ABSTRACT
Of all the chapters in this volume, this could be the most difficult to write. Why? Because it is the only one in which the author examines creativity in his or her own domain of creativity. Psychologists may examine creativity in the arts, the other sciences, or in various practical domains, such as business, with relative impunity. After all, as outsiders looking in, the investigator can adopt an objective stance most concordant with a bona fide scientific analysis. However, when a psychologist looks at psychologists, it is easier for personal biases to interfere. The analysis might be tainted by alliances to particular subdisciplines or to specific theoretical or methodological orientations (Cronbach, 1957; Kimble, 1984; Simonton, 2000c). In addition, because psychology tends to be a more personal enterprise than the other sciences, there is perhaps more latitude for the intrusion of individual idiosyncrasies of a more subtle kind. Many have noted, for example, how much a psychologist’s ideas tend to reflect his or her distinctive background and personality makeup (Johnson, Germer, Efran, & Overton, 1988). It was no freak accident that Sigmund Freud, the inventor of the Oedipal Complex, had an attractive, young mother. Neither was it mere coincidence that Alfred Adler, a middle-born child, spoke somewhat derisively of the firstborn as the “dethroned king.” Neither, finally, was it just happenstance that Carl Jung, an advocate of the
significance of archetypes in the collective unconscious, had a sometimes psychotic fascination with the mysterious and the occult that extended back to childhood. Given these intimate connections between psychologist as person and psychologist as creator, how are we to trust anything that psychologists have to say about creativity in psychology?
