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THE CREATIVITY QUESTION. Edited by Albert Rothenberg and Carl Hausman. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1976, xiv + 366 pp., $14.75; $7.95 (paperback).
This collection of readings on creativity aims for balance and variety rather than depth or adherence to a particular point of view.
Short selections, from the writings of philosophers, psychologists, psychoanalysts, educators, literary figures, and creative scientists are presented. The editors have avoided introspective accounts by intent, although subjective descriptions of the creative process appear in excerpts by Edgar Allen Poe and Walter Cannon. The selections begin with Plato and Aristotle, include Kant and Lombroso, Jacques Maritain and Arthur Koestler, empirical investigators such as Jacob Getzels, Anne Roe, and Frank Barron, and contemporary philosophers such as Croce, Collingwood, and Monroe Beardsley. Although the editors, a psychiatrist and a philosopher, include excerpts from their own writings on creativity, they modestly place their contributions among the "Alternative Approaches" rather than under the heading of "Seminal Accounts."
Of the total of 45 selections, only four are by psychoanalysts, Freud, Harry Lee, Ernst Kris, and Lawrence Kubie. Several excerpts are by sometime psychoanalysts Rank and Jung. Several additional contributors, Ehrenzweig, Schachtel, and Barron, have been influenced by psychoanalysis. The low psychoanalytic profile, however, is deceptive. As the editors state, "The upsurge of scientific interest in creativity in this century began with the psychoanalysts who first became interested in art and artistic creation because of their wider concern with the phenomena of motivation, affect and irrational id processes" (p. 94), and many of the other selections show the influence of psychoanalytic theory and clinical findings, if only in passing.