Content uploaded by Alfonso Montuori
Author content
All content in this area was uploaded by Alfonso Montuori
Content may be subject to copyright.
http://jhp.sagepub.com
Journal of Humanistic Psychology
DOI: 10.1177/0022167802250582
2003; 43; 7 Journal of Humanistic Psychology
Alfonso Montuori
Frank Barron: A Creator On Creating
http://jhp.sagepub.com
The online version of this article can be found at:
Published by:
http://www.sagepublications.com
On behalf of:
Association for Humanistic Psychology
can be found at:Journal of Humanistic Psychology Additional services and information for
http://jhp.sagepub.com/cgi/alerts Email Alerts:
http://jhp.sagepub.com/subscriptions Subscriptions:
http://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.navReprints:
http://www.sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.navPermissions:
© 2003 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.
by Alfonso Montuori on November 10, 2007 http://jhp.sagepub.comDownloaded from
10.1177/0022167802250582 ARTICLEFrank Barron:A Creator on CreatingAlfonso Montuori
FRANK BARRON:
A CREATOR ON CREATING
ALFONSO MONTUORI first met Frank Barron in 1984. In 1991, Frank
was a member of his dissertation committee at Saybrook Institute, and
they later went on to collaborate, with the assistance of Frank’s daughter
Anthea, on the edited book Creators on Creating (Putnam, 1997).
Montuori’s research has been in the areas of creativity and innovation,
systems and complexity theories, planetary culture, organizational the-
ory, strategy and strategic thinking, and cultural epistemology. Regard-
less of the subject matter, Frank’s influence pervades his work, particu-
larly Frank’s view of creativity as a general orientation to life rather than
a special gift confined to special people in special domains. His books
include Evolutionary Competence (Gieben, 1989), From Power to Partner-
ship (coauthored with Isabella Conti) (Harper San Francisco, 1993), and
the three-volume series Social Creativity (co-edited with Ronald E.
Purser) (Hampton Press, 1999-2000). Montuori’s articles have appeared
in publications including Academy of Management Review, Human Rela-
tions, and Journal of Management Education. A member of the General
Evolution Research Group, he is book series editor of Advances in Systems
Theory, Complexity, and the Human Sciences at Hampton Press; associate
editor of World Futures: The Journal of General Evolution, and a member
of the editorial board of the Journal of Transformative Education, Tamara:
The Journal of Critical Postmodern Organization Theory, Pluriverso
(Italy), and Elites (Italy).
7
Journal of Humanistic Psychology, Vol. 43 No. 2, Spring 2003 7-23
DOI: 10.1177/0022167802250582
© 2003 Sage Publications
Frank Barron: 1922-2002
© 2003 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.
by Alfonso Montuori on November 10, 2007 http://jhp.sagepub.comDownloaded from
Some there are, and not solitaries only, who in the midst of the spectacle
of the world stand a bit aside and muse upon the passing show. They
give to its every particular their sustained present attention, thus res
-
cuing a part of the spectacle from time’s erosion. What they save may be
called eternal, for the object of their attention has been that which stays
when time and particulars have passed. We call them artists or poets if
they not only give their enduring attention to what abides through the
cycles of change, but in addition make a social communication of their
vision and create a new form in which the essence of the particulars is
conveyed so that at least one other person may be given to see what the
artist has seen.
The study of individual human lives offers to the psychologist this valu-
able possibility. Psychology, if it holds itself apart from vulgar curiosity
and from dehumanizing generalization, can be a sacred discipline de-
voted to the celebration of the human spirit.
Barron (1995, p. 79)
Frank Barron, the man who wrote these words, might well have
been describing himself in the above passages. For him, the study
of human lives was indeed both an art and a science and a “sacred
discipline devoted to the celebration of the human spirit” (p. 79).
And Frank was decidedly not someone who would use the word
“sacred” lightly.
As Frank’s friend and student, I have felt compelled to write
something about him and for a very specific reason. Clearly, I want
to honor a man who was my teacher, mentor, and friend. Frank was
such a complex, multidimensional, multifaceted figure that it was
difficult to get an understanding of the whole person—or, rather,
the whole person was there all the time, every time I was with him.
What was less clear was where that whole person had been, what
he had done, and who his friends were, as I discovered trying to put
together a Festschrift for him and finding myself calling, in no spe-
cific order, Hans Eysenck, Howard Gardner, Timothy Leary,
Michael Murphy, Stanley Krippner, Teresa Amabile, Mike Arons,
Harrison Gough, Richard Baker-Roshi, Claudio Naranjo, and
many of his other “unusual associates” (Montuori, 1995). Frank
would never boast about his work or his influence. In fact, I remem-
ber having several conversations with him over the years only to
find out later that he had spent years researching the topics in
question and had published remarkable studies about them.
