182 V. P.

GL AVEANU

(
if I look at the created object, inquire into its creation, and follow this pro-
cess back as far as I can, I will find a series of steps. Since these are not actu-
ally seen together before me, I must visualize them in my memory so that
they form a certain ideal whole.… At first I will tend to think in terms of
steps, but nature leaves no gaps, and thus, in the end, I will have to see this
progression of uninterrupted activity as a whole. (Goethe, 1785/1998, p. 75)

Creativity in the making, creativity as a forward movement, creativity as

the action of the whole person—these are just a few insights creativity
scholars would gain from a close reading of Goethe. But this reading will
not suffice if it takes us back only to the person of the creator and his/her
perception and action. There is a second, crucial theoretical step to be
made toward understanding creativity as a relational phenomenon,

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grounded in the dynamic between self and other. This concern has
reemerged in creativity studies in the last 2 to 3 decades and it is this fea-

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ture that most radically sets apart old conceptions of intuition and fantasy
from contemporary, sociocultural thinking about creativity.

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Creativity and the Other

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Despite the strong tradition of individualization referred to before, cre-

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ativity theory also benefited, in time, from the growing appeal it has for

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psychologists working in the social, organizational, and educational

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fields. What these applied domains brought to the fore was a profound
dissatisfaction with a view of creativity as something that happens (pri-

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marily) inside the mind. The reality of creating is, in fact, that of people
and groups collaborating with each other. This need to take other people
into account was the basis for Amabile’s (1996) social psychology of cre-
ativity. Unfortunately, the largely experimental approach to the social
constructed it in this case essentially as a set of external variables (e.g.,
surveillance, rewards, and punishments) that condition creativity (by act-
ing on the intrinsic motivation of the creative person). Group creativity
studies share the same social cognition legacy and often end up focusing
on people and outputs rather than interaction and communication. Is this
the only way to understand the role of others in creative expression?
Decidedly, no. Systemic and sociocultural approaches place the other
not at the periphery but at the very center of creativity. A cultural psychol-
ogy account of creativity needs to start from this relational basis and con-
ceptualize creative action not within a space of subjectivity but one of
intersubjectivity (Glăveanu, 2014; for a broader discussion, see Cornejo,
2008). Novelty itself always depends on the comparison term we use and,
when it comes to creativity, this comparison term is always social. Not only
is it the case that we wouldn’t be able to recognize or validate creativity in

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 From Fantasy and Imagination to Creativity 183

the absence of social agreement (Csikszentmihalyi, 1988), but no creative

action is ever possible outside of collaboration and division of labor
(Becker, 2008). More than this, if we adopt the developmental perspective
Goethe advocated for, we find self/other interactions (between child and
caregiver) at the origin of the very first forms of creative expression. The
capacity to symbolize and its development in pretend play are both
achievements of decentration and thus grow out of understanding and
engaging with otherness (see Piaget & Inhelder, 1966; Vygotsky, 2004;
Winnicott, 1971).
As I mentioned above, there are many things present-day creativity
theories can learn from Goethe’s developmental and holistic perspective.
The emphasis on the senses and the lived experience of creating, as well

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as the necessity of reuniting fantasy and reason, are of key importance
and have often been neglected in contemporary research, including

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within the sociocultural tradition. There are signs of progress though in
this regard. Cognitive and psychometric approaches tend to think nowa-

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days that both divergent and convergent thinking are required for cre-
ative production (Lubart, 2003), building bridges between the

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imaginative and the more “rational” (analytical) sides of the creative act.

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In addition, the sociomaterial perspective on creativity (Tanggaard, 2013)

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brings to the fore not only the material world but also the senses and the

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body as key channels for creativity.

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Conversely, present-day theories of creativity rooted in the long cul-
tural tradition developed, among others, by Goethe, also make what I

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consider great steps forward compared to older theories of fantasy. While

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the latter focus our attention on the human “soul” and its capacity for
relating to the world in both intuitive and rational ways, they rarely con-
sider the self/other relation as critical for acquiring, developing, and
enacting these capacities. The discussion of fantasy in Cornejo’s lead
chapter, following historical sources, is equally focused on the individual
and his or her use of fantasy. Vico was perhaps the closest one to address
the dynamic between self and other when he related imagination to our
ability to empathically understand the experience of others, including
their experience of making or creating. But for Vico, this ability applied
mainly to grasping the social world, its history, including the history of
different social groups (Tateo, this volume). His version of perspective-
taking requires imagination, but, moving this line of argument further, we
can notice that all forms of imagination and, by extension, creativity, are
in fact grounded in perspective-taking, achieved through social interac-
tion Glăveanu (2015). This insight invites us to consider not the self but
the self/other relation as a central unit for fantasy and creativity. And this
shift in perspective (pun intended) is expressed in much more clear terms
in the last century both within (e.g., George Herbert Mead’s symbolic

