F. X. Barron, Who Studied Science of Creativity -- Rest in Peace

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Subject: F. X. Barron, Who Studied Science of Creativity

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Date Posted: October 15, 2002 1:15:13 EDT
In reply to: Michelle 's message, "Recent obituaries you might have missed seeing elsewhere" on October 15, 2002 1:00:40 EDT

Frank X. Barron, a psychologist whose work on creativity influenced a generation of researchers, died on Oct. 6 in Santa Cruz, Calif. He was 80.

The cause was complications from a fall, his family said.

Psychology has become increasingly specialized over the years, but Dr. Barron, an emeritus professor at the University of California at Santa Cruz, stood out as a scholar who blended the scientific study of personality with the less readily quantified insights of philosophy, religion and the arts, his colleagues said.

He was best known for the intensive studies of highly creative people � writers, architects, mathematicians � that he and his colleagues carried out in the 1950's and 1960's at the Institute for Personality Assessment and Research, more widely known as IPAR, at the University of California at Berkeley.

Creative people in the various fields, ranked for their originality by their peers, were brought to the institute for four or five days of rigorous interviews and extensive psychological testing.

Dr. Barron once described the highly creative person as "both more primitive and more cultivated, more destructive, a lot madder and a lot saner than the average person."

In the studies at IPAR, the most creative participants, Dr. Barron and his colleagues found, appeared highly neurotic on personality tests but also showed high levels of ego-strength, a trait that allowed them to channel their pathology into creative work. They resisted conformity and demonstrated a willingness to take risks.

Significant creative advances, Dr. Barron held, required a high tolerance for disorder and a preference for complexity, combined with the ability to extract order from chaos.

Dr. Barron's own style, his colleagues noted, reflected many of these characteristics.

"He worked in a way that might seem, if you hadn't followed it for very long, to be casual and without any particular focus," said Dr. Harrison Gough, an emeritus professor at Berkeley who worked with Dr. Barron. "But after a few years it became clear that there was an inner compass that guided him and continued to guide him for all of his life, really."

Two of Dr. Barron's books, "Creativity and Psychological Health" (1963) and "Creativity and Personal Freedom" (1968), are considered classics in the field.

He also developed the Barron Ego-Strength Scale and other personality tests still in wide use.

At Berkeley, Dr. Barron, a graduate school classmate of Timothy Leary, helped conduct some of the earliest experiments with psychedelic drugs, including psilocybin and LSD.

At the time, LSD was legal, and its use was confined primarily to research settings. Dr. Barron later expressed great ambivalence about those years and about the widespread use of LSD, his daughter Brigid Barron said.

"He never would have anticipated that so many people would be hurt by drugs," she said.

Dr. Barron's friends included not only leading psychologists like Dr. Paul Meehl and Dr. Donald McKinnon, the director of IPAR, but also many counterculture luminaries of the 1960's, including Dr. Leary, Allen Ginsberg and Michael Murphy, the founder of the Esalen Institute, the healing retreat with sulphur hot springs in Big Sur, Calif.

"He was always someone who straddled the sciences and the humanities," said Dr. Alfonso Montuori, a philosopher at the California Institute of Integral Studies.

Francis Xavier Barron was born in Lansford, Pa. He graduated from La Salle University in 1942 and began a graduate program at the University of Minnesota, but his studies were interrupted by the war. He served as an Army medic in Europe.

In 1948, he completed his master's degree at Minnesota, and two years later he received his doctorate from Berkeley. He continued his work as a researcher at IPAR, leaving to join the faculty at Santa Cruz in 1969.

In addition to his daughter Brigid, of Palo Alto, Calif., Dr. Barron is survived by his wife, Nancy Jean Barron; a son, Frank Charles Xavier Barron; and another daughter, Anthea Rose Maeve Barron, all of Santa Cruz.

In the last days of his life, Dr. Barron began planning a book about attitudes toward death. One chapter, Brigid Barron said, was to be about "how hard it is to live when you're dying."

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Subject	Author	Date
Vera G. List, 94, Philanthropist and Collector	-	October 15, 2002 1:16:43 EDT