A Review of the book,  No Rootless Flower: An Ecology of Creativity

by Frank Barron

Hampton Press, 1995

by Jane Piirto

This review appeared in the Creativity Research Journal in 1997.

There I was, reading my eyes out, with all of New York City beneath me in my hotel overlooking Broadway during the 1996 AERA conference. I should be out and about! I should be at the social gathering of my SIG! But no, I had just bought Frank Barron’s magnum opus, No Rootless Flower: An Ecology of Creativity at the Hampton Press booth in the display area and I was busily devouring it. I had not been engulfed in a book recently, and like most writers, I need my book fix just to remain sane. The social life would have to wait.

I had read most of Barron while doing research for books and articles on creativity, and as a writer, I had taken great interest in his work at the Institute for Personality Assessment and Research at the University of California, Berkeley. Now he had collected many of his pieces in this book, and had added autobiography. I was hooked. Who was this giant in the field of creativity research? Where did he come from? What made him the way he was? My favorite book of his came out in 1968; it was called Creativity and Personal Freedom, and in it Barron had floated his theory that high level creators are generally pacifist. This brought to my mind poets such as Allan Ginsberg, Robert Bly, and Denise Levertov, who had led the anti-war movement during the Vietnam War. In No Rootless Flower, Barron postulates that creativity in the individual "mitigates aggression . . . through the development of a refined ethical sensibility" (p. 18) but in the species creativity makes aggressiveness more tempting. He calls for the human collective to use its creativity (thereby the "ecology" of the subtitle) to inhibit aggression: "Can man’s intelligence and creativity--his consciousness, indeed--take the giant step necessary to keep up with his technology?" Barron’s interest in nuclear disarmament after World War II is the autobiographical fuel for this statement.

That the autobiographical is relevant to scholarly and empirical work is a postmodern idea, a reaction against the scientism of the modernists, who insisted that the work sprang full-blown and objective, without any history on the part of the person doing the work. That is why this book may be viewed by some as such a surprise, for Barron himself was trained as a modernist, a psychologist whose charge was to make psychology a true science, a psychologist who designed many assessment measures and experiments and who always quantified before he qualified. Many might know Barron for the empirical studies he conducted and for the instruments he developed.

Yet throughout Barron’s work there has always been a thread that is the philosopher/theologian, and indeed, he said in one essay that creativity research has reopened "some of the doors that were closed to psychology when it self-consciously separated itself from philosophy" (Barron, 1975, p. 146). Throughout his work there has always been the wounded Catholic struggling to make theological sense of the self, of consciousness, and of the "life . . . between the structures of intellect" (p. 52). When I read the following statement that rainy New York night, I laughed aloud, for I had just published a poetry chapbook with the title poem that said exactly this: "Poetic creation is sensitive precisely to the interstices of experience" (p. 52). My book is called Between the Memory and the Experience, and the poem goes like this:

BETWEEN THE MEMORY AND THE EXPERIENCE   (click to see more poems by Jane Piirto)

between the memory and the experience
between the photograph and the periphery
with intuitive and parsed phrases
for salvation, doubt and irony
run over by pale images become sharp
twisting and turning in synapse of wire
sad more than joyful

the years of the fog of life
brooded upon as if the magi of words
could clarify meaning like heat to butter.
what has it meant?
truth told a lie
by telling like a hurricane
by the process itself a swirl
wind gathering water to make waves

deep within the basin of oceanic consciousness
between the memory and the experience
"This novel is about the divorce," I tell him
offering the code from a cardboard box in my red trunk
"And this is about being a mother."

the blue folder of unpublished truth
no one would know unless I wrote

©Jane Piirto 1996

What common feeling I had at that moment, reading that line. I felt understood. What Barron called "The Solitariness of Self and Its Mitigation Through Creative Imagination" (Barron, 1975), his essay on the solipsistic self being "saved" through creative imagination, was reaffirmed. I read on.

