According to Osho, yes: creativity flowers when you accept, rather than deny, your neurotic part. Repression breeds hypocrisy, fear and paralysis; acceptance brings those energies into awareness, where they can be transformed and used creatively. Freud's denial made him defensive and divided; your conscious, honest embrace of your contradictions frees energy, restores integrity, and allows authentic no's and yes's to guide original expression.
If you accept the weird, worried parts of you instead of hiding them, their energy can help you create.
From the Discourses
Passages where Osho speaks to this question — each links to the complete discourse.
My feeling is that you have a great desire to be famous, and that creativity is only a means towards it. That is causing the trouble. Forget about becoming famous, then there is no problem. Then when you feel like playing music, play; when you feel like writing, write. If you don't feel like writing, don't write -- even if in the middle of the sentence the inspiration disappears. So what? Stop, then and there. The problem arises because you would like to make it a beautiful piece to be appreciated, you would like to become a great musician or an author. Somewhere deep down there is ambition -- and ambition is very very dangerous for creativity. If one can be creative without having any ambition, then creativity flows so easily, so spontaneously. But still I am not saying that by dropping ambition you will become a great musician.
Creativity is something utterly new, discontinuous with your past. The ego is continuity with the past, hence it can never be creative. The ego has to give way. And when I say to let me work, it is just a simple device -- not that I am going to work... I am not that foolish! (laughter) If I am unburdening you, don't think that I will burden myself! (chuckling) Not at all! It is just a device: you love me and it will be easy for you to drop the ego in my name. Just in dropping it, something bigger than you starts functioning. Then the ego is no more in the way, you are simply available to the group.
So it is not accidental that poets go on talking about sex and love and painters go on painting nude women and sculptors go on sculpting nude statues. That is not accidental. It is heavy on their head; it is really their substitute. They have repressed something and that has become fantasy. For example, Henry Miller or people like that go on talking about sex and masturbation and intercourse and love-making, and they go into such details. It simply shows that this man has suffered. What he always wanted to do and could not do he is now doing in his fantasy. All pornography is born that way. One can use this repressed energy in religious ways also -- there is no need to use it sexually -- but then too it will erupt in some way or other.
What is creativity?
That's the paradox of creativity. If you see a painter painting, certainly he is active, utterly active, madly active -- he is all action. Or if you see a dander dancing, he is all action. But still, deep down there is no actor, no doer; there is only silence. Hence I called creativity the state of paradox. All beautiful states are paradoxical. The higher you go, the deeper you go into the paradox of reality. Supreme action with supreme relaxation: on the surface great action is happening, in the depth nothing is happening, or ONLY nothing is happening. Creative quietude is the supreme action -- the precious suppleness, simplicity, spontaneity and freedom that flows from us, or rather through us, when our private egos and conscious efforts yield to a power not their own. Yielding to a power not of your own, surrendering to a power that is beyond you,…
I believed I was uncreative. What else can be creativity besides dancing and painting and how to find out what my creativity is?
CREATIVITY has nothing to do with any activity in particular -- with painting, poetry, dancing, singing. It has nothing to do with anything in particular. Anything can be creative -- you bring that quality to the activity. Activity itself is neither creative nor uncreative. You can paint in an uncreative way. You can sing in an uncreative way. You can clean the floor in a creative way. You can cook in a creative way. Creativity is the quality that you bring to the activity you are doing. It is an attitude, an inner approach -- how you look at things. So the first thing to be remembered: don't confine creativity to anything in particular. A man is creative -- and if he is creative, whatsoever he does, even if he walks, you can see in his walking there is creativity. Even if he sits silently and does nothing, even non-doing…