Maslow says that we tend to think of creativity in terms of products and that we also judge creativity (as we do achievement) in terms of stereotypes. He distinguishes "special talent" creativeness from "self-actualizing" creativeness. The former is a result of high abilities in special fields and ordinarily restrict production to those fields; it is also relatively independent of mental health. The latter, springing much more directly from the personality, shows itself as an effect of positive mental health and appears as a creative flexibility and a free energy to accomplish the ordinary affairs of life in a creative way. He further states that creativity involves the processes of construction and unification of synthesis; it depends upon character integration in the person.

The creative person is able to tolerate conceptual ambiguity: he is not made anxious by configural disorder, but sees in it a clue to a higher synthesis. He also has a great fund of free energy which often seems to result from a high degree of psychological health.

Creativity appears to be enhanced by the predisposing focusing or constructing of interests and attention. This channeling occurs first in the child as a result of parental pressures and relataionships; it is forwarded or retarded by the environmental stimulation of school and it is finally refined and directed to its target by the self-motivation of early successes.

Creativity can also be defined as types of thinking. It seeks to distinguish those forms of thinking which are creataive from those which are not. It is generally agreed that creative thought consists of certain integrating, synthesizing functions; that it deals with relational form rather than with individual instances; that it discovers new forms which can accommodate past experiences. It involves a real fusion of forms and not merely juncturing.

The Necessary and Sufficient Conditions of Creativity

Ralph J. Hallman gives five major components of a creative act: (1) it is a whole act, a unitary instance of behavior; (2) it terminates in the production of objects or of forms of living which are distinctive; (3) it evolves out of certain mental processes; (4) it co-varies wth specific personality transformations; and (5) it occurs within a particular kind of environment. These may be expressed as the act, the process, the person and the environment.

The Criterion of Connectedness. This condition isolates the relation of similitude rather than of difference as basic to connectedness. It imposes upon the individual the need to create by bringing already existing elements into a distinctive relation to each other. The essence of human creativeness is relational and an analysis of its nature must refer to the connectedness of whatever elements enter into the creative relationship. The analysis must demonstrate that though man does not create the components, he can nevertheless produce new connections among them. It must prove that these connections are genuinely original and not simply mechanical. Logically, this means that connectedness comprises relationships which are neither symmetrical nor transitive; that is, the newly created connections as wholes are not equivalent to the parts being connected.