That’s one of the many things that was so unusual about him. He
8 Frank Barron: A Creator on Creating
© 2003 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.
by Alfonso Montuori on November 10, 2007 http://jhp.sagepub.comDownloaded from
never approached you as “the expert” but was always listening
with what seemed to be, in that overused but powerful term, a
“beginner’s mind,” open to possibilities, eager to really hear what
you had to say, explore the questions you were exploring, and dia-
logue about them. And this was not some kind of manipulative fake
modesty on his part but rather his way of engaging a subject mat-
ter, and his interlocutor, anew and not getting stuck in his own
findings and categorizations in the process.
In Frank’s obituary in The New York Times, Harrison Gough,
emeritus professor at UC Berkeley and a fellow member of the
Institute for Personality Assessment and Research, put it this way:
He worked in a way that might seem, if you hadn’t followed it for
very long, to be casual and without any particular focus. But after a
few years it became clear that there was an inner compass that
guided him and continued to guide him for all of his life, really. (The
New York Times, 2002, p. 29)
The casual approach and seeming lack of focus reflect Frank’s per-
sonality, both singularly free of academic ego and posturing and
drawn to enormous transdisciplinary complexity that could not
easily be reduced to a single, easily expressed academic project. In
these pages, I want to take the opportunity to remind the reader of
both the great and fascinating diffusion found in Frank’s work and
the vital integration that manifested both in his life and in his
work. Frank never pushed his work or his enormous wisdom and
erudition on anyone, and in these days of hype and sound bytes and
publicists, this is surely a rare quality.
I am particularly happy to bring Frank’s work once more to the
attention of readers of the Journal of Humanistic Psychology
because Frank identified himself clearly as a humanistic psycholo-
gist (although not in any exclusive sense, I should hasten to add)
and was actually president of APA Division 32 from 1989 to 1990.
Frank was a founding board member of the Esalen Institute, and
through his relationship with Rollo May, Michael Murphy, Claudio
Naranjo, George Brown, Gregory Bateson, Richard Baker-Roshi,
Ralph Metzner, Stanley Krippner, and others too numerous to
mention was part of a group associated with much of humanistic
psychology’s intellectual creativity on the West Coast.
I would like to invite humanistic psychologists to revisit Frank’s
work, and I hope these pages will serve as a way to renew interest
Alfonso Montuori 9
© 2003 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.
by Alfonso Montuori on November 10, 2007 http://jhp.sagepub.comDownloaded from
in his tremendous contribution not just to the psychology of cre-
ativity but also to the understanding of human personality. One of
the particularly interesting characteristics of Frank’s work, and of
Frank Barron the man, was the extraordinary way in which it com-
bined elements from diverse disciplines, perspectives, and tradi-
tions. This kind of eclecticism rubbed purists of all stripes the
wrong way. “How could Frank Barron be president of Division 32?”
someone asked me once. “His research is psychometric!” A true
individual and individualist, Frank did not let himself and his cre-
ativity get caged in by categories that would allow him to belong to
this or that group and benefit from their support, political or other-
wise. If his work was complex and multidimensional, it is because
it reflected the complexity and multidimensionality of both subject
matter and author as well as his integrity as a scholar.
EMERGENT EVOLUTION AND HOLISM
In his last major work, No Rootless Flower, Frank recalls that
while writing the autobiographical sections of the book and reflect-
ing on his life, he found that he was, in many ways, still working on
his undergraduate senior thesis at LaSalle on emergent evolution
and holism. These two terms have now become widely used buzz-
words, the subject of endless books, articles, and research projects,
but they formed a connecting thread throughout Frank’s work for
more than 60 years.
The problem of psychic creation is a special case of the problem of
novelty in all of nature. By what process do new forms come into
being? The specifications of the conditions under which novelty
appears in human psychical functioning is the task to which the psy-
chology of creativity addresses itself. In doing so, it links itself to the
general scientific enterprise of describing the evolution of forms in
the natural world. (Barron, 1995, p. 299)
We have much to learn from Frank’s exploration on this subject
for many different reasons. Frank’s findings are crucial in provid-
ing us with the human dimensions of creativity, complexity, sim-
plicity, order, disorder. But we must also take into account not so
much his methodologies but also his larger approach, the way he
developed his inquiry.
10 Frank Barron: A Creator on Creating
© 2003 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.
by Alfonso Montuori on November 10, 2007 http://jhp.sagepub.comDownloaded from
Reading the concluding chapter of No Rootless Flower, we find
Frank contextualizing creativity in the evolution of the universe,
reflecting on necessary correspondences for a theory of creativity.
