The Creative Trance
Altered States of Consciousness and the Creative Process

An investigation of how the creative trance works across multiple domains in the arts, sciences, sports, and self-transformation.

Tobi Zausner (Author)

9781108738583, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 9 June 2022

200 pages
22.8 x 15.1 x 1.2 cm, 0.38 kg

'As the field of psychology struggles between its identify as either a science or an art, Zausner's study, the new fields of NeuroArts, and research into creativity and the brain overcome old splits between science and art. In this book, Zausner identifies a way to clearly bridge both. As an experienced clinician as well as a researcher, she is also able to differentiate creative trance states from pathological dissociative states. The addition of neurodiversity is critical as Zausner legitimized the exploration and acceptance of new ways of understanding cognition and the word trance. This exhaustive book is highly recommended for both beginning and advanced professionals in the healing arts, as well as the general public. It should be on every psychology teacher's reading list and available in university libraries.' Ilene A. Serlin, Ph.D., BC-DMT, Associated Distinguished Professor, California Institute of Integral Studies, USA

In those moments when focus on creative work overrides input from the outside world, we are in a creative trance. This psychologically significant altered state of consciousness is inherent in everyone. It can take the form of daydreams generating scientific or creative ideas, hyperfocus in sports, visualizations that impact entire civilizations, life-changing audience experiences, or meditations for self-transformation that may access states beyond trance, becoming gateways to transcendence. Artist and psychologist Tobi Zausner shows how creative trance not only operates in scientific inventions and works of art in all media, but is also important in creating and recreating the self. Drawing on insights from cognitive neuroscience, clinical psychology and post-materialist psychology, this book investigates the diversity of the creative trance ranging from non-industrial societies to digital urban life, and its presence in people from all backgrounds and abilities. Finally, Zausner investigates the future of trance in our rapidly changing world.

Introduction: the pervasive state of trance
1. The multifaceted creative trance
2. Consciousness and creativty theory in a creative trance
3. Unconscious origins of the creative trance
4. Empathy and dissociation in the creative trance
5. Evolution, altered states, and the creative trance
6. The creative trance and the brain
7. Dynamics of the creative trance
8. Dyslexia, attention deficit disorder, and the creative trance
9. Illness and transformation in the creative trance
10. Different abilities and the creative trance
11. Dementia and the creative trance
12. Altered states of a lifesaving creative trance.

Subject Areas: Clinical psychology [MMJ], Health psychology [MBNH9], Cognition & cognitive psychology [JMR]