Creative Expression

by Stanley Rosner, Lawrence Edwin Abt

KIRKUS REVIEW Unlike previous books in a similar vein (best known, perhaps, Koestler's The Act of Creation and Ghiselin's The Creative Process) Abt and Rosner's work is totally untheoretical (and, they would add, unbiased), consisting of a series of open-ended and apparently unedited interviews with distinguished contributors to science and the arts. Whereas Koestler and Ghiselin enter armed with more and less abstract theses about the nature of the creative act, Abt and Rosner content themselves to review the unique and personal manifestations of creativity; and it is this difference in method that characterizes the book rather than the distinction the authors cite (and then proceed to blur) between process and experience. Being psychologists they are very much interested in process, particularly the influence of irrational and non-deliberative factors (dream, fantasy, intuition, accident); otherwise they tend to concern themselves with psychological determinants (family background, pivotal associations, personal--even ulterior--motives).

Genres: Nonfiction

383 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1970