You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
As part of a study of gifted children this book explores the nature of creativity. Its findings are useful in furthering the understanding of psychoanalytic therapy. Much thought and effort have gone into this book. It is well written and organized and it avoids the pitfalls of oversimplification on the one hand, and being too abstruse and theoretical on the other. The review of the various approaches to an understanding of creativity, as expressed by Wertheimer, Maslow, Schachtel, and Freud is excellent. The conclusions reached are well substantiated. There has been a bias in our schools in favor of those children with high intelligence as if this were the sole gift. It has been repeatedly noted that those with high intelligence are not necessarily the ones with the greatest originality. Gifted children as defined in this book are “those whose performance in any line of socially useful endeavor is consistently superior.” The categories of giftedness include: intelligence, school achievement, social skills, athletic ability, personal appearance, physical health, energy level, sense of humor, creativity, morality, goal directedness, breadth of interest, psychological adjustment. Four of these categories are selected by the authors as having the greatest practical and theoretical interest: intelligence and creativity, morality and psychological adjustment. For the purpose of this study, high intelligence is equated with a high I.Q.
The two groups of students selected in studying creativity and intelligence are those in the upper 20% in I.Q., and those in the upper 20% in the creativity test. Those who scored in the upper 20% of both are excluded from this study. The students came from a private high school where the average I.Q. is high. The disadvantage of this rather restricted sample is outweighed by access to the student's records and the availability of parents for interviews.
Creativity tests had to be devised which would measure the capacity for creativity. The n