Yet after one particularly heady section that begins, appropriately
and “cosmically,” with the Big Bang, Frank concludes by gently sit-
ting us down in a pub in Dublin, where we find him nursing a
Guinness while he overhears a conversation, a fleeting, humorous,
if typically dark and edgy, exchange about Ernest Hemingway’s
recent suicide. This was one of Frank’s almost magical abilities.
He could take the most seemingly abstruse, abstract, and
cosmologically huge aspects of our existence, with discussions of
galaxies and protons, spiral into a duet between Yeats and
Wittgenstein on the inability of the human mind to grasp our ori-
gins, and then relate it, obliquely and poetically, gently but
insightfully, to this moment, right where we are sitting now.
Frank’s study of emergent evolution and holism led him to
address such key questions as the relationship between complex-
ity and simplicity, order and disorder. The mathematical and scien-
tific dimensions of complexity are now being exhaustively studied,
and complexity has indeed become somewhat of a fad, perhaps in
the same way that quantum physics was 20 years ago. But Frank’s
work focused on outlining the phenomenology and existential
implications of complexity and the characteristics of people who do
not only deal well with complexity but actually welcome it in their
lives.Frank also realized the importance of disorder in the creative
process. Whereas traditional social scientific thinking—and, in the
1950s, perhaps society itself—was obsessed with order, Frank
demonstrated that order without disorder would lead to the bland,
static homogeneity of a closed system. Creativity and self-renewal,
he argued, required embracing disorder and emerged out of the
dialogue between order and disorder and the search for a more
complex integration.
One of the key characteristics Frank Barron found in creative
individuals was that their entire approach to what are considered
antinomies, polarities, or oppositions in society is quite unusual. It
is almost as if, both in their personality and in their mental pro-
cess, creative individuals take as their point of departure both/and
rather than either/or. Let us take the example of the relationship
between creativity and madness, one that always gets much atten-
tion and has been the subject of much Hollywood interest through
Alfonso Montuori 11
© 2003 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.
by Alfonso Montuori on November 10, 2007 http://jhp.sagepub.comDownloaded from
movies such as Bird, Amadeus, and, most recently, A Beautiful
Mind. Creative individuals score higher on measures of
psychopathology, which would suggest that yes,there is a clear link
between creativity and what we might call, in popular language,
“madness.” End of story? Not at all. Creative people also score
higher on measures of psychological health. Now the situation gets
a little bit more complex. In fact, a lot more complex. Because our
natural tendency might be to say that you’re either crazy or you’re
sane, but you can’t be both. Furthermore, how can you actually be
saner than average because you’re crazier than average?
Here we find an aspect of Frank’s thinking that is truly key.
From his perspective, human beings are not static systems in equi-
librium but dynamic systems in a process of constant self-renewal
and self-reorganization. The view that one is either crazy or
healthy blinds us to the nature and effect of the relationship
between the two. To give a simple example, any system that focuses
on order at the exclusion of disorder soon becomes a rigid, homoge-
neous equilibrium system where no change is likely or even possi-
ble. What cybernetics and the systems sciences are showing us
today is that disorder is needed for a system’s self-renewal and
reorganization. Living systems create order out of chaos in the
same way that integrating new and unexpected experiences, peo-
ple, and encounters “keeps us alive,” and a steady diet of monoto-
nous sameness can be stultifying. Frank showed that creative indi-
viduals alternate order and disorder, simplicity and complexity,
sanity and craziness in an ongoing process and that a defining
characteristic of their creativity is the capacity to engage in what
Kazimier Dabrowski (1964) called “positive disintegration.” If cre-
ative persons are constantly engaged in a process of self-creation
and self-renewal, then we have to accept that along with that self-
renewal comes a breaking down of old structures and patterns.
Maslow (1971) argued that dichotomizing pathologizes, and
Frank showed that connecting creates. But this connecting is not
simple task: it is an ongoing process of navigating the edge of chaos.
If you’re not either statically, “essentially” sane (or crazy) but in a
dynamic equilibrium between the two, occasionally flopping over
on one side and occasionally on the other, then life becomes a much
more ambiguous, uncertain process—a creative process, with all
that entails. Frank was inviting us to think differently—dare I say,
creatively—about creativity and go beyond the traditional polariz-
ing ways of thinking that so block the creative process.
12 Frank Barron: A Creator on Creating
© 2003 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.
by Alfonso Montuori on November 10, 2007 http://jhp.sagepub.comDownloaded from
ECOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE
Consistent with his creative spirit of embracing oppositions,
Frank was both fiercely individualistic, committed to deeply
researching human personality and personal freedom, and con-
vinced that human personality should be studied ecologically, con-
textually. He even went as far as stating,in the title of a memorable
essay (Barron, 1995), that “All creation is collaboration” (p. 69).
