Listening with the creative ear.

Herein I explore creativity as a prime force in the evolution of consciousness, a fundamental motivating energy related to a need to maintain or regain spontaneity and freedom, and having rudimentary existence from the beginning of life. It has its own developmental progression, throughout life makes its demands on the mind, is subject to dissociation and repression, and can be defended against as well as used defensively. A force that operates through symbolization, it increasingly distinguishes man from animals and operates to aesthetically express ineffable and evolving states of truth. This formulation is in some way consistent with Bion's (1965, 1970) belief that the most basic drive was "the truth instinct" aimed at achieving a resonance with "0" (an ultimate and transcendent truth). The truth drive links the creative and spiritual. Both involve a surrendering to truths and intelligence beyond the conscious self. This dynamic and creative "consciousness"—more often referred to as the "unconscious" and attributed negative qualities (the repressed and id) in analytic theory—is inherent in existence, and at all times accessible by one's creative and imaginative capacities. The capacity to value, access without excess anxiety, and be free enough to be "driven" by the truth instinct involves nurturance by parenting figures whose own achievement of unconditional love and evolved consciousness allows the child the necessary freedom to explore his full range of feelings or thoughts without being shamed or terrorized into feeling bad, wrong, or afraid of destroying another person. This idea differs from Freud's, who believed that the libidinal and aggressive drives were central to both psychic and physical survival and continuous with our evolution from animals. The former involves an imaginative striving to bring into being what is new, and in so doing may in fact put one's psychic and physical survival in jeopardy. As man evolves into higher states of consciousness, I believe the balance shifts from survival as a primary motivating force to creative processes emerging as a more identifying characteristic of the self. This emergence changes one's relation to the libidinal, aggressive, and interpersonal drives and to what has been considered in analytic thought the primary danger situations-loss of love, object loss, castration anxiety, and superego anxiety. With the evolution of the creative as more central to one's identity, the person wants and needs to be known and understood not just in terms of his * "determined" role as a child of particular parents or a product of a particular culture or in terms of how he obtains satisfaction, comfort, or prestige in relation to his biological determinates, physical and instinctual, but for his