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 184 V. P. GL AVEANU

(
interactionism) and outside psychology (e.g., Mikhail Bakhtin’s dialo-
gism).
My main critique of old conceptions of fantasy, for as much as I under-
stand them, is that they invite us to imagine, as Cornejo very nicely put it,
“a psychology with soul” but not necessarily a “psychology with others.”
Goethe and, further back, Nicholas of Cusa, started from the individual
because their reflections engage mainly with the question of the produc-
tion of knowledge through experience, so central for centuries past and
still important to this day. Using contemporary sociocultural theory to
socialize even further their conception would, I believe, lead to a much
more productive dialogue between past and present. Many meanings
have been lost or transformed in our understanding of fantasy, as Cornejo

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notes, but some things might have changed for the better. One of the
main modern-day incarnations of fantasy, creativity, can be taken as an

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example. Fantasy directs our attention to psychological processes; creativ-
ity reunites these processes with interpersonal and material forms of

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action. In doing so, it can even help us transcend many of the historical
dichotomies that scholars like Goethe struggled with.

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Cornejo’s lead chapter often refers back to such polarities (Goethe

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himself was guided by the principle of polarity, including in his theory of
color; see Goethe, 1810/1998). On the whole, if on one side we have rea-

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son, logic, intellect, and scientific measurement, on the other (the “forgot-

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ten” side) we find empathy, physiognomic properties, sensibility,

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intuition, fantasy, aesthetics, poetic imagination, and so on. Creating
sharp distinctions between these two “poles” quickly becomes problem-

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atic, and this is something Goethe argued against. He proposed the union
of opposites within intuitive and poetic forms of understanding the world.
What we need is to place this union in the intersubjective space created by
self and other and to study dichotomies in (inter)action; this, if nothing
else, is the present-day lesson of creativity.

Toward a Critical Cultural Psychology

I began this commentary by raising three questions that seem essential

to me in relation to the arguments put forward by Cornejo in his chapter
(see the first section). I would like to end with a fourth, more general one,
that relates to the discipline of cultural psychology and its future. Cornejo
eloquently makes the point that we should pay closer attention to the past,
including what seems to be a distant and forgotten past. In his words,

the fate of fantasy in psychology is a fractal reflection of the fate of the

whole dimension of internal experience: abandonment or transmutation.

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 From Fantasy and Imagination to Creativity 185

The challenge for cultural psychology is to recover the forgotten dimen-

sions of the human being.

This is the moral that such a cultural history of fantasy brings to bear on
our discipline as a whole. I wholeheartedly agree with this type of exercise
and welcome the new light it sheds on past and present debates about
fantasy and reason, rationalism and empiricism, materialism and ideal-
ism; they are, in many ways, at the core of cultural psychology as a reflec-
tive discipline. The question is though, where do we go from here?
Clearly, and I am certain this is not Cornejo’s intention, we cannot go
back. The definition of fantasy Goethe or Vico used can and should be
considered a valuable reference point but they grew out of a world
(including a world of ideas) that is considerably different from the one we

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inhabit today. It is rather on this world, of today, that we might decide to

F
focus, and particularly its (dis)continuity with conceptual histories of a
much longer duration. But what would this focus help us achieve in prac-

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tical terms? Gergen (1973) some time ago made the very pertinent point
that social psychology is history, a form of history in the making. This res-

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onates with Cornejo’s observation that, “from a wider point of view, mod-
ern psychology looks more like another chapter of the large book of the

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human studies; neither the first one, nor the last.” It is because there are

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always more/new chapters to come that we have a collective responsibility,

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as psychologists, for how they are written. In this sense, looking toward
the past is a scholarly practice with great future-making potential.

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Is it enough to point, as cultural psychologists, to the fact that contem-

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porary psychological science constructs reality in ways that skew our
understanding of what it means to be human (in this case, by downplay-
ing the role of fantasy in our life) and reduce our possibilities of being/act-
ing in the world? Or should we go further? We can, in our writing and
research, look at things differently, and we often do. But does this make a
real difference for the lives of those we study, observe, or consider co-par-
ticipants in our work? Achieving such difference requires a critical cultural
psychology, one that moves comfortably from construction to deconstruc-
tion and action. It is a kind of psychology that is both “with soul” and
“with others”; much more than this, it is also a “psychology for others.”

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to express my deep gratitude to Constance de Saint-Laurent

for discussions that shaped the ideas presented in this chapter. Also my
gratitude goes to the participants at the 3rd Annual Niels Bohr lecture at
Aalborg University for their feedback and many constructive comments.

The Psychology of Imagination : History, Theory and New Research Horizons, edited by Brady Wagoner, et al., Information
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