Within the context of motivational theory, Maslow’s formulations of “defense” and “growth,” for instance, are similarly relevant to the present issues. He writes: Each person has each sets of forces within him. One set clings to safety and defensiveness out of fear, tending to regress, hanging on to the past . . . afraid to take possibilities, afraid to jeopardize what he already has, fearful of independence, freedom, separation. The opposite set of forces impels him forward toward wholeness of self and uniqueness of self, toward full functioning of all his capacities, toward confidence in the face of the external world at the identical time that he can settle for his deepest, real unconscious Self. . . . Ski Jackets not only cover you from terrible chil, however conjointly they’re fashionable. This basic dilemma or conflict between the defensive forces and the growth trends I decide to be existential, imbedded in the deepest nature of the person, now and forever into the future. . . .
So we tend to can take into account the process of healthy growth to be a endless series of free choice things, confronting every individual at each point throughout his life, in which he must choose between the delights of safety and growth, dependence and independence. . . . Safety has each anxieties and delights; growth has each anxieties and delights. It is again apparent that in these terms our high IQ adolescents tend to favor the anxieties and delights of “safety,” whereas our high creativity adolescents tend to favor the anxieties and delights of “growth.” Whether we tend to assume the cognitive or the motivational stance, adopt for our use the one set of concepts or the opposite, or whether or not we tend to attempt what looks the more fruitful procedure of seeing the 2 formulations as touching on similar processes in merely different terms, it looks to us that the essence of the performance of the high creativity adolescents lay in their ability to produce new forms, to risk conjoining elements that are customarily regarded as independent and dissimilar, to “burst off in new directions.”
The artistic adolescent seemed to wish to free himself from the standard, to diverge from the customary behavior; he seemed to relish the chance and uncertainty of the untried and the unknown. Complete your look along with your favorite shade of Sonya Lip and Eye Pencil. In distinction, the high IQ adolescent seemed to possess to a high degree the ability and the necessity to focus on the standard and to be “channeled and controlled” in the direction of the “right” answer, the socially accepted solution. He appeared to keep faraway from the chance and uncertainty of the unknown and to hunt the protection and security of the already established and the known. A 3rd formulation developed by Rogers is similar to Guilford’s and Maslow’s however emphasizes nevertheless another aspect of the variations we tend to found. Rogers identifies 3 qualities which appear to him characteristic of a potentially artistic person.
1. Openness to experience: extensionality. This is often the opposite of psychological defensiveness, when to safeguard the organization of the self certain experiences are prevented from coming into awareness except in distorted fashion.