulldog," was, by all estimates, "brilliant," while Darwin himself was "somewhat slower and steadier" (as he admits in his autobiography), but it was Darwin who made the great discoveries. Nor was Einstein the best mathematician of his day ("From Epistemic Subject" 178). "To be creative means to be somebody doing a long, hard job, picking something that other people are not going to do, can't do, would be afraid to do. You have to want to do it. You have to remember that you want to do it even when you run away from it for a while out of agony. . . . you have the confidence to keep on going" (Contemporary Authors 119, 128-29). Great skill is likewise easily overemphasized. Forgers, as Gruber points out, may exhibit skill equal to that of the great artists they mimic but they do not use it for creative work ("Inching" 244-45). "The creative person must develop a sense of identity as a creative person, a sense of his or her own specialness" ("And the Bush" 294-95). Creative people possess, and seek to possess, unique points of view, special perspectives on the world. Such points of view, in fact, are likely to distinguish the creative person more than any particular problem solving ability.

The ongoing work of creation is often guided by what Gruber calls "images of wide scope." "There is probably a place," Gruber writes, "for a special term such as 'image of wide scope,' distinct from metaphor, to refer to the potential vehicle of a metaphor that has not yet been formulated or to refer to supple schematization . . . that might enter into a number of metaphors" ("Inching" 256). Darwin's notebook sketches of the tree of evolution, Einstein's "thought experiment" of a voyage on a beam of light in order to understand reality from its perspective--these are classic examples of images of wide scope. Their role in the creative process is complex.

Gruber notes that the "different modalities of thought" are, for the creative individual at least, never "separated by an unscalable wall." Thus,

thinking moves from one modality to another, from visual images to sketches, to words and equations explaining (that is, conveying the same meaning as) the visualizations. The thinker is pleased to discover that certain structures remain invariant under these transformations: these are his ideas. ("Aha" 49)

Creative individuals nevertheless "have at [their] disposal a number of modalities of representation. Systems of laws, taxonomic systems, and thematic repertoires [the term is Gerald Holton's] . . .--are all pertinent" ("Cognitive Psychology" 315). Various thinkers develop direct, special ways of thinking: Wordsworth in iambic pentameter, von Neumann in mathematical equations, Dr. Johnson in prose ("Aha" 48). These "private languages and modes of thought" must be translated, however, into public discourse. "Public and private are distinct, but they must be commensurate and transposable" ("Foreword" to Notebooks x). "The creative person," Gruber writes, "may very well start with a wild idea. Soon enough it becomes familiar and, within a private universe, no longer seems wild. But to be effective the creator must be in good enough touch with the norms and feelings of some others so that the product will be one that they can assimilate and enjoy. Even the person who is far ahead of the times must have some community, however limited or special, with whom to interact" ("The Evolving Systems Approach" 14-15)

For the creative person, an "enormous density of personal experience . . . is packed into the simplest ideas." "The personal knowledge packed into an abstract idea, Gruber explains in Darwin on Man, "is put there by the growing person himself, through his own activities, assimilating what he can into existing structures and thereby strengthening them, occasionally noticing anomalies that require the revision of these structures to accommodate experiences that would otherwise not find a stable place" ( 254).

A "peculiar combination of improbability and fitness" governs creative work. Creative products meet a "felt or almost-felt need," and, obviously, "others are aware, and more than dimly, that some move in that direction is needed." (Think of Huxley's famous response to hearing of Darwin's theory of evolution through natural selection: "How stupid not to have thought of that!") But if such a move were truly at hand, Gruber notes, then the work would not be seen as creative ("Inching," 265). "For the creative person, carpe diem has a special meaning: since he is trying to do something that has never been done before, he must look for the rare opportunity and then seize it. To recognize what is rare, one must have the kind of knowledge of the world that is gained only by moving about in it" (Darwin on Man 252).

The occurrence of sudden insights, Gruber's research reveals, is not unique. One or two noteworthy insights a day, five hundred in a year, five thousand in a ten year project may be typical of highly creative people ("Inching," 244). "It is reasonably clear," Gruber writes in an essay on the "Aha" or "Eureka" experience, "that meanings do not occur 'instantaneously,' and there is, consequently, time for the thinking person to manoeuvre, to steer his thoughts in desired directions and to avoid undesired ones" ("Aha" 44). As Gruber explains later in the same essay:

Archimedes may have often seen and thought about the water displaced by his body. If at the moment in question he was in mid-course in constructing a new set of ideas and a solution to a new problem . . . then the sight of displacement would be assimilated or mapped into a different schema than before, and the act of assimilation would provoke new accommodations. Even the simple act of submerging an object in water has many subtleties. Which ones are picked out and exploited depends on where the thinker is at the time. We can accept Galileo's sophisticated caveat [that the story of Archimedes in the bathtub is "implausible"] without denying the import of the bath, so long as we remember that Archimedes was immersed in thought. ("Aha" 46)

For example, close examination of the epiphanal moment in which Darwin discovered, while reading Malthus, the centrality of natural selection to the evolutionary process, shows him in the act of "recognizing an idea he has had, almost within his grasp, for some time" ("The Evolving Systems Approach," 18). The very concept of "insight," Gruber suggests, though a "convenient shorthand" for a complex, evolving system, nevertheless "does justice" to something quite real: "to the emotion of thought, to the surge of joy and dread, excitement and fulfillment whenever the thinking person closes the loop and discovers what he has done" (Darwin on Man 7).

