Frank Barron Quotes

The creative person is both more primitive & more cultivated, more destructive, a lot madder & a lot saner, than the average person.

On the ward there was hurt and pain so big and so deep that speech could not express it. I had been interested in philosophy, and suddenly philosophy came alive for me, for here the basic questions of human existence were not abstractions: they were embodied in human suffering

Examples of Trump’s narcissism are legion and instructive. A widely photographed instance occurred in February 2018, when Trump, boarding Air Force One on a rainy day, held a large umbrella to cover his head in the storm without inviting his wife or young son to join him. While depriving Melania and Barron of cover from the rain, Trump was exhibiting textbook signs of two kinds of narcissism: primary narcissism, associated with survival, which was the impulse behind his disregarding his family’s comfort to ensure his own protection, and secondary narcissism, the impulse we connect to the familiar impulse to give oneself pleasure beyond mere survival

Notice how wickedly and cunningly the serpent tempted Eve: “God knows well that the moment you eat of it your eyes will be opened and you will be like gods who know what is good and what is evil.” The basic sin, the original sin, is precisely this self-deification, this apotheosizing of the will. Lest you think all of this is just abstract theological musing, remember the 1992 Supreme Court decision in the matter of Casey v. Planned Parenthood. Writing for the majority in that case, Justice Kennedy opined that “at the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, of the mystery of human life.” Frankly, I can’t imagine a more perfect description of what it means to grasp at the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. If Justice Kennedy is right, individual freedom completely trumps objective value and becomes the indisputable criterion of right and wrong. And if the book of Genesis is right, such a move is the elemental dysfunction, the primordial mistake, the original calamity. Of

We are not called “human stagnates.” We are called human beings, persons in process, persons involved in the act and art of actually shaping or reshaping ourselves, or working to understand what Frank Barron calls the “patterns within diversity.

One of the foremost authorities on the psychology of creativity in the 20th century, Frank Barron, designed an experiment which displayed the extraordinary ability of creative individuals to embrace uncertainty, chaos, and anxiety.