Everyday Creativity and the Healthy Mind

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xxiii

   PDF

2. Introduction

   • Ruth Richards

   Pages 1-10

3. NEW OPENINGS (Creative Product: 1st of Four P’s)

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 11-11

      PDF

   2. Missing Worlds

      • Ruth Richards

      Pages 13-31

   3. Creative Palette

      • Ruth Richards

      Pages 33-49

   4. Change and Open Systems

      • Ruth Richards

      Pages 51-65

4. AHA! MOMENT (Creative Process)

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 67-67

      PDF

   2. Moments of Insight

      • Ruth Richards

      Pages 69-81

   3. Flavors of (Creative) Mind

      • Ruth Richards

      Pages 83-97

   4. Emergence of Life and Creativity

      • Ruth Richards

      Pages 99-117

5. LIVING CREATIVELY (Creative Person and Press)

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 119-119

      PDF

   2. “Popcorn”: A Model (Ongoing Creative Insights)

      • Ruth Richards

      Pages 121-134

   3. Creative Person

      • Ruth Richards

      Pages 135-152

   4. Creative Space

      • Ruth Richards

      Pages 153-170

6. NORMAL AND ABNORMAL (Not What Some Think)

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 171-171

      PDF

   2. Deep Sea Diving

      • Ruth Richards

      Pages 173-192

   3. A New Normal

      • Ruth Richards

      Pages 193-212

   4. Creative (Compensatory) Advantage

      • Ruth Richards

      Pages 213-240

7. NEW DIRECTIONS (Going Deeper)

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 241-241

      PDF

   2. Empathy and Relational Creativity

      • Ruth Richards

      Pages 243-265

As human beings we all have creative potential, a quality essential to human development and a vital component to healthy and happy lives. However this may often remain stifled by the choices we make, or ways in which we choose to live in our daily lives. Framed by the “Four Ps of Creativity” – product, person, process, press – this book offers an alternative understanding of the fundamentals of ordinary creativity. Ruth Richards highlights the importance of “process”, circumventing our common preoccupation with the product, or creative outcome, of creativity. By focusing instead on the creator and the creative process, she demonstrates how we may enhance our relationships with life, beauty, future possibilities, and one another. 


This book illustrates how our daily life styles and choices, as well as our environments, may enable and allow creativity; whereas environments not conducive to creative flow may kill creative potential. Also explored are questions of ‘normality’, beauty and nuance in creativity, as well as creative relationships.

• Four Ps of Creativity
• Lifetime Creativity Scales
• Alterations of consciousness
• Mindfulness
• Wallas’s five stages of creative process
• Chaos and complexity theory
• Creative Palette
• wellbeing
• psychology of creativity
• cultural psychology
• creativity studies
• Creative space
• Relational creativity

“This book on creativity and a healthy mind is a result of knowledge and practice in the science of both mind and body. ... The book is well presented. … Throughout the book, Richards offers insights and useful markers of benefits of creativity and a healthy mind.” (Gayle Byock, Creativity Research Journal, August 04, 2019)

• Psychology, Saybrook University, Oakland, CA, USA

  Ruth Richards

Ruth Richards is a professor at Saybrook University, USA, a psychologist and psychiatrist. She has written numerous articles and books on everyday creativity, and was awarded the Rudolf Arnheim Award for Outstanding Lifetime Achievement (APA).

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