Inherently "dynamic," a network of enterprises, Gruber suggests, should be thought of as a "sketch of the entire set of intrinsic motives regulating the person's work" ("History" 9), promoting "diverse simultaneous or parallel activities" ("Cognitive Psychology" 311). Such a network is interactive and interdependent ("History" 9) and typically "includes a scheme for replenishing itself with new tasks if ever the original stock nears completion" ("Emergence" 17).

Individual enterprises sometimes show "astonishing longevity" (though they may pass into a long period of dormancy) ["And the Bush" 293]. Single enterprises may be shared by many, but they remain unique because the host is different. As a pigeon fancier, Gruber observes, Charles Darwin "was not like the other pigeon fanciers with whom he consorted. For him, the selective breeding of pigeons was part of a grand plan to come as close as possible to an experimental attack on the evolutionary process" (Darwin on Man 257).

Ordinarily, an "overriding project [emerges] that unites all the enterprises," though this is not always the case ("History" 9). Each enterprise is governed by plans and intentions, but, due to the nature of the coupling, the frustration of one plan does not bring the whole system to a halt. Rather the individual overcomes obstacles through new procedures: he or she may, for example, turn to a related enterprise which had been placed on the "back burner." "How the individual decides whether to struggle with . . . difficulties or to shift to some other activity," Gruber notes, "is regulated by the organization of purposes as a whole" ("Cognitive Psychology" 315).

A special strategy creative individuals use to deal with obstacles to their ongoing work is "bracketing." They know how to hold, in temporary suspension, that which they do not yet understand, postponing solutions to problems until later--if at all. (Scientists, Gruber shows, are especially adept at bracketing, since they frequently work at the edge of the known and often specialize in only a small aspect of a larger field.) Darwin, for example, did not possess the genetic knowledge necessary to make natural selection work--he knew nothing of the discoveries of his contemporary Mendel--but this lacuna did not prevent him from proceeding with his own work (Darwin on Man, 254-55). When a creative person is baffled at a task, "his activity level does not go to zero." In fact, bracketing may be liberating, since it usually results in the activation of other tasks. Nor is knowledge lost in the process: for the creative person ordinarily takes up where he or she left off when return to the problem seems appropriate ("Inching" 266-67). The great amount of time required by creative work can even make interruptions seem a natural part of the process ("The Evolving Systems Approach" 12).

Like the evolutionary process itself, a network of enterprises is a kind of "tangled bank":

an organism is a system for adapting to variations in milieu, and by that token cannot be completely identified with any single situation. Loose coupling, then, is an essential component of the idea of interaction. The interplay of a number of loosely coupled subsystems is another essential component. Logically, it need not be a large number, but in any realistic picture of an organism or of an ecospace the number rapidly grows very large. It was exactly this idea that Darwin had in mind when he ended the Origin of Species with the image of the tangled bank. ("History" 6)

Ordinarily, creative people are thought of as "task-oriented" and not "ego-oriented," and yet, Gruber has discovered, "it is also true that the set of tasks taken as a whole constitutes a large part of the ego: to be oneself one must do these things; to do these things one must be oneself" ("The Evolving Systems Approach" 13). Indeed, there is every reason to believe that creative individuals "believe that they are doing something that has never been done before, they want to do something new, and they suffer knowingly the anxiety of life in the vanguard" ("Which Way" 128).

Two basic outlooks have dominated the study of creativity in all its forms, and neither, Howard Gruber argues convincingly, has been able to offer a faithful portrait: "One approach externalizes and depersonalizes the creative process, attributing it entirely to the Zeitgeist or spirit of the age, objective circumstance or even contingencies." From this deterministic perspective "thought and action" are reduced to mere "reflections of factors in the controlling environment: the person is a vehicle and not an agent." The second approach is likewise reductionistic, driving "the creative process entirely inward, desocializing it, and minimizing the role of conscious, disciplined effort." In this view, the creative individual is a "'sleepwalker' who stumbles onto his best ideas in dreams or other unguarded moments. Underlying this approach is the premise that conscious thought is not free, that it runs in 'passionate grooves' dictated by the prevailing ideas of the day, and only unconscious mental activity is free enough of these constraints to permit creative work" (Darwin on Man 245-46)

To free the study of creative work from the horns of this dilemma, Howard Gruber writes in Darwin on Man, "We need an approach,"

that would do justice to our image of the creative person as well organized, purposeful, aware of the manifold possibilities that exist in the world, and therefore free to choose among them. We need an approach that respects the kinship of mental processes with other living systems: variation and novelty are not chaotic or unrelated to the organism's past, but express the degrees of freedom characteristic of a particular organization as it stands at one moment in its history. (249)

Ghiselin, Brewster, ed. The Creative Process: A Symposium. New York: New American Library, 1952.

