Psychologists often study creativity like a kind of pathology, researching causes of creativity, methods to diagnosis it, and determining best practices. The creative person is often contradictory because the strongest drive in creative people is to not be like other people, even other creative people. During the 1950s, when creativity research was acknowledged as a legitimate scientific subject, Psychologist Frank Barron tested and conducted in-depth interviews with writers, architects, research scientists, and mathematicians  at University of California in Berkeley.

According to Barron the highly creative person is “both more primitive and more cultivated, more destructive, a lot madder and a lot saner than the average person.” Creative people could appear and actually be conventional in many ways. However, “they tend to rebel against conformity as they accompany their own private visions down lonely, untrod paths.” They also could appear highly neurotic on personality tests while having an ego strength that could…