The exploration of psychological barriers to creative self-realization among students is increasingly relevant in the context of contemporary educational frameworks across Europe. The European Commission’s Creative Europe program aims to support the cultural and creative sectors by fostering innovative approaches to education and community engagement. Within New European Agenda for Culture the current Work Plan for Culture covering the period 2023-2026 sets out key priorities for European cooperation in cultural policy-making including: enhancing cultural participation and the role of culture in society; strengthening the cultural dimension of EU external relation and co-creative partnerships. The need for educational systems to cultivate creativity as a core competency, which is essential for students' personal and professional development is highlighted. Moreover, it is important to note that Global Research PISA 2022 examined students' creative thinking i.e. the capacity to generate diverse and original ideas, and to evaluate and improve ideas, across a range of contexts through open-ended communication and problem-solving tasks.  The authors of the study emphasize that the level of creative thinking of students is a significant factor in the further development of the country’s economy.

By investigating the psychological barriers that students face in their creative endeavors, this research can contribute valuable insights into how educational institutions can better support student engagement in their creative thinking development.  Barriers to creative self-realization may be of a deep personal nature and most likely not recognized by the person. Non-objective art, characterized by its abstraction and emphasis on personal interpretation, offers a unique platform for students to explore their identities, emotions and unconscious attitudes towards creative self-realization.

The methodological foundation of the research is the structural-dialectical approach in psychology (Veraksa, 2024; Veraksa et al., 2013; Belolutskaya, 2015). We define creativity as the ability to actualize a complex of cognitive and affective mechanisms, including dialectical, formal-logical, and symbolic structures, to identify and transform problem situations with a high degree of uncertainty in order to generate new content (Belolutskaya, 2024).
Accordingly, from our perspective, research and educational practices aimed at developing the capacity for creativity should include the following key components:
• Defining of personally significant meanings for the participants;
• Symbolization/ability to construct metaphors;
• Working with contradictions and oppositions;
• Achieving an individual product as a result of addressing "an open-start problem" where a person has to cope with a situation of uncertainty and, before starting to solve it, first formulate one’s unique personally significant task.
In this experimental work, we tested two research hypotheses:
1. Working with metaphors basing on non-objective art material will allow participants to define personally significant contradictions that they will be motivated to further explore, transforming them into a creative product.
2. The most resourceful symbols/metaphors for addressing psychological barriers that hinder creative self-realization are those that are initially "negatively" charged from the participant's perspective. It is in these symbols that the main potentials for further reframing and, consequently, expanding and restructuring the individual's space of possibilities are concentrated.
We tested these hypotheses through:
1. A series of experimental in-person sessions at a modern art museum.
2. A series of reflective individual interviews with participants.

The research is qualitative. The experimental part of the study was conducted at the Multimedia Art Museum in Moscow. Twelve students from the Faculty of Psychology at Lomonosov Moscow State University (22-23 years old) participated. The students took part voluntarily, specifically those who wanted to work on the topic of psychological barriers in terms of personal creative self-realization. The experiment consisted of six three-hour in-person sessions at the museum (with two students participating in each session). After each session, we conducted individual in-depth interviews with each participant. The materials for the participants' work included: • Non-objective art works by contemporary artist Igor Shelkovsky. The author is a follower of Suprematism and creates paintings and installations that combine the traditions of Russian avant-garde and conceptualism. • The "Electroart" exhibition (installation author: Nikolai Polisksy). The hall features bright, large constructions woven from wires. The constructions represent tunnels, towers, and barriers, evoking associations with a fantastical city. The goal of the experiment was to reveal a key contradiction that, on one hand, blocks each participant's creative self-realization at this moment in their life, but on the other hand, through dialectical transformation, can become a resource for creating unique creative products by working with metaphors and dialectical structures using non-objective art. Stages of the in-person session (3 ours totally): 1. Stage "Symbolization". The facilitator works with the participants' unreflected unconscious attitudes, offering exercises for constructing metaphors based on the visual material of the exhibition. 2. Stage "Changing Alternatives". The facilitator works at a reflective level, offering exercises that involve reframing the attitudes expressed by participants in the first stage through metaphor work. 3. Stage "Open-start task ". In the final part of the session, the facilitator models a real creative process, where each participant must cope with an "open start" situation, describing a personally significant creative product. During the interviews, we verified the hypotheses previously put forward and collected feedback from participants on questions such as: 1) Can we say that the pair of opposite concepts resulting from the first stage (the result of working with metaphors based on abstract works of art) reflects one’s current internal conflict? 2) Can we say that reflecting on the resource aspect of the negative concept provided student with additional psychological support and allowed one to reframe barriers that hinder creative self-realization in your life? 3) How does a participant assess the overall resourcefulness of the training?

Analysis of the experimental work and transcripts of in-depth interviews allowed us to formulate three groups of results: 1. Resource-oriented: defining of non-obvious meaning blocks that require rethinking by the participant. 2. Cognitively oriented: development of dialectical thinking and imagination. 3. Competency-based: the ability to convey complex meanings to an audience in a product form. Let’s provide an example of one participant's work as an illustration. At the first stage of the experiment, through working with metaphors, the participant identified that the key pair of opposites constituting their current internal conflict is "emptiness VS lightness." In this pair, lightness represents "life," while emptiness relates to death, desolation, and the heaviness of loneliness. Then, during the "changing alternatives" exercise, resource part of emptiness concept such as energy, boundlessness, and possibility were identified. Throughout the interview, the participant repeatedly emphasized that this art-based experiment provided her with food for thought regarding the idea that a pause (an empty space, nothingness) is not something to be feared, but rather something that needs to be created in order for something new to emerge: "emptiness has no boundaries. In emptiness, silence, and timelessness lies a great energetic resource. For a new product to emerge, a niche is needed, that is, an empty space in which a person can see possibilities." Throughout the experiment, participants sequentially worked through conceptual blocks such as unfreedom, panic, disconnection, struggle, overload, and others. All participants highlighted the following positions: • The resourcefulness and multidimensionality of the work with constructing metaphors using visual materials of non-objective art. • Reflection on positive and negative symbols and father dialectical transformation of defined contradiction help to capture insights about unexpected concepts that could help to find possible directions of personal creative self-realization

The Routledge International Handbook of Dialectical Thinking. – New York : Routledge, 2024. – 526 p. – EDN PUFYYO. Belolutskaya, A. K. Creativity and Dialectical Thinking / A. K. Belolutskaya // The Routledge International Handbook of Dialectical Thinking. – New York : Routledge, 2024. – P. 396-409. – EDN EAXISS. Belolutskaya, A. K. Multidimensionality of thinking in the context of creativity studies / A. K. Belolutskaya // Psychology in Russia: State of the Art. – 2015. – Vol. 8, No. 1. – P. 43-60. – DOI 10.11621/pir.2015.0105. – EDN UFZCLB. Structural dialectical approach in psychology: problems and research results / N. E. Veraksa, A. K. Belolutskaya, I. I. Vorobyeva [et al.] // Psychology in Russia: State of the Art. – 2013. – Vol. 6, No. 2. – P. 65-77. – EDN RMMYDV.