Personally, I think that my most important conceptual contribution to science might turn out to be the work I have done trying to adapt evolutionary theory to human development, and particularly to creativity; and in terms of methodology, the work with the Experience Sampling Method, or ESM, which has resulted in the beginnings of a systematic phenomenology that I expect will be widely used in psychology. I must repeat, however, that this is only my personal opinion. In terms of how others evaluate my work, I am quite sure that those who have heard about it at all would single out the concept of flow as being my main contribution – however small. As defined here, flow is complete absorption in what one is doing.

So let's talk about flow. I think flow is important mainly for two reasons: because it is (a) an essential aspect of life that almost everyone recognizes as being something they have experienced, yet they had no name for it or way to understand it; and (b) the recognition of the phenomenon I ended up calling “flow” helped to add a new perspective to understanding human behavior, a perspective that eventually helped establish the subfield of Positive Psychology.

My original interest in this phenomenon probably started when, as a child, I was caught up in the tragic events of World War II. The stupid cruelty around me was hard to tolerate and impossible to understand. My two older brothers disappeared – the oldest snatched away from his family to spend years in Soviet prison camps, the younger one drafted out of college and killed in the defense of Budapest. Nobody knew what was going to happen. Powerful, wealthy, well-educated men acted like frightened children. Daily air raids chased us into basement shelters, and buildings crumbled in flames up and down the streets. I was ten years old while all this was going on, and could not figure out how grown-up people I had assumed to be rational and in control of their lives could suddenly become so clueless.

One small remaining island of rationality was that I had just learned how to play chess.

Long ago the natural sciences achieved a universal language and a global network of information exchange, so that a new finding in astronomy, or chemistry, or biology is almost immediately noted, evaluated, and replicated in laboratories the world over. By contrast in the social sciences, U.S. scholars are nowadays generally unaware of what their colleagues in other nations are doing. Because anthropology, sociology and psychology rely heavily on language and cultural context for describing and explaining their findings, it is often difficult to understand the significance of foreign scholarship, even on those rare occasions when it appears in English translation.

There are, of course, exceptions: In the past half century or so, the works of Levy-Strauss, Piaget, Vigotsky, and a few others have had a pervasive influence on American social science. But our assimilation of foreign thought has been quite selective: Only those scholars tend to be translated whose work is already congenial to an American readership. This is unfortunate, because one could argue that in the domain of the Geistenwissenschaften a multivocal, multicultural perspective advances knowledge more effectively than the homogeneous, hegemonic approach of the natural sciences. Regional accents might be jarring in mathematics, but in psychology they often greatly enrich our understanding of human experience by providing unusual perspectives and new possibilities.

Paolo Inghilleri provides one such enriching voice. Inghilleri, like his colleagues who were trained by Professor Fusto Massimini at the University of Milan, had his secondary schooling in the Liceo Classico, with its demanding curriculum heavy on ancient Greek, Latin and philosophy.

Psychologists tend to see creativity exclusively as a mental process. In this chapter, I will propose that such an approach cannot do justice to the phenomenon of creativity, which is as much a cultural and social as it is a psychological event. To develop this perspective, I will use a “systems” model of the creative process that takes into account its essential features.

Creativity research in recent years has been increasingly informed by a systems perspective. Starting with the observations of Morris Stein (1953, 1963) and the extensive data presented by Dean Simonton (1988, 1990) showing the influence of economic, political, and social events on the rates of creative production, it has become increasingly clear that variables external to the individual must be taken into account if one wishes to explain why, when, and where new ideas or products arise from and become established in a culture (Gruber, 1988; Harrington, 1990). Magyari-Beck (1988) has gone so far as to suggest that because of its complexity, creativity needs a new discipline of “creatology” in order to be thoroughly understood.

The systems approach developed here has been described before and applied to historical and anecdotal examples, as well as to data collected to answer a variety of different questions (Csikszentmihalyi, 1988b, 1990, 1996; Csikszentmihalyi, Rathunde, & Whalen, 1993; Csikszentmihalyi & Sawyer, 1995; Feldman, Csikszentmihalyi, & Gardner, 1994).

For one who has been among the pioneers of the systematic study of human experience in natural settings, it is enormously gratifying to greet this distinguished collection on The Experience of Psychopathology. My students and I at the University of Chicago began gathering electronic paper-induced responses from everyday life situations some 15 years ago. The Experience Sampling Method – or ESM – has since found numerous research applications. The psychiatric applications reported in this volume by Marten deVries and his colleagues span 10 years of work in the field and are without doubt some of the most important ones.