Interestingly and quite appropriately given his cosmological
approach to creativity, he began this essay by suggesting an alter-
native to the Biblical myth of the single (male) Creator, with the
image of co-Creation involving both male and female.
Frank was a holist, in some sense of the word, but his interest in
creativity and his deeply ingrained, existential individualism (I
remember hearing him sing “You’ve got to walk that lonesome val-
ley, you’ve got to walk it by yourself,” one particularly surreal eve-
ning at Esalen) led him to avoid the sort of holistic, whole-rather-
than-parts thinking that came as a reaction to the parts-rather-
than-whole it critiqued. Parsonian equilibrium systems theory
had interpreted holistic approaches in a collectivistic as opposed to
individualistic way, oriented toward system maintenance of the
status quo as opposed to creativity and transformation. But it was
abundantly clear that this was not the case in Frank’s work. He
championed a holistic approach to emergent evolution. The emer-
gent evolution brought in the factor of change, discontinuity, and
creation that traditional holism was lacking. So Frank valued both
part and whole, both change and constancy, and saw the individual
as embedded in a larger ecology that he or she contributed to
(re)creating. Complexity, coupled with differentiation and integra-
tion were key for him, leading to the kind of complex holism
described by the French thinker Edgar Morin (1990), who argued
not for whole or part, but for a “unitas multiplex,” a unity in diver-
sity that recognizes difference and underlying unity. And indeed,
Frank conceived of the self (and the whole) as a unity in diversity
(Barron, 1995, p. 13).
With all this talk of holism and evolution and dynamical sys-
tems, one might wonder if reading Frank’s work might be some
daunting affair requiring an encyclopedia of science by one’s side
and having little, if anything, to do with humanistic psychology.
This is not at all the case—on the contrary. Frank was not a
reductionist at all. In fact, one of the most fascinating aspects of
Alfonso Montuori 13
© 2003 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.
by Alfonso Montuori on November 10, 2007 http://jhp.sagepub.comDownloaded from
Frank’s work is that he did read human creativity in light of, and
through, creation in nature but did not attempt to reduce human
creativity to the creativity found in natural systems. What sets
Frank apart from such biologism is that, for him, the enterprise
went both ways, and he also sought to understand principles in
nature through the psychology of creativity. The way he did this
was by exploring the necessary correspondences for a theory of cre-
ativity, the pattern that connects.
One third of No Rootless Flower consists of autobiographical
material, in keeping with Frank’s focus on the study of human
lives. These pages guide us through a narrative of part of Frank’s
life and the ecologies that sustained him during his early years.
What is so vital about these pages is not just the insights into
Frank’s life that they provide, and the elegant demonstration of
psycho-autobiography, but also the contextualizing of a life in its
larger creative ecology. In this delightful autobiographical narra-
tive, Frank seemingly sidesteps years of debate about individual
versus society, environmental determinism versus autonomy, zeit-
geist versus lone genius. It is patently obvious that the unique
emerging voice of Frank Barron developed in a set of contexts, in
creative ecologies that shaped him and were shaped by him, as we
see him developing his own unique trajectory through cycles of
integration and diffusion. Frank pays tribute to his major influ-
ences; acknowledges the effect of teachers, chance encounters, and
books; and discusses figures like Henry Murray and Richard
Elliott, with whom Frank took a course that was to change his life:
biographical psychology. An important part of this contextualizing
involves a profoundly ethical dimension because it allows Frank to
acknowledge the sources of his own work and inspiration, a quality
of humility and gratefulness that is perhaps all to often lacking
these days.
FRANK TAKES ME TO THE MOVIES
I had the privilege of spending a fair bit of time with Frank, both
socially and professionally, but I only ever took one class with him.
It was a course on human personality at the University of Califor-
nia Santa Cruz in the late 1980s. Frank was known for his unusual
and somewhat indirect teaching approach. In this particular
14 Frank Barron: A Creator on Creating
© 2003 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.
by Alfonso Montuori on November 10, 2007 http://jhp.sagepub.comDownloaded from
course, he used several movies about the lives of Freud and Jung
but also Fellini’s “8½” and Orson Wells’s “Citizen Kane.”
