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This monograph is the most recent in a series containing many distinguished works. Its topic, The Creative Process, is endlessly challenging and of great contemporary interest. Its senior author is an eminent Swedish research psychologist, and its research approach is described as based on psychodynamic as well as psychometric
principles (p. 3). The authors display an impressive familiarity with the psychoanalytic literature on creativity; the book contains an exhaustive, eight-page bibliography. The authors quote, and obviously respect, three of my favorite investigators of creative processes: Anne Roe (pp. 51, 190, 209, 232), Frank Barron (pp. 51, 154, 228), and Phyllis Greenacre (pp. 54-55, 230). Their discussions and conclusions are thoughtfully developed, carefully analyzed, interesting albeit generally mainstream in their import, and modestly presented.
Why, then, is this book so disappointing, at least to me? I find that I have three main differences with its authors: in their criteria for the identification of creativity, in some of their methodology, and in the philosophical perspective that frames their experimental design. I should say at the outset that I have no expertise whatsoever in experimental psychology—my last course was at the undergraduate college level—and I am realistically troubled about my ability to do justice to the authors' testing instrument and to their statistical analyses. I must bring what I have, which is a longstanding interest in creative processes, not only from the psychoanalytic point of view, but also from the perspectives of educating the gifted and talented and identifying the cultural and educational influences that foster creativity.
Initially, Smith and Carlsson describe the creative person as “filled with new ideas and projects: he views life from surprising perspectives, formulated problems contrary to what he has been told by parents and teachers, turns traditional and seemingly self-evident conceptions topsy-turvy, a