Michail Pokrass (Samara, Russia)
Creativity or Desease
- we haven't seen another alterna-tive to a suffering.
Working out a programme of setting free the teenager's
creative initiative we took into account the following simple premises.
1. Firstly, a man is not only a "Homo sapiens",
that is a thinking human being, his specific feature is that he is a "Homo
moralis" or a moral human being.
2. Life, health and desease, vitality of
the organism -the whole human energy is in a constant bondage with unreali-zed
moral impulses or a moral feeling.
3. A moral feeling is an intermediary between
the world of feelings and the values of the other person, the human so-ciety
and the interior regulation and energy of a particular person.
4. A man moulds his personality under the
influence of moral stereotypes, really existing in culture and in his
soci-al environement, and very often they are not realized and ref-lected
thoroughly in contemporary social consciousness. These
stereotypes are often hostile to a contemporary man and expel any kind
of creativity. In our report we tried to show
the essence and the cha-racter of influence that the most important of
these stereoty-pes produce on both a child's and an adult's existence
and creative activity, for exemple: "the absence of the cult of initiative
in a society", "the everlasting damnation of a wo-men's initiative", "men's
morality", "the worship of a suffe-ring", "the fear of a human egoizm",
"the opposition of "spi-rit" to body"... (5).
5. Unrealized morals and manners, feelings,
tastes, ulte-rior people's likings influence the moulding of a child's
per-sonality more than all their words, slogans and obvious deeds. We
"infect" our children with what we have ourselves: the hap-py ones - with
happiness, the unhappy ones, we forcibly hamper our children's psycological
moral development, hand them down our misfortune as a habit.
6. The moulding of a personality goes on
in a process of active assimilation by a person of this or that culture.
The way a man shapes himself depends on how free his inner initiative
is. The man whose initiave is depressed can forever be nobody else but
an imitator of a man (8).
7. Imitation is a necessary means of active
assimilation by a person of a human culture. Being unrealized and irrespon-sible,
imitation can be the reason and the display of a halt in moral and psycologycal
developement (5,8).
The definite difference between
psycologycal ages of free developement and analogous "ages of imitation"
as a halt of this developement - infantilism - is being reported in our
work. Alongside with this, criteria of diagnostics and self-diagnostics
of the moral-psycologycal age and the age of a halt in moral and psycologycal
development are being set out (3,4,5).
8. Together with the choice of developement
or imitatoin the man also chooses one of the two main variants of shaping
consciousness as "a complex of socially important activi-tes" (7). One
of them works as an instrument of self-realizati-on, which favours the
man's insertion in a social environment. The other only imitates its main
intermediary function of a misinterpreted social interest,it works as
an instrument of a man's forcible submission to a "hostile", ignoring
his inte-rests, society, as an instrument to restrain everything indi-vidual,
spontanious and creative (5,7,8).
9. The way a man appropriates his parents'
characteris-tics, their interaction or ignoring each other opposition
inf-luences the style of all the man's choices, on his attitude towards
his personal characteristics and to the whole world.The parents mutual
understanding becomes the basis to friendly relashionships of both the
conscious and the unconscious, of all person's characteristic features:
maternal, paternal, uni-versal and most individual, new and old ones.
It becomes that very first training which forever provides a creative
way of life, open to the experience, initiative and everything new ( ).
The abovestated understanding of the problem determines
the directions of psychotherapeutic activities (4,5,6,7) and a spe-cial
interest to the organization of the work with macro- and microsocial environment
of a teenager: teachers, parents, mo-ral and psycologocal popularization,
addressed to the society, the work in the teenagers' groups. But
the first task is turned to be the task to find and train a psychotherapeutic
specialist, who is in love with the world, with himself and with the other
person, that is who is living creatively. The programme of training such
speci-alists which was worked out by me has been carried out in Kui-byshev
(now Samara) Region since 1985. The time is happy
and full of paradoxes. Everything has been mixed up. We choose moral bases
which are to determine our life and the life of the following generations.
What shall we save? What shall we change?...
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