The creative artist’s drive to create often parallels the experience of gestation and birth, regardless of the gender of the artist. From the first “glimmer in the eye” to the conception of a specific work, the artist embarks on a process that continues to develop and grow even in the absence of conscious attention...I am continually amazed at the work of the unconscious in the minds of creative artists. The capacity to hold many details in the conscious, wakeful mind may seem limited; the unconscious is capable of holding far more.

Oh, the energy we use in this society to suppress what we perceive to be our undesirable traits — our negativity, judgmental nature, and our other secret peculiarities and struggles. Often we do not even allow our shadow side into our own consciousness but others can often see it. People who passionately irk us are usually mirroring our own shadows back to us, though ours may surface with a different rendition that we do not recognize. In this exercise we not only deny our humanity but we also disable a potent creativity feature — sublimation.

John Beebe, MD:  "Somehow in The Wizard of Oz, the pretensions of patriarchy are exposed; it allows the feminine in the form of that little girl to come forward and the good to assert the power of the feminine... Film works by having the consciousness of someone interact with the unconscious presentations of the characters so that something very odd happens – a kind of dialogue takes place between conscious and unconscious.  And that’s what Jung means by active imagination as opposed to passive imagination."

Transcript of podcast interview with Stephen A. Diamond, PhD, a licensed clinical and forensic psychologist who sees many creative individuals, including members of the Writers Guild and the Screen Actors Guild. He is the author of the book, "Anger, Madness and the Daimonic: The Psychological Genesis of Violence, Evil and Creativity."

Director Mike Nichols recognizes the value for creative expression of our unconscious depths. “In making movies,” he said, “time is so short — because it is so expensive — that we tend to neglect the place from which the best ideas come, namely that part of ourselves that dreams."

While the field of gifted education has relied on educational, cognitive, counseling, behavioral, developmental, and social psychology, the domain of depth psychology offers special insights into giftedness, especially with regard to individuation. Depth psychology offers a way of understanding that is physical, psychological, and spiritual.

By Phoebe Hoban [NY Times] - Writers who suffer in solitude also have a well-known antidote: the artists' colony. But for those tortured souls whose highest-priority creative opus is not so much their writing as themselves, the Lucy Daniels Foundation here has created a different kind of refuge. A handful of local writers, who were deemed both professionally successful and neurotic but treatable, were chosen to participate in a program that provides subsidized psychoanalysis for an unlimited time. It is a sort of writers' colony for the mind.

Creating metaphors and images that may be coded in ways the makers don't even realize, permits the emotion to be changed, to be released through a safe and therapeutic means. The "talking therapy" is often not as effective for people in the arts as is an opportunity to abstractly express themselves in the coded way that the arts allow.

Interview with Dr. Stephen Diamond. "Creativity," he states, "is one of humankind's healthiest inclinations, one of our greatest attributes."