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This group of essays on creativity purports to move toward a muchneeded metatheory, an ambitious task given the present stage of theoretical disagreement. But the seemingly arbitrary arrangement and uneven quality of the essays and the lack of editorial direction in providing the unifying threads through this labyrinth of diverse formulations leads to disjunction rather than integration.
The book contains six articles, each representing a different theoretical perspective, and a conclusion by the editors. Curiously, the first paper, reprinted from Rudolph Arnheim's book on Guernica, criticizes the slant of the editors when the author notes that academic psychology yields little more than common-sense results; that most of its theorizing turns the creative mind into a mental sorting machine. Arnheim rejects classical Freudian and Jungian approaches for their reductionism and their attempts to build an æsthetic centering on the unconscious, which he feels leads to primitivism. He calls for a holistic approach which emphasizes the artist's conscious restructuring of experience—a position already assumed by ego psychology. Arnheim's special contribution is the concept of 'visual thinking': the creative person thinks through what he observes, perceiving the visible world symbolically as embodiments of significant relationships. Given the similarity of Arnheim's concept of Freudian primary process, it is not surprising that he finds in the mechanisms of dream work a 'grammar for visual thinking'.
In contrast to Arnheim's æsthetic concerns, Mary Henle's cognitive approach limits creativity to problem solving. Ignoring subjectivity, she concentrates on the role of questions, defined as 'gaps' that demand to be filled, and the conditions propitious for their formulation. Although most of her examples are drawn from science, even art is located within a question-answer configuration: the developing work itself provides 'vectors beckoning in a certain direction'.
David