Frank was convinced that movies offered a remarkable opportu-
nity to study human personality and likened the experience of
watching a movie in a theater to “dreaming together.” The discus-
sions that followed these movies were enormously entertaining
and insightful. The film “8½” became a study in creativity, with
students following the travails of Marcello Mastroianni’s blocked
movie director looking for inspiration while faced with the pres-
sures of critics, producers, actors, enormous and expensive sets,
lover and wife showing up at inopportune times, and, most of all,
his own internal pressures. The way Frank presented the whole
thing was by no means art theory or criticism. Instead, he invited
us—never explicitly, as far as I remember—to think of Fellini’s
masterpiece as a dream and to interpret it in the context of our
lives. What does that dream mean to you? How does it relate to
your life? I suspect that many of us came out of the experience not
necessarily seeking a career in psychology but rather with an
expanded sense of our own creativity, to be explored and applied in
the ecologies we wanted to live in and create. Shortly after that,
Frank ran a workshop at Esalen in which the participants created
a movie based on their dreams. Once again, the participants were
swept up in an altered state where their dreams somehow became
a shared reality and joined up with other dreams and dreamers to
form a larger whole.
A CATALYST, NOT AN EMPIRE BUILDER
A former student of Frank’s, who was later to become a friend
and mentor of mine, Isabella Conti, came to Esalen during that
time to talk to us about her dissertation, which was on the subject
of Fellini’s movies. Isabella was deeply influenced by Frank but
typically had gone her own way, incorporating Frank’s thinking in
her dissertation and later in her work consulting to industry, which
drew heavily on her experience as Frank’s research assistant at
the Institute for Personality Assessment and Research. Frank was
a catalyst, not an empire builder. He did not encourage his stu-
dents to become “Barronians” following his research agenda, nor
did he enlist them to further his career by spreading the good word.
Alfonso Montuori 15
© 2003 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.
by Alfonso Montuori on November 10, 2007 http://jhp.sagepub.comDownloaded from
On the contrary, Frank encouraged his students to find their own
creative spark, cultivating ways to express their own interests and
to develop their own voice.
While putting together a Festschrift in his honor, speaking to
former students, friends, and colleagues, I came to realize that
Frank was indeed, as Baker-Roshi noted in the title of his essay for
that book, a “social alchemist” and an extremely subtle one, at that.
The way he did it was almost like Milton Erickson, the great (and
indirect) hypnotist: with a metaphor, an image, a suggestion, a
seemingly chance meeting. Many of the people I spoke to men-
tioned how Frank had somehow been a catalyst in a major project,
an important meeting, an insight, or a new direction, such as
Claudio Naranjo speaking of the “providential blessings” that
Frank brought to his life.
I know that, in my case, during my first meeting with Frank I
wasn’t even aware of his creativity research. I went to see Frank in
1984 to discuss the CIA with him because I was working on a paper
on the psychology of the intelligence community. I had heard that
Frank had twice been approached to work for the CIA in an impor-
tant research role. (He declined both times.) On hindsight, this is
not at all surprising given the connection between the Office of
Strategic Services (OSS) and psychological research, and, in fact,
some of the preliminary research on the creative person originated
in OSS research on identifying the personality characteristics of a
person capable of being dropped behind enemy lines.
My first meeting with Frank, at a small restaurant in Santa
Cruz called Zanzibar, where he told me he regularly used to have
lunch with Gregory Bateson, was delightful. I came away from it
with nothing at all to use for my paper but with a whole world of
possibilities. I realize now on hindsight that it completely turned
my attention inside out and set me on the road to creativity, theory,
research, and experience but also to a different way of approaching
inquiry. Frank’s words and images provided no immediate gratifi-
cation, no list of references or direction for my task at hand. But
they sunk in, and to this day, I find new possibilities and insights in
his words.
At the time, I was deeply interested in work on the authoritarian
personality and the psychological dimensions of prejudice, racism,
and intolerance. After visiting Frank, it became clear to me, in com-
paring the creative personality with the authoritarian personality,
that they were in fact mirror images of each other. One could see
16 Frank Barron: A Creator on Creating
© 2003 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.
by Alfonso Montuori on November 10, 2007 http://jhp.sagepub.comDownloaded from
tolerance and intolerance of ambiguity, independence of judgment
and conformity, openness to experience and closed-mindedness,
breaking down of stereotypical gender traits and accentuating
them, a preference for complexity and a preference for simplicity at
the expense of complexity. In this light, creativity took on a differ-
ent meaning for me, and later I immediately understood what
Maslow (1971) meant when he said that he had come to believe
that the self-actualizing and the creative personality were really
one and the same.
Frank’s vision of creativity did include what we typically think
of as the study of genius—the great scientists and artists working
in their rarified domains. But alongside that, there was a view of
creativity as a key, central element of personality and society, one
that pointed the way to a different conception of human nature and
human potentialities. This view showed how the cultivation of
“creativity and personal freedom,” as he put it in the title of his
classic 1968 book, goes beyond the domain of the arts and sciences.