But, one might ask, how can the study of subjective experience help us understand psychopathology – let alone prevent or alleviate it? After all, now that departments of psychiatry at so many Universities are adopting progressively more molecular approaches, hoping to find mental health in the results of psychopharmacological, neurophysiological, or endocrinological studies, what room is there left for research that tries to understand molar behavior in actual social settings?

The chapters in this volume share a common assumption. It is that whether a person suffers or feels happy does make a difference – in fact, that this difference is the ‘bottom line’ of mental health research. Psychology and psychopathology cannot be fully understood at the level of chemical processes. The entire organism with its subjective states, operating in its real social and cultural context, must be taken into account if we wish to know what is right or wrong with it.

Unlike somatic medicine, psychology has failed to develop an adequate model of the healthy individual and particularly of the range of variations of normal experience in daily life. Consequently, psychiatry lacks what physiology contributes to pathology in medical sciences. The task of studying normal consciousness should be the concern of psychology, so that a theoretical discipline could become available to psychiatry in the same fashion that physiology is available to pathology. However, psychology has not sufficiently developed either the study of normal states of consciousness in everyday life or the knowledge of fluctuations over time between states of optimal and aversive experience.

The study of the daily experience of normal subjects became possible with the use of the Experience Sampling Method (ESM) (Csikszentmihalyi et al., 1977; Csikszentmihalyi & Larson, 1984, 1987; deVries, 1987; Hormuth, 1986). This method allows repeated assessment of the experience of subjects in their natural environment. At the University of Chicago it has been used to describe the phenomenon of peak experiences, also called ‘flow’, and as a measurement of current subjective wellbeing (Csikszentmihalyi, 1975, 1982). Through this line of research it became clear that when one's perceived challenges, that is, the intrinsic demands experienced when engaged in an activity, are greater than one's perceived skills, that is, the individual's perception of capacity to meet the demands of the activity, the person experiences worry or anxiety. In the reverse situation (skills greater than challenges), boredom and apathy are experienced (Csikszentmihalyi, 1975).

In the attempt to illuminate what wisdom is about, we shall adopt a method that, for lack of a better term, we might call “evolutionary hermeneutics.“ This method is based on the assumption that concepts relating to the evaluation of human behavior – such as virtue, courage, freedom, or wisdom – and that have been used for many centuries under very different social and historical conditions are likely to have adaptive value for humankind. The method is based on the further assumption that to understand the significance of such concepts, it is advantageous to compare their meanings across time, in order to identify invariant components as well as possible variations in response to differing conditions in the surrounding cultural environment.

To find out what we mean by wisdom at the end of the 20th century is important, but it is not sufficient. No matter how advanced we think we are in terms of understanding the human psyche compared to former times, we still only have access to a limited cross section of the growing branch of knowledge. To ignore the hard-won insights of the past about issues that are vital for survival is like blinding ourselves on purpose out of false pride.

A simple example may help illustrate this point. Up to a few generations ago, children in our culture were warned against promiscuous sexuality, especially of a homosexual kind.

In the ordinary course of events, psychologists observe human action either in clinical settings, where the “patient” is seeking therapeutic redress for some impairment, or in experimental settings, where the confines of the laboratory and the parameters of the experimental design allow only a tiny fraction of potential responses to be manifested. The theoretical models of human action that psychologists have constructed in the past half century reflect this poverty of observational data: They tend to be mechanistic, reductive, and biased in favor of pathology.

To provide a more complete view of what human behavior and experience entail, it is necessary to begin observing what people do and what happens to them when they are not confined to the couch or the laboratory, but are involved in their normal lives in real ecological settings. In particular, it is important to observe them in those moments when their lives reach peaks of involvement that produce intense feelings of enjoyment and creativity. Without accounting for these aspects of experience, models of human behavior will remain one-sided and incomplete. The studies of the flow experience included in this volume attempt to provide evidence on which a more realistic model of human behavior can be built.

The major psychological trends of this century – including drive theories, psychoanalysis, behaviorism, cognitive psychology, and the contemporary atheoretical neuropharmacological approaches – all share a common epistemology.