The whole second section of this book is autobiography. Barron grew up in a coal town in Pennsylvania; born in 1922, he led an Irish Catholic boyhood attending parochial schools. His mother was rumored to have the "second sight," though she never admitted it to her children. His father was a "plumber, roofer, mason, iron-worker, and electrician, and finally builder of whole houses" (p. 112) which Barron likened to Jung’s building of his tower. A child of the Depression, Barron was taught about the nobility of the working class; his family called the strike of 1902 the most creative moment of the labor movement. The "moral force" that was Franklin Delano Roosevelt was a shining symbolic metaphor for Barron and his neighbors, for Roosevelt was slugger, philosopher, magician, and "brave poet, with that jaunty jib to his sail in a wheelchair!" (p. 114).

He spent his preparatory school years with the Sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, and praised their discipline and the requirement of four years of Latin. In his youthful reading habits, Barron fits the profile of the writer that I have discerned (Piirto, 1992), with his library reading of uncritical and far-reaching breadth. One of the themes in the lives of creative writers is childhood reading that is broad, compulsive, and uncritical. My students do biographical studies. I often tell them, "Find me a creative writer who didn’t read a lot as a child." Few have. Perhaps Barron’s interest in creative writers comes from his own impulses. I am not aware of any published poetry or fiction by Barron, but his reading is certainly wide. Another prominent psychologist also had this childhood pattern; that was B.F. Skinner (Piirto, 1995), who spent his childhood tinkering and reading, and who wanted to be a novelist but ended up being a behavioral psychologist. Perhaps this voracious reading is also part of the childhoods of psychologists? Here is Barron on his childhood reading.

Thus did I take on Mark Twain and H.G. Wells almost completely, and became a fan of Mark Tidd and Poppy Ott and Tom Swift and Don Sturdy and some semimystical character called The Night Wind. Then too, I had for free, a bonus granted to the "paper boys" by Sharpe’s newsstand, all the pulp magazines, with their covers torn off, when they failed to sell in their given month: Amazing Stories, Astounding Stories, Wonder Stories, The Shadow, Doc Savage. Then when I got to be 15 I found myself engrossed with Booth Tarkington (Seventeen) and Rafael Sabatini (The Sea Wolf) and a host of other adventure stories. What luck I had, to be young without a TV! Reading thus gave a mental breadth to my world, a secret freedom, for it unbound me from my time and place. My conversations could be with whom I chose, and my adventures too, and all of them could be unwritten and unread and even unseen and unheard. What greater freedom is there? Books exercised me and fed me, they were the nutriment of my imagination, they created for me a veritable ecological niche, in places far off, peopled by heroes and heroines who would never been seen in a wretched little town of penniless coal miners. (p. 118)

Barron went to college at the age of 16 with the Christian Brothers at LaSalle College, and received a classical education with an internship in a mental institution between his junior and senior years that set him on the path to become a psychologist. His senior thesis led him to research the subliminal, and it was titled "The Art of Hypnosis." He was accepted to graduate school at the University of Minnesota where he met "a Buddhist in the guise of a midwestern American university department chairman," Professor Richard M. Elliott (p. 148). "Theological jousts" with his atheist fellow students mixed with the heady atmosphere of experimental psychology and psychological theory as the psychologists were bent on "making a science of psychology by finding the right operational definitions" (p. 150).

Barron left Minnesota to join the military as an enlisted man. He volunteered for the cadet program as a combat crew member in the Air Corps. He was transferred to medic school and went to the Belgian Ardennes and Normandy during the Rhineland campaign. He worked with shell shock victims assisting a psychiatrist: "I learned to hate the psychiatrist, and I was not alone" (p. 158). Witnessing the application of truth serum, crude LSD, and lobotomies, as well as electrical shock treatments inured him to the horrors of the psychoses related to battle. After V-E day he assisted on a research team that conducted interviews comparing the shell shocked with those who didn’t show signs of combat psychosis. He called the latter "self-possessed," not obsessed with good and evil but with doing the job and getting home. Barron said, "I found the war hard going, in a spiritual sense. I had toughened myself to it and did as a soldier must" (p. 160).