It presents us with a blueprint for a different understanding of
being human, from a closed, rigid system to an open, dynamical
system, and to a different, much broader and infinitely richer expe-
rience of being human, one that transcends oppositions and polar-
izations between reason and emotion, objective and subjective, sci-
ence and art, male and female, sane and crazy.
Frank’s vision of psychology and of creativity was rooted in a
deeply ethical view of the world. Forced to choose between career
and integrity in the late 1950s, during the heyday of rabid anti-
communism and accusations of un-American activities, he was dis-
missed from the University of California at Berkeley for not taking
a “loyalty oath,” which he described as an agreement “in writing
not to think certain possible thoughts about communism” (Barron,
1995, p. 85). Frank’s politics were vehemently anti-authoritarian,
and he felt sympathies for no system that attempted to regulate
his, or anybody else’s, thoughts.
His research addressed creativity as an antidote to authoritari-
anism and extended to work on the psychology of nuclear conflict
and the study of the future. This led him to also develop a fascina-
tion with evil and the human capacity for power over others. He
wrote a play about Hitler and Freud that was performed at
Saybrook Institute, in which Freud, with the help of certain mind-
altering substances, analyzed Hitler, reminding us also that the
Nazis’ manipulation of the mass psychology of fascism was influ-
Alfonso Montuori 17
© 2003 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.
by Alfonso Montuori on November 10, 2007 http://jhp.sagepub.comDownloaded from
enced by Freud’s writings, by the study of mass psychology and
hypnosis. Psychological research into human capacities and char-
acteristics was being used as a force of evil to oppress people. For
Frank, this illustrated the tremendous complexity and ambiguity
of advances in knowledge and precluded any easy optimism about
the human condition.
How do we use the power of the human potential? How do we
channel our immense creative capacities for good and for evil? His
use of “Citizen Kane” in the course on human personality was an
attempt to confront us with the relationship between creativity
and power and the enormous questions that it raises. How did we
intend to use our creativity? Would we get caught up in a quest for
power over others? Such questions were never far from his mind.
CRISIS, ALTERED STATES, AND PLACES
And how do human beings respond to crises, to the challenges to
established ways of thinking, feeling, and acting, to breakdowns in
existing orders, whether cognitive or social? In No Rootless Flower
(1995), Frank discussed briefly the 1989 earthquake that affected
the San Francisco Bay and the Central Coast so terribly: “Earth-
quake, selfshake,” he wrote (p. xiv). Crisis is not unlike an altered
state of consciousness—a trip perhaps—where we are called upon
to exercise all our capacities intensely in order to survive, create,
whatever it is that we are called upon to do. As the ordered struc-
tures of our consciousness and our social systems are challenged,
and at times shattered, human beings find the need to dip deeply
into their reserves and challenge established ways of doing things.
“It is always the ‘unexperienced’ that presses for expression and
calls for a resetting of the switches for the same old run” (Barron,
1995, p. 81). Frank and I were both in Santa Cruz for the quake,
and it was an unusual experience to find complete strangers com-
ing up to you to find out if you’re OK, if you need anything.
Crises and altered states offered, for Frank, an opportunity to
study human behavior in vivo, right there, and develop an under-
standing that could complement the more systematic research he
enjoyed, using a variety of psychological tests and long interviews.
During the human personality class, along with extensive read-
ings, the movies on the lives of Freud and Jung, and Wells and
Fellini, Frank also invited us to take a number of tests, including
18 Frank Barron: A Creator on Creating
© 2003 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.
by Alfonso Montuori on November 10, 2007 http://jhp.sagepub.comDownloaded from
the Rorschach and some sentence completion tests. The class was
really a concise but multifaceted exploration of human personality,
using a variety of approaches, engaging us as whole persons, in the
same way that he approached such exalted subjects as Truman
Capote, William Butler Yeats, or the eminent creatives of the IPAR
research.
CREATIVITY AND THE
EXPANSION OF CONSCIOUSNESS
Frank thought of his work on the creative personality not as the
classification of a set of traits possessed by a lucky few but as the
elucidation of a set of characteristics that were fundamentally
present in everyone and could be cultivated with the right effort
and attention. It was his view that we could all aspire to and be
educated for creativity. In fact, he saw this as a step toward the
expansion and evolution of consciousness, with creativity as the
heart of the human potential for self-creation and world-creation.