Some ten years ago the first publications reporting studies of what we have called the “flow experience” appeared in print, beginning with an article in the Journal of Humanistic Psychology and then the book Beyond Boredom and Anxiety (Csikszentmihalyi 1975a, 1975b). In the relatively short span of time since those unheralded beginnings, scholars in a variety of disciplines have found the concept of an optimal state of experience theoretically useful. A great amount of research has accumulated during the decade, and some of the results are now being applied in educational, clinical, and commercial settings. Flow has become a technical term in the field of intrinsic motivation. This introduction briefly reviews the events related to the development of this concept, and the rest of the volume presents some of the most representative and important contributions to the study of the flow experience during these crucial initial years.

The prehistory of the flow concept: before 1975

I was led to investigate the range of experiences that eventually became known as flow by certain observations I had made in the course of my doctoral research with a group of male artists (Csikszentmihalyi 1965; Getzels & Csikszentmihalyi 1976). The artists I studied spent hour after hour each day painting or sculpting with great concentration. They obviously enjoyed their work immensely, and thought it was the most important thing in the world. Yet it was quite typical for an artist to lose all interest in the painting he had spent so much time and effort working on as soon as it was finished.

This chapter is about the role of the flow experience in the construction and complexification of the self, and, in a broader sense, its role in biological and cultural evolution. Some of the theoretical assumptions underlying this relationship have already been developed elsewhere (e.g., Massimini & Calegari 1979; Massimini 1982; Csikszentmihalyi & Massimini 1985; Csikszentmihalyi 1987b). The main contention is that people tend to replicate optimal experiences more often relative to other experiences in order to maintain an ordered state of consciousness.

The characteristics that make the flow experience a negentropic state of consciousness – high concentration and involvement, clarity of goals and feedback, and intrinsic motivation, all made possible by a balance between perceived challenges and personal skills – have already been described theoretically and confirmed empirically (Csikszentmihalyi 1975b, 1982a; Csikszentmihalyi & Graef 1979). One of the purposes of this chapter is to show the underlying sameness in the phenomenology of this experience by reporting examples from interviews with individuals in very different cultures.

In addition, by considering which activities produce flow and the number of people in each sample who find flow in various activities, it is possible to begin estimating how this experience might influence biological and cultural evolution. For example, when a person learns to experience flow in the context of a religious vocation, as in one of the samples considered in the following pages, the replication of cultural instructions having to do with prayer, meditation, and ritual ceremonies may take precedence even over the replication of that person's biological instructions.

Flow is a useful concept not so much because it accounts for rare and exotic activities like rock climbing or ocean sailing, but because it helps explain the texture of everyday life, the rise and fall of motivations that follow one another as normal people respond to the human and inanimate contours of their changing environment. It is the sum of these momentary motivational states that shapes the life of the individual over time, and it is the sum of these individual lifetimes that shapes the evolution of social and cultural forms. As Massimini has observed, flow experiences in everyday life are reminiscent of Darwin's image of the tiny, soft-bodied organisms whose calcareous skeletons slowly build rock-hard reefs on the ocean floor. Flow experiences, too, seem ephemeral, but they form habits and institutions that stand the wear of centuries.

The study of fairly exceptional cases, such as individuals undergoing solitary ordeals or joining motorcycle gangs, is an important first step that helps reveal the parameters of autotelic experience. That was the initial goal of the work reported in Beyond Boredom and Anxiety. But the ultimate goal was “to find out piecemeal and experimentally what combination of challenges and skills can be accommodated in a schoolroom, a neighborhood, or a home…[in order to] maximize flow involvement in as many people as possible” (Csikszentmihalyi 1975b, p. 203).

At the end of this volume, it is time to assess the cumulative implications of the assembled evidence. What has been learned about flow in the 10 or so years since the model was first presented? The main conclusions, derived from a variety of different studies, seem rather robust. In the first place, it is clear that the flow experience is recognized as a phenomenological reality by people of all ages, both genders, diverse socioeconomic statuses, and very different cultures, and that it is considered a positive state of consciousness by everyone. Thus, we might conclude that flow is a panhuman, species-specific state of positive psychic functioning.

Second, both the flow Questionnaires and the Experience Sampling Method point to the fact that flow is generally an optimal state. In flow, most of the dimensions of experience reach their positive peaks. The relationship between flow and optimal experience is present both in the short and in the long term; those who are in flow most often tend to have more positive experiences in the rest of their lives.

Third, the evidence suggests that there are large individual differences in the quantity and intensity of flow experienced by different persons. Some people appear to have “autotelic personalities” that make it easier for them to enjoy everyday life, and to transform routine and even threatening situations into challenging opportunities for action. A good start has been made to determine what the traits of such persons are, and how patterns of child-rearing might facilitate their development.