Creativity: An Overview

Introduction

The root of the term creativity lies in the Latin verb creare, meaning to bring something forth, to produce something. For several centuries, this term was not applied to human activities. It was, rather, associated with the generative powers of gods and of nature.

Although creativity indubitably played a crucial role in human history, the word creativity was documented for the first time in 1875, with a reference to Shakespeare’s poetic creativity in Adolfus William Ward’s History of Dramatic English Literature (Weiner, 2000, p. 89). The concept of creativity only began to assume its current popularity after World War II and, in fact, the term creativity was not widely used before the 1950s. There were, however, some prior experimental scientific studies that anticipated the investigation of people’s creative attitudes. In the 1930s, Catherine Patrick examined the differences that creative thought may assume in the domains of the arts and of the sciences (1935; 1937; 1938). The author offered the first systematic attempt to analyze the creative process, asking people involved in creative writing, drawing, and scientific problem-solving to describe their thoughts while working. In 1937, Patrick carried out an experiment involving 50 artists and 50 non-artists, representing a wide variety of people including psychology students, secretaries, teachers, economists, biologists, nurses, engineers, lawyers, librarians, and home-makers. From this experiment, four stages of creative thought emerged, to which the author applied the terms preparation, incubation, illumination, and verification, although the German physician Hermann Ludwig Ferdinand von Helmholtz had previously already used the first three of these terms in his work (1896), while Wallas (1926) had used all four. In 1937, the General Electric Corporation organized the first creativity training programs, and by the mid-1940s, the word creativity could be found in most English language dictionaries (Weiner, 2012).

In the 1950s, the literature concerning creativity proliferated, and it is significant that the work On creativity and the unconscious by Freud, which had first appeared in 1925, was reprinted in 1958. At the end of the 1940s, many authors had criticized the fact that the scope of most studies on creativity was restricted to genius behavior, and it was then that the notion of creativity started to be analyzed in all its various different dimensions. With this shift, the social aspects of creativity began to be scientifically investigated, and multicultural aspects came to be considered for the first time (Stein, 1953), along with the relationship that exists between creativity and spontaneity (Moreno, 1955). For the most part, psychologists and pedagogues dominated the study of creativity (Anderson, 1959; Guilford, 1958; May, 1959; Morgan, 1953), but research on creativity also attracted the interest of philosophers (Nelson, 1958; Tomas, 1958), as well as of political scientists (Lasswell, 1955). Researchers also brought their attention to bear on social aspects. Carl R. Rogers, an American psychologist who was among the founders of the client-centered approach, also turned his attention to developing a theory of creativity, arguing that there was a “desperate social need for the creative behavior of creative individuals” (Rogers, 1954, p. 249).

In the early 1970s, creativity came to be viewed as a basic factor of human activity beyond psychological studies. In Language and Mind, Chomsky observed that: