p In this investigation we have not tried to embrace and expose the whole range of problems of phantasy. Our purpose was to reveal some of its intrinsic laws. However, even this task, narrow as it was; brought forward a whole number of serious methodological problems associated with the general theoretical difficulties of psychology (Chapter III). Up to now we meet with different interpretations of the nature and essence of the indispensable links which psychology can and must define. To the researchers who believe that psychology is confined to a mere description of facts while their explanation is the prerogative of other sciences (for example, physiology, cybernetics, sociology), a search for psychological laws seems to be absolutely senseless. All doctrines which ultimately reduce psychological phenomena to various direct and indirect external influences in fact also deny the existence of intrinsic laws in psychic processes as well as in phantasy. To crown all this, the nihilist attitude toward the search for immanent laws is typical of the’psychologists who regard activity as a special phenomenon existing independently from objective cause-and-effect relations and identified with the final explanatory instance.

p However, even the investigators who recognize this specific nature of the psyche and who admit the possibility of defining its laws cannot agree concerning the theoretical tenets which have to be raised to the level of genuine laws of phantasy. In this respect, in spite of a great number of theories and hypotheses (considered in detail in Chapter II) we can single out only two entirely different approaches.

p In compliance with one of these approaches, the sphere of psychology should not extend beyond the most general formulations of the laws" of phantasy, such as, for example, voluntarist and intuitivist assertions on the subject’s innate abilities to create the new.

p These excessively general, and therefore superficial formulations of the “laws” of phantasy were, first and foremost, counterposed by the theoretical premises reflecting specific, narrow aspects of creativity as a result of which the latter was watered down to the extreme and reduced to the Locke scheme, according to which human brain was only capable of performing a limited number of acts, i. e. decomposition, association and generalization; these, however, also included recombination and formation of images and ideas by analogy. As to the leading psychological trends, which were developing in counteropposition to the voluntarist-romantic approach to creativity, they attributed to the subject a merely passive role. Indeed, behaviorism, Gestaltpsychologie and psychoanalysis place phantasy in equal dependence on the factors uncontrollable by the subject or his will: behaviorism associates creative accomplishment with random external discoveries, Gestaltpsychologie, with the action of self-regulatory mechanisms, and psychoanalysis, with unconscious processes.

p The polarity of the two extreme approaches to defining the laws of creativity thus rests on the alternative which, as it may seem, may be encountered by any theory of phantasy: either to recognize the subject’s decisive role in a creative act at the expense of giving up the possibility of defining the concrete and objective laws of phantasy; or, on the contrary, to recognize the objective laws of productive mental activity at the expense of isolating them from the subject, even though certain theories ascribe to him the possibility of accomplishing individual acts which are part of the creative process.

p Is this alternative overcome in the proposed conception of phantasy?" The experiments described in this investigation (Chapter IV) revealed two internal mechanisms of phantasy, anaxiomatization and hyperaxiomatization , (respectively, a devaluation and an increased evaluation of certain information or of one or another way of fulfilling a task). Both mechanisms are closely interconnected and they invariably exercise their effect on any productive mental act. In this sense, they may be regarded as objective laws, i. e. acting independently from the subject’s will. However, these mechanisms may produce both positive phenomena (solutions of non-standard problems, abstraction, creation of generalized, schematic and weird images, stable orientation of thinking, reduction of the area of search, -etc) and negative phenomena (illusory solutions, logical errors, unreal “fantastic” constructions, distorted drawings, narrowing of the range of variants of the solution, etc.). This means that the presumable 234 internal laws (mechanisms) in themselves do not automatically insure the desirable results (which is asserted, for example, by the theory of self-regulation). Because the nature of these mechanisms is objective, they can neither be discarded nor altered by the subject. However, as long as anaxiomatization, in compliance with the proposed conception, has a non-predetermined character, the subject can direct it one way or another. In this sense, the results of the process of phantasy essentially depend on the subject and on what he desires to devaluate in particular. We regard the practical measures aimed at optimizing creativity considered in Chapter VII as the subject’s real opportunities to make use of the objective laws to his own advantage.

p Thus, we succeed, as it seems to. us, in effecting the synthesis which had been difficult for many theories of phantasy, i. e. in combining the recognition of the objective laws of this process with the recognition of the subject’s active role. At the same time, we overcome two extreme and equally unacceptable ways of defining the laws of phantasy: on the one hand, as excessively general premises completely divested of the factual basis; on the other, as particular dependences. Since the possibility to apply the theory to the maximum range of diverse phenomena increases its heuristic significance, we have attempted to prove that the proposed conception of phantasy in its concrete content agrees with the data, accumulated by psychology and by the adjoining sciences, which characterize creativity (Chapter V), as well as the conditions favorable for its process (Chapter VI).

p The expansion of our knowledge of the subject resulting from further differentiation and improvement of research methods, as well as penetration into the essence of the object of our study will help us expose the fundamental laws whose particular manifestations are the mechanisms of anaxiomatization and hyperaxiomatization postulated by us. This explains why it would be wrong to regard these laws of phantasy as its determinants in the last instance, for it is quite possible to approach them even closer, in particular, by conducting new purposeful series of investigations into concrete kinds of creative activity by means of modern methods and by elaborating a specific conceptual apparatus. However, at the present level of our knowledge of productive mental activity, the mechanisms of anaxiomatization and hyperaxiomatization enable us to explain a wide range of concrete facts, including some more general phenomena which served as explanatory notions, for example, analogy, abstraction and symbolization, in certain theoretical constructions. We see the adequacy of the proposed conception of phantasy mainly in the 235 fact that in contrast to the schemes of intellectual activity deriving from Locke’s teaching, it, undoubtedly, reflects the essential features of creativity. By and large, the mechanism of anaxiomatization ensures the emergence of the new not only through the devaluation of deep-rooted bonds, differentiations and combinations (as the traditional terminology has it, "by analysis, synthesis and recombinations"), but also through the devaluation of any method of fulfilling a task, through the very approach to this method, as a result of which we can expose essentially new aspects of the object of phantasy, new standpoints at this object, as well as realize a transition to different levels of generalization. Consequently, anaxiomatization engenders not only new products of phantasy, but also new techniques of mental activity, new "ways of thinking", thus demonstrating the inexhaustible nature of creativity.

One of the general conclusions of this investigation implies a reconsideration of the very notion of phantasy which we previously defined as productive mental activity (Chapter I). We have every reason to include into the definition of phantasy the psychological characteristic of its essence, which in the light of the proposed conception consists in effecting a shifting of evaluations of any kind of information, as well as of any ways adopted for accomplishing mental acts. We can hardly regard as unjustifiable the concomitant widening of the canonized classificational boundaries since the expansion of the notion of phantasy is achieved by applying objective laws to numerous and seemingly disintegrated entities rather than by reducing its content. This interpretation of phantasy obviously extends beyond the framework of the traditional interpretation of thinking which infrequently identifies psychological and logical categories. The peculiarities of the proposed internal mechanisms of phantasy, in our opinion, enable us to reconsider the approach to the very psychological nature of mental activity and to question the legitimacy of the sharp division of the procedural essence of emotional and intellectual phenomena. Indeed, the shifting of evaluation stands forth as a distinctive feature of a great number of phenomena" in the emotional sphere (a hightened evaluation of the objects of positive emotions and a devaluation of the objects of negative emotions). Naturally, all this deserves special research, yet the new problems posed in at the end of this investigation serve, we believe, to indicate its productivity.