Deepening understanding of human creativity

Highly creative people deliberately challenge, shake, destabilize, frustrate and disintegrate themselves in order to reassemble the parts better. They know how to set aside control when they need to. To this end they cultivate being both masculine and feminine, logical and emotional, rational and idealistic, excitable and fair-minded, and they move back and forth continuously between such poles. They score both lower and higher than the average person on several scales of clinical personality tests, coming out as slightly more "neurotic'" or "psychotic" on measures of anxiety, depression, schizophrenia and deviance. At the same time, however, the also get high scores for stability and "ego-strength", the power to rally from setback and generally cope with adversity.