Frank was known mostly for his work in creativity. All too often
he was read simply in a psychometric key, perhaps because the
numbers were what more conventional psychologists could latch
onto. But Frank’s entire work can be read as a study in the evolu-
tion of consciousness, something the last chapter of No Rootless
Flower (1995) makes clear. Frank’s work on emergent evolution
and holism did continue throughout his life and found a home in
the study of human lives. That is why, along with the specific
research on creativity, Frank’s work can also be thought of as a
study in the existential dimensions of emergent evolution and
holism and manifested in the study of the evolution of the whole
human personality.
A key aspect in his study of the evolution of consciousness was
his encounter with psychedelics. Frank went to UC Berkeley with
Timothy Leary, and the two were, as is well known, extremely
close. Frank, the established and respectable psychologist, is in
fact the man who introduced (the equally respectable and estab-
lished) Timothy Leary to the “magic mushroom,” which Frank had
sought out during a visit to Mexico. At the time, Frank was spend-
ing a year at the Center for the Advanced Study in the Behavioral
Sciences studying the farther reaches of psychology. He had been
reading exhaustively in works ranging from Swedenborg to Yeats’s
Alfonso Montuori 19
© 2003 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.
by Alfonso Montuori on November 10, 2007 http://jhp.sagepub.comDownloaded from
A Vision to William James, and a lot of mystical writings from all
traditions and eras. Frederic Myers’s Human Personality and Its
Survival of Bodily Death had been an early and decisive influence
on Frank, along with William James’s Varieties of Religious Expe-
rience. There was always a spirit of openness in him that was not
just unwilling to reject the unusual but actively courted it. This
spirit also allowed him to see the existing limitations in
psychology.
If the psychedelic experience has recently been trivialized, with
serious research gone underground and popular accounts mostly
either sensation-seeking, personal attacks on Leary and others or
simply lurid press stories, Frank’s approach demonstrated pre-
cisely what seems to be so lacking—and indeed unthinkable, in
some circles—in much of today’s discourse on mind-altering drugs.
His approach was eminently sensible, informed, open, and aware
both of the long history of use of mind-altering drugs and of their
potential dangers. But he was vitally open to their potentials and
determined to understand what was going on without preconcep-
tion or polemical ideology. In 1964, Barron, Jarvik, and Bunnel
published an article in Scientific American on hallucinogenic
drugs, Frank’s second appearance in those eminently respectable
and establishment-worthy pages, pointing to the extent of his com-
mitment and scholarship in this area.
Frank saw psychedelics as an opportunity to experience a wider
range of consciousness and to access states that had previously
been experienced only by mystics. But he was also very clear that
the ultimate test was the effect on the person when he or she was
not in an altered state, in everyday circumstances, and that what
the church refers to as “spiritualism and related errors” is akin to
exploring the collective unconscious without bringing to bear on
the mass of perceptions and potentialities there the faculties of
attention, discrimination, judgment, and the responsibility for
shaping the nascent forms for entry into consciousness (Barron,
1995, p. 89).
In the last years of his life, Frank was working on (among other
things) a book of tremendous importance. The Sacred Mushroom
and Harvard Yard was an account of what preceded the work at
Harvard by Leary, Alpert, and Metzner, and was an attempt to
place psychedelics in a historical, philosophical, and psychological
context, outlining the important precedents for the use of mind-
20 Frank Barron: A Creator on Creating
© 2003 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.
by Alfonso Montuori on November 10, 2007 http://jhp.sagepub.comDownloaded from
altering drugs in the study of human consciousness, with William
James clearly emerging as the single most significant predecessor
of such work in the United States. One can only hope that Frank
completed enough of it for it to be published either as a series of
articles in or in book form.
COSMOLOGICAL MOTIVE
A key ingredient of creativity, as Frank articulated it, was a deep
motivation, so deep, in fact, that he called it “the cosmological
motive,” “the desire to create one’s own universe of meaning, per-
sonally defined” (Barron, 1995, p. 75). This cosmological motive
runs throughout Frank’s work, in his studies of creative individu-
als—particularly the psycho-biographical work, such as “Yeats as
Self-Creator” (Barron, 1995, p. 294)—and in the very way that he
approached creativity, creating his own universe of research,
inquiry, memories, dreams, and reflections. Frank’s deep motiva-
tion did lead him to create his own universe, and a particularly
complex and differentiated whole it was. In it, one could find dis-
cussions of the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, the
Adjective Check List, and the Thematic Apperception Test flowing
seamlessly into C. S. Peirce and Samuel Butler’s views on evolu-
tion, psycho-biographies of Truman Capote and Philip Johnson,
biomass and psychomass in creative ecologies, altered states of
consciousness ranging from dreams to hypnosis to LSD to reverie
and reminiscence. Particularly in No Rootless Flower, but also in
his other works such as The Shaping of Personality, one can find his
friends, mentors, and influences: Henry Murray and C. S. Peirce,
Henri Bergson and Carl Jung, Frederico Fellini and Timothy
Leary, Rollo May and Gregory Bateson, Claudio Naranjo and Har-
rison Gough, and, above all, his beloved wife Nancy and his chil-
dren, Frank Jr., Brigid, and Anthea Rose. Unusual associates,
indeed, certainly for traditional academic psychology, which typi-
cally does not encourage one to include photos of one’s family mem-
bers in an academic work or, for that matter, to discuss evolution-
ary theory and its relationship to psychedelics. In his own words,
Frank was always “less likely to throw out the baby with the bath
water than to put another baby into the bath water and keep an eye
on the whole scene” (Barron, 1996, p. 441).
