Neyla Nachi Bouattour

Creating from the Unconscious Neyla Nachi Bouattour

Creative people from different fields have used a variety of techniques to explore unconscious process. Still, there is no widely recognized model for systematically provoking and making effective use of the unconscious in creative work. Additionally, only a small number of teachers, coaches, or therapists are familiar with the few paradigms that do exist. Creating from the Unconscious describes the development of one approach taken to hopefully help advance discussion in the field.

Meanwhile, along the lines of their diverse interests, people from different parts of the world, using different approaches to creativity, have begun to consult at an expanding list of companies, schools, boardrooms, and institutes. Their design-oriented programs (in the widest sense of the word), continue to experiment with techniques sometimes similar to ones noted in this book, each, respectively, in the service of helping move forward the work of people engaged in creativity and innovation activities.

Creating From the Unconscious is, overall, a memoir profiling the development of one such a paradigm, one which used depth psychology techniques to help enhance creative expression. In evolving possible courses of action, a specific project, (a screenplay adaptation of Robert Browning's The Ring and the Book), was used as a "stalking horse," a way to test theorized approaches. Findings from the theoretical and applied activities were integrated in service of developing and later hosting a sequence of creativity workshops.

All of these vectors are profiled in Creating from the Unconscious: development of the project concept is reviewed extensively; its varied outcomes are discussed in detail; the evolving screenplay adaptation is highlighted along the way (available in a companion Mead-Hill edition).

The overall intent of this and other initiatives exploring this domain is to help formulate creativity and innovation models for further development, and review and make more widely available current training methodologies.

(Entirely incidental to the creativity goals pursued in completing the above, two unintended aspects of this project were found to be of specific value: application of several aspects of the work were associated with significant positive therapeutic outcome in the medical setting; important adjuncts, perhaps best termed psycho-spiritual in nature, were experienced by numerous project participants. Thus, the activities helped serve a much wider, if entirely unexpected and somewhat abstract end: a small addition to the timeless search for how to bring inner meaning to things tended outwardly in everyday life.)

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