Creativity in psychology

A psychodinamic approach to understanding creativity was proposed by Sigmund Freud. He suggested that creativity arises as a result of frustrated desires for fame, fortune and love. However, later he changed his mind.
According to Graham Wallas creative insights may be explained by a process consisting of 5 stages:

1. PREPARATION- focusing individuals' mind on the problem.



2. INCUBATION - problem is internalized into the unconscious mind.



3. INTIMATION - the creative person gets a feeling that a solution is on its way.



4. ILLUMINATION - creative idea goes from preconscious processing into conscious awareness.



5. VERIFICATION - idea is consciously verified, elaborated and than applied.

Wallas considered creativity to be a legacy of the evolutionary process.

J. P. Guilford claimed that convergent thinking involves aiming for a single solution to a problem, whereas divergent thinking is involves creative generations of multiple answers to a problem. Sometimes even term "fluid intelligence" is used when speaking about creativity.

I was surprised but creativity can be measured. The first psychometric approaches were constructed by J. P. Guilford too in 1967. However, in 1974 Torrance developed those tests. Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking involved simple tasks of divergent thinking and other problem-solving skills, which were scored on:

• Fluency



• Flexibility



• Originality



• Elaboration

In 2005 The Creativity Achievement Questionare was designed and it was shown that it is reliable and valid. It is widely used until these days.