The Creative Expression

Edited and arranged by:  Stanley Rosner Ph.D and Lawrence Edwin Abt, Ph.D.
Publisher:  North River Press, Inc. Croton-on-Hudson, N.Y., 1976

Overview

Twenty-one well-known men and women from five broad professional fields examine and discuss the nature of their creativity, and the forces in their lives, which helped them, develop it.

Interviews

Preface

However variegated it may be, is creativity a unitary process – that is, when it is present, does it function in similar ways in different fields and among widely different creative persons?  The answer to this question is difficult to come by, as readers of our The Creative Experience will recall.  Others, remembering our Essays in Creativity, will call to mind what theorist of different persuasions have had to say about this matter. 

The purpose of the present work is to investigate the issue further – to probe the matter in the experiences of an additional group of creative persons who are applying their talents in areas different from those addressed in our first book.

For the most part, The Creative Expression examines creative experiences in persons working in fields that are more directly known to Americans – fields like engineering and technology, the arts, criticism, the communications media, and business – and that therefore touch our lives with greater frequency and persistence.  Among persons in such creative endeavors do we deal with the same creative urges, the same persistent problems, the same unknown outcomes?

The reader of The Creative Expression will have made this determination for himself.   For our part, we are deeply grateful to the twenty-one persons who have been kind enough to share themselves and their time to further our inquiry, to permit us to round out a look at the larger arena of creative effort represented by the additional fields in which creativity expresses itself.

We are persuaded that, although the protean nature of the creative process, the creative experience, and the creative product still eludes us, we have made a forward movement toward a better understanding of it. 

Abridged Summary

The Creative Expression represents an attempt to compare the pure artist and scientist in their creative endeavors with the engineer, the physicist working for industry, the art or drama critic, the businessman, and the applied artist and musician-composer.  The Creative Experience dealt with creativity in the first group, and the present interviews deal with the latter group.  We ask, “What are some of the similarities and differences between these groups?  Is the creative process the same, regardless of orientation towards pure research and pure art or in the applied areas?”  We recognize the limitations of these interviews.  They do not represent research  in the strict sense of the term, which would necessitate exhaustive inquire, with large samples, under controlled conditions.  Rather, we are looking for qualitative differences and similarities that may serve heuristic purposes.  We hope that we may be able to isolate some factors that will stimulate further research.