Handbook of Creativity (Perspectives on Individual Differences)

Rating:
Summary: A great introduction to and overview of the academic field
Review: Creativity is perhaps one of the most profound, important and still mysterious domains of study open to us.

From 1908, when Poincare wrote his landmark essay on creativity and psychology of thought in mathematical invention, through 1950 when Guilford brought this neglected topic back into the mainstream of psychological study, through to today where we have a plethora of views regarding creativity and the creative process, it remains a fascinating study.

This book is an excellent introduction to and reference work to creativity and the creative process as viewed by professionals in the field of psychology. As such, it is immensely useful to anyone wanting to or needing to orient themselves in this field, but it also suffers from the limitations inherent in the methodology and focus of the field itself. These problems revolve around the need to make psychology a respectable 'science' and raise methodological difficulties with evidence from testimonies of creative people and from our own personal experience - two of the most important sources of knowledge for creativity - and with the need to reformulate insights as testable hypotheses. These problems while generally present in psychology as a discipline are exascerbated in the study of creativity, due primarily to the elusive and potentially mysterious phase of the psychological creative process when 'illumination' or insight occurs, and the difficulty or perhaps impossibility of studying it any way other than internal observation or through reports of others' observations of their creative experience.

The book is fair and even handed in its approach, raising many of these difficulties in the discussion and reporting fairly on a wide range of different views in the historical and modern context as well as giving an excellent outline of the field.

This book is an excellent book with which to orient oneself in a professional psychological understanding of creativity. However, if you are mainly interested in practically developing and applying creativity and the creative process, popular authors such as Robert Fritz ('Path of Least Resistance') or the wide range of authors who report on the personal experience and views of outstanding creators (eg 'The Creative Process' by Brewster Ghiselin) may be more inspirational, applicable, useful and satisfying.