Alfonso Montuori 21
© 2003 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.
by Alfonso Montuori on November 10, 2007 http://jhp.sagepub.comDownloaded from
OPPOSITION OR
CREATIVE PROCREATION?
There seems to be an essential and continuing tension between the
establishment and maintenance of environmental constancies and
the interruption of achieved equilibria in the interest of new experi-
ence. The creative process itself embodies this tension, and persons
who distinguish themselves in artistic and scientific creation exem-
plify an incessant dialectic between integration and diffusion. In the
sequence of related acts which result in the creation of something
new, there occurs consistently a rhythmic alteration and a genuine
resolution or synthesis of certain common antinomies. Apparently
contradictory principles of action, thought, and feeling, which usu-
ally must be sacrificed one to the other, are instead expressed fully in
one sequence,the dialectic leading at special moments to an unusual
integration. (Barron, 1995, p. 85)
Frank’s own personality and his work demonstrated this pro-
cess very well. His own comfort in many seemingly opposed worlds
is one of the things that made Frank and his work unique. It sepa-
rated him from the vast majority of academic psychologists for
whom references to Yeats’s poetry were simply meaningless, from
the more woolly-minded transpersonalists and New Agers who
recoiled at Frank’s psychometrics, and from those who are
obsessed with qualitative methodologies and feel that their use
constitutes a blow for humanism against positivist scientism.
None of this ideology seemed to bother Frank who was, in many
ways, a pragmatist when it came to inquiry.
In his work, Frank brought together science and art, the quanti-
tative and the qualitative, the mainstream and the leading edge,
the objective and the subjective, reason and emotion, hard facts
and inspired intuitions, poetry and prose. These “unusual associ-
ates” made it hard for people wedded too tightly to disciplinary cat-
egories to understand him and contributed perhaps to his work
receiving less attention than it should have. Perhaps more accu-
rately, given the enormous influence he did have in creativity
research, I should say it contributed to many “partial” readings,
whereas the overall thrust of his work was rarely understood.
As I write these words, I find myself wishing, of course, that I
had the opportunity to share them with Frank, to dialogue about
the endless subjects that fascinated him and see the way he man-
aged to embody his knowledge in his everyday interactions. I am, of
course, still dialoguing with Frank, and I invite the readers of this
22 Frank Barron: A Creator on Creating
© 2003 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.
by Alfonso Montuori on November 10, 2007 http://jhp.sagepub.comDownloaded from
article to join me. Frank’s last words, I am told, were “amaz-
ing...amazing . . . amazing.” There is perhaps no better way to
describe Frank himself.
REFERENCES
Barron, F. X. (1968). Creativity and personal freedom. New York: Van
Nostrand.
Barron, F. X. (1995). No rootless flower. An ecology of creativity. Cresskill,
NJ: Hampton.
Barron, F. X.(1996).Barron’s ordinary wars.In A. Montuori (Ed.), Unusual
associates. A festschrift for Frank Barron (pp. 438-446). Cresskill, NJ:
Hampton.
Barron, F. X., Jarvik, M., & Bunnel, S. (1964, April). The hallucinogenic
drugs. Scientific American, pp. 29-37.
Dabrowski, K. (1964). Positive disintegration. Boston: Little, Brown.
Maslow, A. (1971). The farther reaches of human nature. London: Penguin.
Montuori, A. (Ed.). (1995). Unusual associates. A Festschrift for Frank
Barron. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton.
Morin, E. (1990). Introduction à la pensée complexe. Paris: ESF.
The New York Times. (2002, October 13). Obituary of Frank Barron. p. 29.
Reprint requests: Alfonso Montuori, California Institute of Integral Studies, 1453
Mission St., San Francisco, CA 94103; e-mail: amontuori@ciis.edu.
Alfonso Montuori 23
© 2003 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.
by Alfonso Montuori on November 10, 2007 http://jhp.sagepub.comDownloaded from