Creative work is the handmaiden of self-discovery. No matter where our creative work starts or what path it follows–with a word, with a note, with a brushstroke–it eventually, with repeated effort, returns us home to the very source of our beings. We are never more true to ourselves than when we are creating something. Inexorably, what we create reflects ourselves as profoundly, faithfully and uniquely as our fingerprints. Each single thing we create, no matter when or under what conditions it was produced, will bear trace deposits of ourselves, a creative fingerprint sufficient to identify us and show who we are just as our physical fingerprints do.

For those who know how to interpret them, our creative fingerprints are as unerring as our physical fingerprints in identifying us. Our creations are self-portraits. We cannot escape ourselves no matter how hard we may try. In all art, there is an underlying voice that cannot be completely hidden or extinguished. In the end, our creative work can reflect only one thing: ourselves.

Topics explored in Our Creative Fingerprint include: Creativity and Inner Truth–part of which examines seven paintings by Frida Kahlo, Divine Discontent: The Inner Urge to Create, Transformation: Cleaning Our Psychic Augean Stables, and Creativity and Rebirth.

Nancy Carter Pennington received her MSW from The University of Maryland. For more than 30 years, Nancy has had the privilege of working with clients on a range of issues: phobias, OCD, grief, depression, obsessive thinking, guilt, and relationships.

Lawrence Staples has a Ph.D. in psychology; his special areas of interest are the problems of midlife, guilt, and creativity. Dr. Staples is a diplomate of the C.G. Jung Institute, Zurich, Switzerland, and also holds AB and MBA degrees from Harvard. In addition to Guilt with a Twist: The Promethean Way, Lawrence is author of the top-selling book The Creative Soul: Art and the Quest for Wholeness and co-author, with Nancy Carter Pennington, of The Guilt Cure.