After V-J day, he stayed in Europe to write the history of his unit and to edit the unit’s newspaper. As a former school newspaper and yearbook editor, Barron welcomed the opportunity. His first editorial was about U.S. atomic policy, and he called for the publication of all information about the making of atomic weapons, to be done at an multi-nation gathering for the purpose of creating a world government. The chaplain collected all the issues of the newspaper in order to save Barron from charges of treason and subversion. This led Barron to apply to a seminar at Cambridge on moral science and to a seminar at Biarritz on genetics. He got accepted into both and began his re-entry to the academic world. Barron said:

That arbitrarily suppressed editorial was the beginning of many efforts I was to make over the years to sound the alarm and to help; in the efforts of many people, atomic scientists included, to delineate the forces at work in the new and dangerous situation of the world. I was to work the way a psychologist could, by doing research, publishing it, teaching seminars, giving talks here and there (including one at Los Alamos at the invitation of the Fellows). (P. 166)

Among the research he conducted was the co-development of the Inventory of Personal Philosophy with a scale of attitudes about disarmament; they administered it to an international population. He taught a seminar at Harvard on nuclear disarmament in the early 1960s.

He went back to Minnesota but transferred to California and completed his Ph.D. at Berkeley, where "I persisted in being my own kind of psychologist," with a group of intellectual and spiritual leaders he called "a mixed Pantheon":

Galton and Pavlov and Fechner; William James, Myers and Barlett; Yeats and Jung and Freud; Bergson and Binet and Piaget; and, going back a bit in time, Dante and Aristotle-Augustine-Aquinas, with Virgil and Ovid and Catullus guarding the door. An irregular, ill-sorted band. The spiritual crew of Voyager III, I like to think. (p. 171)

By 1950 the first round of IPARites as they called themselves had assembled at Berkeley; Gordon Tierney, Richard Crutchfield, Ronald Taft, Donald MacKinnon, Harrison Gough, Paul Dempsey, Robert Harris, Erik Erikson and Nevitt Sanford. The Institute of Personality Assessment and Research was founded in 1949. MacKinnon (1975) said its purpose was "thinking about and investigating higher things" (p. 61). Funded at first by the Rockefeller Foundation, the psychologists were charged to develop assessment instruments and techniques that would uncover "(1) What are the characteristics of persons who are highly effective in their personal lives and professional careers? And (2) How are such effectively functioning persons produced in our society?" (MacKinnon, 1975, p. 61). Influenced by the personology of Henry Murray and Gordon Allport, fresh from their service in the Office of Strategic Services in World War II, the staff began their work with graduate students. Under pressure to sign loyalty oaths, they and their graduate student subjects began to look deep within. Erikson, Sanford, and Barron didn’t sign and had to resign. Barron became a guest lecturer at Bryn Mawr College where he began to develop the Independence of Judgment Scale. He returned to Berkeley after one year.

In 1956, after Barron had spent some time as a visiting professor at Harvard, where he found he missed California, he wrote a grant to the Carnegie Corporation that was funded. The Berkeley IPAR group began the research for which they were to become known, the research on the effective personality, later to be known as the creative personality. Other people joined the group: Ravenna Helson, who did research on mathematicians and women creators; Wallace Hall, Kenneth Craik, and Gerald Mendelsohn. Barron studied writers and artists. He called IPAR "an open-ended adventure in the science and art of psychology" (p. 183) and the odd thing is that there has never been an IPAR book, and people interested in the research there must go to the individually published books and papers of those who researched there. Barron said, "We kept our individual projects to ourselves and never really analyzed data across the board for all our thousands of subjects" (p. 183).

Barron left IPAR in the 1970s to become a professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He has been married twice and has three children. His wife designed the cover for the book and his son and daughter critiqued it in drafts. He is now Professor Emeritus. His many awards include a Guggenheim fellowship, an honorary Doctor of Science degree from LaSalle University, and the 1995 Rudolph Arnheim Award from the American Psychological Association.

This autobiographical section literally forms the heart of the book, a heart surrounded by muscle tissue made up of conjecture and surmising as well as by findings of studies conducted on personality characteristics of creative youth and adults. Part I of the book contains revisions and consolidations of key papers that Barron has published or spoken during the years. This section sets out his premises for the ecology and include discussions of consciousness, design, genesis, chaos, collaboration, and transcendence. Part II, as summarized above, sets out to illustrate these through Barron’s own life story. Barron said, "My personal life . . . is simply one useful example of a life well known to the author. And, in spite of lots of psychoanalysis, I found surprises as I tried to write this" (p. 316).

