Life-creativity: Imagining one’s life

How people become unique persons is an ever-renewed puzzle for any observer of human life. Somehow, in the complex sets of social and cultural constraints that reduce margins of freedom, each person is actually the author of his or her life. Each trajectory is unique, and can be recognized by its specific melody (Zittoun et al., 2013). This uniqueness, we propose, can be seen as resulting from lifecreativity, the process of creating one’s life-paths. To better understand it, we will first examine the relation between creativity and development, then propose to consider imagination as the heart of the creative process. We will treat imagination as a three-dimensional developmental process, and define the conditions under which it might be acknowledged as creativity. The case study of Rachel, going through her teenager years, will ground our proposition and further discussion. This exploration, we hope, will contribute to our understanding of the developmental aspects of creativity.