From Crisis to Creativity: Towards a Psychology of Creating

The present paper argues that crisis talk has been rampant in psychology since its beginning. This is so because it serves a powerful rhetorical function – ‘if we are in crisis we must do x to get out of it’. In fact, being in crisis is the state of any progressive discipline, where new evidence is brought to light and new ideas are put on offer. This paper then turns to the specific conceptual and methodological issues facing the psychology of creativity and offers some suggestions for moving the sub-discipline forward. It proposes dropping the study of ‘creativity’ as a noun, and instead focusing on the concrete process of creating and evaluating the products of that activity.