ABSTRACT
This chapter briefly reviews seven approaches to understanding creativity—mystical, pragmatic, psychoanalytic, psychometric, cognitive, social-personality, and confluence. It also reviews in more detail an eighth, biological-evolutionary approach. This approach can actually be viewed as consisting of two sub approaches—Darwinian and Lamarckian. The mystical approaches to the study of creativity have probably made it harder for scientists to be heard. Pragmatic approaches may well have been useful to some, but they have been divorced from psychological theory. In contrast, psychoanalytic approaches are deeply grounded in a general theory of the mind, and especially, the unconscious mind. Psychometric approaches provide measurement of creativity, but little understanding of the cognitive processes that give rise to measured individual differences in creativity. Cognitive approaches seek to illuminate such processes. Cognitive approaches look at the mental representations and processes underlying creativity. Several investigators have suggested evolutionary interpretations of human creativity, whereby Darwinian ideas about natural selection are applied to the creative process.