As a professor of psychobiography, he has conducted many seminars on interesting and creative people including John Butler Yeats, King Lear, and William Carlos Williams. These seminars are described in the book and provide touchstones for other teachers of creativity courses. Part III provides evidence that the personal life should be the data source for studies of creativity. The Afterword is original material, summarizing Barron’s evidence that an ecology of creativity should take a systems approach to study the formation of the origins of novelty. Taking an evolutionary approach to the development of contemporary consciousness, Barron cites C.S. Peirce, Samuel Butler, George T.L. Lund to describe his theory of the necessity for replicative and accretive growth. William James, who also is honored with the opening quote in the book, is marshalled, along with Peirce and Teilhard de Chardin to argue for a pragmatic, spiritual, and theological approach to creativity. The creative person is called a "transformed transformer," whose creativity is "the ability and propensity (or will) to bring something new into existence. Like the divine Creator pictured in Genesis, the human creator wills and acts" (p. 313). Thus the creative person is motivated to reshape what already is, transforming form. This transformation, then, is psychically directed through the person’s spiritual quest, and through the person’s natural proclivity for complexity. Barron’s long-time interest in uncovering the preference for complexity by using such instruments as the Barron-Welsh Art Scale and the Complexity of Outlook Scale in the Inventory of Personal Philosophy, is illustrated with findings from his studies. Simply put, those who are more creative like things (including their personal lives) messy, disordered, ambiguous, and asymmetric. Those who are less creative like things neat, orderly, clear, and even.

Barron’s work of a lifetime has significantly contributed to our understanding of creativity; he has always acted with integrity and curiosity. This book begins with a quote from his favorite author, the Irish poet, playwright, and, along with Carl Jung, a devoté and scholar of the occult and alchemical, William Butler Yeats, whom Barron calls " a wild card psychologist " (p. 274). Barron pointed out that many of the leading figures in the formation of the discipline of psychology were interested in the remote places within the mind: "the subliminal, trance states, dreams . . . prophecy . . . and creativity, that superordinate concern that keeps getting thrown out of psychology but won’t go away" (p. 275). Yeats should not be disqualified as a psychologist just because he is a poet, Barron said, and he quoted Yeats thus:

A poet is by the very nature of things a man who lives with entire sincerity, or rather the better his poetry the more sincere his life; his life is an experiment in living, and those that come after have a right to know it . . . we should understand that his poetry is no rootless flower.

The title of this book, No Rootless Flower, taken from this quotation, points to Barron’s own journey as a psychologist. The converse is true as well. As a well-published poet, I am here to assert that Barron should not be thrown out of the discipline of poetry just because he is a psychologist. Perhaps we could change the word "poetry" above, to the word "psychology" and say that Barron’s psychology is also "no rootless flower"; it was born and bred and formed through his own life history; his interests and his achievements have also been rooted in his autobiography. I read my eyes out when I bought this book and I know I will go back to it for enlightenment and insight into my own journey as a writer and as a researcher into creativity (Piirto, in preparation). Bravo, Francis Xavier Barron!

References

Barron, F. (1968). Creativity and personal freedom. New York: Van Nostrand.

Barron, F. (1975). The solitariness of self and its mitigation through creative imagination. In I.A. Taylor & J.W. Getzels (Eds.). Perspectives in creativity (pp. 146-156). Chicago, IL: Aldine Publishing Company.

MacKinnon, D. W. (1975). IPAR’s contribution to the conceptualization and study of creativity. In I.A. Taylor & J.W. Getzels (Eds.). Perspectives in creativity (pp. 60-89). Chicago, IL: Aldine Publishing Company

Piirto, J. (1992). Understanding those who create. Dayton, OH: Ohio Psychology Press.

Piirto, J. (1995). Review of BF. Skinner: A Life, by D. Bjork. Gifted Child Quarterly 39, 4, pp. 218-219.

Piirto, J. (1996). Between the memory and the experience. Ashland, OH: Sisu Press.

Piirto, J. (In preparation). Understanding creative writers. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press.