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One of the ideal goals in analysis, as I see it, is frequently to assist a patient to effect a separation between his creativity and his intelligence. The goal might be viewed as helping him to attain the freedom to entertain divergent thinking, not only convergent thinking, to step outside a sometimes confining, closed system and to stretch himself to his height, to enable him to approach top level functioning.
If we equate intelligence with the ability to engage in convergent thinking and creativity with the capacity for divergent thinking, then Wallach and Kogan in their book provide us with an operational definition of creativity—the ability to generate, within some criterion of relevance, (a) many cognitive associations, and (b) many of these which are unique. As one example, among a large number, children were asked to tell as many diffrent ways one could use a newspaper, or a cork, or a shoe, or a button or a chair. All relevant answers were tabulated in terms of number and uniqueness. The children were also asked to make up stories around sets of four disparate words (i.e., night, fence, medicine, flower). These were then rated for integration and imagination, fancifulness or drama.
Modes of Thinking in Young Children offers us a valuable and well-ordered study. After a slightly stodgy beginning, by Chapter 3 the book, having proved itself “scientific,” takes on a slightly quicker pace. The authors, though occasionally dry, offer us an extended, many-faceted study in which the material and the data are handled with assurance. This investigation is grounded in the solid bedrock of careful experimentation, of hypotheses shaped and re-shaped, as data is gathered. The work is a broadly conceived research attempt relating creativity and intelligence, individually and in combination, to styles of conceptual functioning; to sensitivity to physiognomic properties of stimuli, to levels of anxiety and to defensiveness. The study encompasses rigorous experimental researc