Each Has Its Creativity / À chacun sa créativité: Einstein, Mozart, Picasso... et nous

Is creativity as elusive as is generally alleged? Jean Cottraux proposes an analysis of creative personality types and of the ways of thinking and the psychological traits that favour creativity. He examines the motivation bhind the creative burst of energy and its links with intelligence, emotions, personal values, destruction, dreams and madness. The lessons learned from the lives and works of great artists, as well as of great scientists, are closely examined: open-miededness, hard work and perseverance matter more than talent or personal gifts. Day-to-day creativity, translated into the art of living and of surviving, is also taken into consideration. In fact, for many creative people a successful life can be their greatest creation. Ten practical tips followed by ten original exercises to develop creative thinking are proposed here: Managing time and space - Alternative novels: an exercise in narrative creation - Continuing the scenario: an exercise in iedividual or group narrative creativity - An exercise in perspective: the balcony - An aesthetic exercise: what is your choice of timeless analysers? - Interior monologues and automatic thoughts - Automatic writing - The new rotating corpse - Dialogue and brainstorming - Reversed maxims: an exercise in inverted thinking.Underpinning this new psychology of creativity are suggestions and practical advice that will enable each of us to fied our own personal creative path.Jean Cottraux is a respected psychologist whose accessible works have attained success with a wide readership. In this original, previously unpublished analysis of creativity, he offers a model of innovative thought, a method of evaluating iedividuals and the products of their creativity, and a test of narrative imagination. For Cottraux creativity is an art of living that lies within everyone's grasp.The author of such highly successful books as La Force avec soi and Les Ennemis intérieurs, Jean Cottraux is an honorary hospital psychiatrist and a senior lecturer at the University of Lyon-I. He is a Founding Fellow of Philadelphia's Academy of Cognitive Therapy and the scientific director of the Association Francophone de Formation et de Recherche en Thérapie Comportementale et Cognitive (a French-speakers' association for training and research in behavioural and cognitive therapies).