256 ■ NOTES
Crime as flow. A description of how juvenile delinquency can provide
flow experiences is given in Csikszentmihalyi & Larson (1978).
The Oppenheimer quote is from Weyden (1984).
70 “Water can be both good and bad ...” This fragment from Demo
critus was cited by de Santillana (1961 [1970], p. 157).
CHAPTER 4
page Play. After Huizinga’s Homo Ludens, which first appeared in 1939,
72 perhaps the most seminal book about play and playfulness has been
Roger Caillois’s Les Jeux et les Hommes (1958).
73 Mimicry. An excellent example of how a ritual disguise can help one
to step out of ordinary experience is given by Monti (1969, pp. 9-15),
in his discussion of the use of West African ceremonial masks:
“From a psychological point of view the origin of the mask can
also be explained by the more atavistic aspiration of the human being to
escape from himself in order to be enriched by the experience of different
existences—a desire which obviously cannot be fulfilled on the physical
level—and in order to increase its own power by identifying with univer
sal, divine, or demonic forces, whichever they may be. It is a desire to
break out of the human constriction of individuals shaped in a specific
and immutable mould and closed in a birth-death cycle which leaves no
possibility of consciously chosen existential adventures” (italics added).
74 Flow and discovery. When asked to rank 16 very different activities
as being more or less similar to flow, the groups of highly skilled rock
climbers, composers of music, chess players, and so on studied by Csik
szentmihalyi (1975, p. 29) listed the item “Designing or discovering
something new” as being the most similar to their flow activity.
75 Flow and growth. The issue of how flow experiences lead to growth
of the self are discussed in Deci &. Ryan (1985) and Csikszentmihalyi
(1982b, 1985a). Anne Wells (1988) has shown that women who spend
more time in flow have a more positive self-concept.
76 Flow and ritual. The anthropologist Victor Turner (1974) saw the
ubiquity of the ritual processes in preliterate societies as an indication
that they were socially sanctioned opportunities to experience flow.
Religious rituals in general are usually conducive to the flow experience
(see Carrington 1977; Csikszentmihalyi 1987; I. Csikszentmihalyi 1988;
and Wilson 1985 and in press). A good introduction to the historical
relationship between the sacred and the secular dimensions of leisure
can be found in John R. Kelly’s textbook Leisure (1982, pp. 53-68).
Flow and art. A description of how passive visual aesthetic experiences
can produce flow is given in Csikszentmihalyi & Robinson (in press).
