Good Business_ Leadership, Flow, and the Making of Meaning - Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi [167]
Cortical activation is the amount of electrical activity in the cerebral cortex at a given moment in time; its amplitude (in microvolts) has been used to indicate the general effort taking place in the brain at that time. When people concentrate their attention, their cortical activation is generally found to increase, indicating an increase in mental effort.
The study of autotelic families is reported in Rathunde (1988). His findings are in line with many previous investigations, for instance that securely attached infants engage more in exploratory behavior (Ainsworth, Bell, & Stayton 1971, Matas, Arend, & Sroufe 1978), or that an optimal balance between love and discipline is the best child-rearing context (Bronfenbrenner 1970, Devereux 1970, Baumrind 1977). The systems approach to family studies, which is very congenial with the one developed here, was pioneered in clinical settings by Bowen (1978).
The people of flow. This is the term Richard Logan (1985, 1988) used to describe individuals who are able to transform trying ordeals into flow experiences. The quote “If the reach of experience…” is from Burney (1952, pp. 16–18).
Eva Zeisel’s imprisonment is described in a New Yorker profile (Lessard 1987). How a Chinese lady survived the brutalities of the Cultural Revolution is the subject of Life and Death in Shanghai (Cheng 1987). Solzhenitsyn’s accounts of prison are from The Gulag Archipelago (1976).
The account by Tollas Tibor is reconstructed from personal conversations we had in the summer of 1957, when he was released from jail after the Hungarian revolution.
The quote from Solzhenitsyn is cited in Logan (1985). Bettelheim presents his generalizations about imprisonment based on his concentration camp experiences in the article “Individual and Mass Behavior in Extreme Situations” (1943); for Frankl see Man’s Search for Meaning and The Unheard Cry for Meaning (1963, 1978).
The quotation from Russell was cited in an article in Self magazine (Merser 1987, p. 147).
CHAPTER 5
The Tarahumara festivals that include ritual footraces up and down the mountains of northern Mexico for hundreds of miles are described in Lumholtz (1902 [1987]) and Nabokov (1981). An account of the ritual elements involved in modern sports is given by MacAloon’s (1981) study of the modern Olympics.
The Icarus complex was explored by Henry A. Murray (1955).
At this point it might be appropriate to confront squarely the Freudian concept of sublimation, a topic that, if bypassed, might leave us with the nagging feeling of an unresolved problem. Superficial applications of Freud’s thought have led many people to interpret any action that is not directed to the satisfaction of basic sexual desires either as a defense, when it aims to hold back an unacceptable wish that otherwise might be expressed, or as a sublimation, when an acceptable goal is substituted for a desire that could not be safely expressed in its original form. At best, sublimation is a poor substitute for the unsatisfied pleasure it helps to disguise. For example, Bergler (1970) has argued that games involving risk provide a release from guilt about sexuality and aggression. According to the “Icarus complex” a high jumper is trying to escape from the ties of an Oedipal tangle in a socially acceptable way, but without really resolving the basic conflict that motivates his actions. Similarly, Jones (1931) and Fine (1956) have explained chess as a way of coping with castration anxiety (to mate the opponent’s king with the help of one’s queen is a sublimated enactment of the father’s castration with the collusion of the mother); and mountain climbing has been explained as sublimated penis envy. Nobody seems to do anything, according to this point of view, except to resolve a festering childhood anxiety.