About the Book
What is everyday creativity? A capacity, a strategy, a process, all of these. It is an ability that is intimately woven into our daily lives and our personalities, one that we use from hour to hour yet it remains, for most of us, underdeveloped and, unfortunately, underacknowledged. Writes editor and leading creativity researcher Ruth Richards, amp quot Everyday creativity is about everyone, throughout our lives, and fundamental to our very survival. It is how we find our lost child, get enough to eat, make our way in a new place and culture amp hellip With our everyday creativity, we adapt flexibly, we improvise, we try different options, whether we are raising a child, counseling a friend, fixing our home, or planning a fundraising event. amp quot
In this provocative collection of essays, an interdisciplinary group of eminent thinkers and writers offer their thoughts on how embracing creativity-tapping into the amp quot originality of everyday life amp quot -can lead to improved physical and mental health, to new ways of thinking, of experiencing the world and ourselves. They show how creativity can refine our views of human nature at an individual and societal level and, ultimately, change our paradigms for survival-and for flourishing-in a world fraught with urgent challenges. Neither a dry treatise nor a manual, this anthology draws upon the latest research in the area to present a lively examination of the phenomenon and process of everyday creativity and its far-reaching ramifications for self, culture, history, society, politics, and humankind's future.
Part I looks at creativity and individuals-our well-being, potential for new and transformative understandings, and openings to richness, immediacy, and profundity of experience. Part II involves social creativity-including issues of complexity, collaboration, contextual relativity, inclusiveness, and creative systems evolving from the ground up (vs. more hierarchical models). Part III presents a detailed and multilayered discussion of 2 potential benefits of living more creatively.
Table of Contents:
Contributors
Foreword
-Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
Introduction
-Ruth Richards
I. Creativity and Our Individual Lives
Everyday Creativity: Our Hidden Potential
-Ruth Richards
Living Well Creatively: What's Chaos Got to Do With It?
-David Schuldberg
Artist and Audience: Everyday Creativity and Visual Art
-Tobi Zausner
To Understand Is to Create: An Epistemological Perspective on Human Nature and Personal Creativity
-Mark A. Runco
Audience Flow: Creativity in Television Watching With Applications to Teletherapy
-Steven R. Pritzker
Structures of Consciousness and Creativity: Opening the Doors of Perception
-Allan Combs and Stanley Krippner
II: Creativity and Society
Telling the New Story: Darwin, Evolution, and Creativity Versus Conformity in Science
-David Loye
Standing Up for Humanity: Upright Body, Creative Instability, and Spiritual Balance
-Mike Arons
Creativity in the Everyday: Culture, Self and Emotions
-Louise Sundararajan and James R. Averill
A amp quot Knowledge Ecology amp quot View of Creativity: How Integral Science Recasts Collective Creativity as a Basis of Large-Scale Learning
-S. J. Goerner
Cyborgs, Cyberspace, Cybersexuality: The Evolution of Everyday Creativity
-Frederick David Abraham
Our Great Creative Challenge: Rethinking Human Nature-and Recreating Society
-Riane Eisler
III: Integration and Conclusions
Twelve Potential Benefits of Living More Creatively
-Ruth Richards
Author Index
Subject Index
About the Editor
About the Author :
Ruth Richards, MD, PhD, is a board certified psychiatrist and educational psychologist. She is a professor of psychology at Saybrook Graduate School in San Francisco, California a research affiliate at McLean Hospital, Belmont, Massachusetts (psychiatric affiliate of Massachusetts General Hospital) and a lecturer in the Department of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts. For many years, Dr. Richards has studied everyday creativity in clinical and educational settings and has published on creativity and social action as well as spiritual development. She is the principal author of The Lifetime Creativity Scales, which broke new ground as a broad-based assessment of real-life everyday creativity in a general population. With Mark A. Runco, Dr. Richards coedited Eminent Creativity, Everyday Creativity, and Health. She served on the executive advisory board for the Encyclopedia of Creativity and is also on the editorial boards of three journals: The Creativity Research Journal The Journal of Humanistic Psychology and Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, the journal for APA Division (Society for the Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity and the Arts), where she is also an at-large member of the executive committee. Personally, Dr. Richards draws, writes, plays three instruments badly, and learns even more about creativity from her teenage daughter.
