No
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way exists to explain how to form a good idea. You think about a problem until you are tired, forget it, maybe sleep on it, and then
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! When you"re not thinking about it, suddenly the answer arrives as a gift from the gods.
Of course, all ideas don"t occur like that but so many do, particularly the most important ones. They burst into the mind, glowing with the heat of
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. How they do it is a
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, but they must come from somewhere. Let"s assume they come from the "
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". This is reasonable, for psychologists use this term to describe
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processes, which are unknown to the
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Creative thought depends on what was unknown becoming known.
All of us have
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this sudden arrival of new idea, but it is easiest to examine it in the great creative
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. One can draw examples from genius in any field. All truly creative activities depend in some degree on these
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from the unconscious, and the more highly
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the person, the shaper and more
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the signals become.
In the example of Richard Wagner
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the opening to "Rhinegold", the conscious mind at the moment of creation knew something of the actual processes by which the
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was found.
As a
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, Henri Poincare"s finding of the Fuchsian functions make us see the conscious mind
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the new combinations being formed in the unconscious, while the Wagner story shows the sudden
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of a new concept into consciousness.
Wagner"s and Poincare"s experiences are
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of countless others in every field of culture. The unconscious is certainly the source of
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activity. But in creative thought the unconscious is responsible for the production of new organized forms from relatively
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elements.