Gruber, Howard E. "Aspects of Scientific Discovery: Aesthetics and Cognition." Vision of Aesthetics, the Environment, and Development: The Legacy of Joachim F. Wohlwill. Ed. Roger M. Downs, Lynn S. Liben, and David S. Palermo. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University, 19xx.

___. "Breakaway Minds" (interview with Howard Gardner). Psychology Today, July 1981: 68-73.

___. "Cognitive Psychology, Scientific Creativity, and the Case Study Method." In On Scientific Creativity. Ed. M.D. Graek, R.S. Cohen, and G. Cimino. Amsterdam: D. Reidel, 1980: 295-322.

___. "The Cooperative Synthesis of Disparate Points of View." The Legacy of Solomon Asch: Essays in Cognition and Social Psychology. Ed. Irvin Rock. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1990: 143-58.

___. "Coping With Multiplicity and Ambiguity of Meaning in Works of Art." Metaphor and Symbolic Activity 3(1988): 183-89.

___. "Creativite et fonction constructive de la repetition." Bulletin de psychologie de la Sorbonne: Numero special pour le 80e anniversaire de Jean Piaget. 1976.

___, with P.H. Barrett. Darwin on Man: A Psychological Study of Scientific Creativity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980.

___. "Darwin's 'Tree of Nature' and Other Images of Wide Scope." In On Aesthetics in Nature. Ed. Judith Wechsler. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1978: 121-40.

___. "The Emergence of a Sense of Purpose." In Beyond Formal Operations. Ed. M. Commons. New York: Praeger, 19xx.

___. "Ensembles of Metaphor in Creative Scientific Thinking." Cahiers de la Fondation Archives Jean Piaget (1987): 235-54.

___, and J. J. Voneche, eds. The Essential Piaget. New York: Basic Books, 1977.

___. "The Evolving Systems Approach to Creative Work." In Wallace and Gruber, Creative People at Work: Twelve Case Studies: 3-24.

___. "The Evolving Systems Approach to Creativity." In Towards a Theory of Psychological Development. Ed. Sohan and Celia Modgil. Windsor, England: NFER, 1980..

___ and V. Gruber. "The Eye of Reason: Darwin's Development During the Beagle Voyage." Isis 53(1962): 186-200.

___. "Foreward." Notebooks of the Mind: Explorations of Thinking by Nora John-Steiner. New York: Harper and Row, 1985: ix-xii.

___. "The Fortunes of a Basic Darwinian Idea: Chance." In The Roots of American Psychology: Historical Influences and Implications for the Future. Ed. R.W. Rieber and K. Salzinger. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 291(1977).

___. "From Epistemic Subject to Unique Creative Person at Work." Archives de Psychologie 54(1985): 167-85.

___. "Giftedness and Moral Responsibility: Creative Thinking and Human Survival." In F.D. Horowitz and M. O'Brien, eds. The Gifted and the Talented: Developmental Perspectives. Washington: American Psychological Association, 1985.

___. "History and Creative Work: From the Most Ordinary to the Most Exalted." Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 19(1983): 4-15.

___ and S.N. Davis. "Inching Our Way Up Mount Olympus: The Evolving Systems Approach to Creative Thinking." In The Nature of Creativity. Ed. R.J. Sternberg. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988: 243-69.

___. "On the Hypothesized Relation Between Giftedness and Creativity." New Directions for Child Development 17(1982): 7-30.

___. "On the Relation Between 'Aha' Experiences' and the Construction of Ideas." History of Science 19(1981): 41-59.

___. "Piaget's Mission." Social Research 49(1982): 239-64. (PM)

___ and J.J. Voneche. "Reflexions sur les operations formelles de la pensee." Archieves de Psychologie 44(1976): 45-55.

___ and I.A. Sehl. "Transcending Relativism: Going Beyond the Information I am Given." In W. Callebaut, S.E. Cozzens, B.P. Lecuyer, A. Rip, and J.B. van Bendegem, eds. George Sarton Centennial. Ghent, Belgium: Communication and Cognition, 1984.

___. "Which Way is Up? A Developmental Question." In Adult Cognitive Development. Ed. R.A. Mines and K.S. Kitchener. New York: Praeger: 112-33.

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___ and Howard E. Gruber, ed. Creative People at Work: Twelve Cognitive Case Studies. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989.