The study of the creative mind and ways of measuring and increasing creativity emerged as the right mixture of nature and science by the times of post-World War II. The child became a focus for psychological investment in creativity. What was in question, particularly in the United States, was promoting the open-minded citizen in opposition to the authoritarian one. At the same time, creativity became a commodity presented to educators and parents as absolutely necessary.
In 1967, Guilford, one of the most prominent names in the study of creativity during and after the Second World War, opening the pages of the new Journal of Creative Behavior, stated that several forces were at work by the end of the war. The war
“had called forth great efforts toward innovation in research and development, culminating in the atomic bomb. . . . We were on the eve of the space age, and rockets were already taking trial flights, stirring our imaginations of things to come”.
The stage was well set; in Guilford’s words, on the one hand, is the idea of change toward an unknown and, on the other hand, is the explosion of concern in science for investigating creative processes and detecting creative traits to master better the production of what was yet to come and of a specific kind of creative human. This human was driven by moral principles, not only in terms of the government of society and the nation’s exceptionalism but also through the ways of reasoning from psychologists themselves and the tools available and chosen to produce the knowledge that counted about this creative human. The rationality of post–World War Two science was part of a way of reasoning through a theory of systems, in which a cause produces an effect that must be known in advance and not left to human reason alone. A side of creativity lies between the two poles of reason and rationality. Thus, creativity was conceived as part of human reasoning that was tamed through science to become more ‘rational.’
CM